Hiking in Acadia was actually an adventure without Kamala. She stayed at home while we made the 5 1/2 hour trek north to Acadia National Park.
We did three hikes and one walk on our Acadia visit.
I didn't do much reading about hiking in Acadia in advance of the trip. I thought that since the tallest mountain is under 3,000 ft, we'd have no problem with any of the hiking there. I didn't know that there are actually much more rocky, steep and technical hikes and climbs there that neither Joe or I had experience with.
On Saturday we attempted Penobscot and Mount Sargent, starting from the Jordan Pond House. It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the 70s. Early on we saw the turn off for the Jordan Cliffs trail and I thought, oh, that sounds like there will be great views! I didn't realize that this is classified as a "ladder" trail and should definitely not be attempted by anyone with a fear of heights. We didn't make it to the the actual iron rungs of the ladder part of the trail, before you get to that area there is quite a ways of walking on with complete exposed 900 foot drop off to you right and rocks along the left. There a video of a couple hiking the trail here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izcfIViEimc&feature=related
Here is a view before we got to the actual cliffs.
On our way back down we met two very docile deer in the woods, who seemed to not be afraid of us at all, they never ran away and just let me take photos of them.
After our Jordan Cliffs adventure, we decided to keep it more mellow for the afternoon and did a walk around Ships Harbor. This was an easy walk and was very beautiful.
It would be a beautiful spot to have a picnic.
On Sunday we did three hikes, starting with Gorham Mountain. This is a 525 ft mountain, but with it's location right on the ocean, there are some lovely views from the top. The distance is 1.8 miles round trip and we found it to be a very fast hike; we were at the summit in well under an hour.
I found myself often thinking of the first people that hiked and climbed in this area, what a beautiful discovery it must have been.
Gorham is said to be one of the more crowded hikes and there were several other people on the trail when we went up and that was during the off season.
We decided that we still had plenty of energy left, so we drove around on the park road and hiked the Bubbles, mostly because I liked the names. North Bubble is 872 ft and South Bubble is 766 ft. We did South Bubble first and almost missed Bubble Rock, which is a giant boulder that seems like it's about to tumble off the mountain at any moment. Then we hiked over to North Bubble, which I thought had the better view. This was less like a hike, and more like walking up many flights of stairs, with a lovely view of South Bubble, Jordan Pond, Penobscot Mountain and the ocean at the top.
