The main street in Bar Harbor, Maine

Bar Harbor has a winter population of about 5,000 but over 3 million day trippers during the summer months, so it is entirely devoted to tourism. The first day I was there, there were two huge cruise ships anchored about a mile away, which between them disgorged around 3,000 passengers. As it was out of the whale watching season, they were transported ashore in whale watching boats.

This number of people, in addition to coaches and those arriving by car and on the shuttle buses from Ellsworth, is really more than the town can cope with, so there were queues at every establishment. Prices everywhere were high – a lobster roll was $39 and a single scoop of ice cream in a cone was over $8!

This is most of the harbour with Bar Island behind.

When the tide is out, this shingle bar is completely dry and it is possible to walk to Bar Island, after which the town is now named. It was originally called Eden.

There are a few nice old buildings, but it was difficult to get a photo without too many people in it.

This is a small park not far from the harbour.

And of course it has a fire station.

Parking is expensive and wasn’t very easy to find even in October. I shudder to think what it is like in mid-season.

My first experience was to go on a 2 hour cruise round Frenchman’s Bay.

This was the boat, moored about a mile and a half from Bar Harbor.

This is one of the cruise liners, with a whale boat nearby. The passengers got onto it by a door very near water level.

Bar Harbor had existed as a resort from about 1870 onwards, but it really became well known  when Newport, Rhode Island became too accessible for the masses, so the super rich wanted somewhere more exclusive. In the 1920s and 30s the Vanderbilt family led the way to Bar Harbor, which is on Mount Desert Island, and about 50 or 60 mansions were built along the coast. They were not as large as most of those in Newport, and all but one were built of wood.

Mount Desert Island is now connected to the mainland by a short bridge, but even at the end of the season there were traffic jams in each direction.

In 1947 there was a catastrophic forest fire along the coast and virtually all the mansions and hotels were destroyed. That ended the occupation of Bar Harbor by the super rich, who went their various ways. Most gave their property to the National Park which had been set up in 1919, but a few kept their sites and sold them on, so there are a few posh houses on top of the cliffs to the northern side of Bar Harbor.

The man with the headphones was our guide. I think I was lucky as he is a retired science teacher who had also spent 20 summers as a park ranger before he retired. He didn’t claim to know much history, but he certainly knew the the wildlife and geography of the area inside out and loved what he was doing. Many of the cliffs are 80 ft high.

The bay is extensive and has many islands. We went about 4 miles towards the open sea to Egg Island where there is a lighthouse.

When it was automated they removed the black bit on top, but it looked so awful that it was reinstated following public complaints.

If you look very carefully, there are the heads of several harbour seals poking out of the water. Apparently they are asleep when vertical with just their noses in the air. There were a great many of them.

The bird with the white head on the right hand side is a bald eagle, and is much larger than it looks. They nest in the trees on some of the islands.

All over the bay there were floats for lobster pots. Some fishermen have pots as far as 40 miles out to sea. This boat was pulling up pots and resubmerging them again. The water is about 140 ft deep, and the pots rest on the sea floor. They are not really pots nowadays, but rectangular cages with net cones inside them. Cameras have been put in some cages, and they have found that about 10% of lobsters can escape. The other 90% never try to. Eventually evolution will increase the percentage escaping, I suppose. They only take lobsters between fairly small and small to sell, and return the rest. This is because once over a certain size each female produces vastly more eggs, so that way they are able to harvest a lot but still keep the overall stocks high.

We were able to go very close to some islands as the cliffs continue vertically another 80 ft or so under water. This island has never had its trees felled, so is virgin forest. However the white spruce is easily windblown, so the trees are not actually very old.

The other side of most islands is much lower (due to glaciation) and the French originally felled the trees on most of the islands and grazed large flocks of sheep on them.

It was an enjoyable trip (cheaper than a lobster roll) and a good way to be introduced to the area,

Acadia National Park consists of much of Mount Desert Island, plus Isle de Haut (several miles offshore) and parts of the Schoodic Peninsula on the north side of Frenchman’s Bay. I had to pay $30 to take a car into the National Park, though that was good for 7 days. Without a car it is $15 per person, but $30 dollars gets a car of 4 people in.

I did not visit Isle de Haut, but I did go to the Schoodic Peninsula, which is where most of the lobster fishermen actually live, so it is not totally dependent on tourism. Apart from the part that is in the National Park, of course all the coastline is private and inaccessible.

The far end of the peninsula is all National Park and the road is one direction only. I went for a 3 to 4 mile walk up Schoodic Head and Bucks Cove.

The first mile was along this quiet road, right by the sea.

As you can see from the road markings, it really is ‘right by the sea’!

Of course I then had to start the hard work uphill.

The route uphill was steep, with the usual rocks and tree roots – note the blue blaze marking the trail.

The actual summit had its marker, but no view.

There was a good view a little way further along the long easy ridge that I descended by.

As it is now the hunting season and one occasionally hears shooting in the distance, I decided to wear my ‘blaze orange’ gilet (cheap from Walmart), though it was not really necessary on the trail I was on. As there were a few other people about, I got my photo taken. One advantage of the gilet is a couple of pockets that my phone fits into, so it is much more accessible for taking photos.

Still on the Schoodic Peninsula, but outwith the National Park, was this ‘tidal fall’. On the right is the Taunton River and to the left is the sea. This was taken around low tide when the sea is higher than the river so it ‘falls’ down the rocks into the river. Once the tide is higher you would not see it as all the rocks would be covered. In the days when most transport was by river, the currents at the mouth of the Taunton River tested the expertise of the boat captains to the limit.

John D Rockefeller Jnr wanted to be able to ride his horses away from cars, so he built 45 miles of carriage roads around the island. These are restricted to pedestrians, horses and bicycles. I hired a bike for the day and set off to sample them. There are many bicycle and kayak hire companies in town; some cruise ships order 300 bicycles at a time. E-bikes are available, but I decided to hire an ordinary bike. The carriage roads are never steep, but I had not realised that an uphill could go on for a mile and a half with no relief!

The surface is always like the Wirral way, so requires more effort than cycling on tarmac.

It is 1.7 miles from Bar Harbor to the nearest carriage road, mostly up a steep hill, where I (like most of the bike renters) had to walk.

The bike had 21 gears, but I only used the bottom seven.

There were several smaller ponds along the way, but this is Eagle Lake, the first large one. All the time there were hills all around.

This colour was not at all unusual.

This was typical, though at times the carriage roads were all tree lined, of course. There were many cyclists, one horse and rider, and quite a lot of walkers, though most of them did not stray far from the car parks. The carriage roads tend to parallel the roads, so there are several places where they meet and there are car parks.

Roosevelt wanted to mark the National Park and this is one of two gatehouses he had built. It is not far from Jordan Pond, a real tourist honeypot.

This is looking down on Jordan Pond from Jordan Pond House which has a restaurant and facilities and was heaving with tourists. I had left the bike by the pond to go up hill.

In a few places there had been serious quarrying to make the carriage road.

I made a mistake taking this photo looking down on Jordan Pond. I was actually only half way up hill and I had to walk the rest of the way to the top as it was too steep for me to get back on the bike!

The route was circular and about 20 miles long. A very enjoyable, if somewhat harder ride than I had anticipated. I would not have liked to do it on a hot day, even though a lot of the route was in shade.

My next post will be mainly about the coast further north and a serendipitous discovery.