Acadia National Park: The Park Loop Road and Cadillac Mountain

The tour begins at the park's main visitor center. Buy your pass by card, and use the restrooms before you set off. The Park Loop Road closes from December 1, or the first big snow, until about April 15.

The first big view of the tour, looking out over the Porcupine Islands from Paradise Hill. There's a small parking area along the road.

In August 1914 a German liner carrying a fortune in gold fled the British navy and hid in Frenchman Bay.

How an island that outlawed cars ended up with one of the country's great scenic drives.

In about a quarter mile, turn left onto Park Loop Road.

From here the Park Loop Road runs one way. Parking is in the right-hand lane unless posted otherwise.

George Dorr spent his fortune and his life assembling this park, and took a dollar a month for looking after it.

A wetland at the foot of Dorr Mountain, right beside the road.

Coming up on your right, the turn-off for Sieur de Monts. This is the spring George Dorr bought, with a garden of more than four hundred wild plants, a nature center and restrooms. It's about two minutes in and out, o…

In November 1944 a U-boat landed two spies across this bay. A teenage Boy Scout found their tracks.

Peregrine falcons nest on these cliffs. The trail up the face is nearly vertical, on iron rungs, and is usually closed from late spring into summer.

The scholar who mapped Petra built the iron path up Champlain Mountain, and left it behind him.

Your warning before the Sand Beach lot, on a road with no way back.

Sand Beach is a rare thing on Mount Desert Island, a sandy beach in a park built of granite. Tucked into Newport Cove between the cliffs of Great Head and the offshore ledge called Old Soaker, it gathers sand that is…

Your warning before the Thunder Hole lot, and how to tell if it's worth stopping today.

Thunder Hole is a narrow slot in the granite shore where an incoming wave traps a pocket of air and forces it out with a deep boom and a burst of spray that has topped 40 feet. It performs best in the one to two hours…

A sea stack below the road and an ancient sea cave high above it, left from when the ocean stood far higher.

At Otter Cliff the Park Loop Road runs along the top of granite cliffs that drop straight into the Atlantic. Its builders set the road's two lanes at different heights to open the ocean view, and gave walkers a third,…

The rocky point where the road turns west, near where Champlain first described the island in 1604. Parking is along the road.

A triple-arched granite bridge built to double as a tidal swimming pool that never happened.

A millionaire's radio station on Otter Cliffs became the Navy's best ear on Europe in the First World War.

October 1947, through the eyes of a three-year-old on the town pier.

How the great fire of 1947 changed the color of Acadia's east side.

After the 1947 fire, scientists around the world mailed a burned-out Bar Harbor laboratory its mice back.

The story of the carriage roads, the granite guardrails and the summer neighbors who fought them.

Where the one-way ends, and four hundred million years of Acadia's geology on the way to Jordan Pond.

Your warning before the tour's one real meal stop.

Jordan Pond is the deepest lake in Acadia at 150 feet, and the Park Service calls it the clearest lake in Maine, with visibility that normally reaches at least 45 feet. A ridge of rubble left by the glacier holds it i…

Two rounded glacier-carved domes standing over the north end of Jordan Pond.

Bubble Rock is a glacial erratic, a boulder the size of a minivan perched on the edge of South Bubble as if one push would send it over. It is Lucerne granite, a rock that formed about 30 miles to the northwest and lo…

The Wabanaki peoples, whose homeland this has always been, and the part of the park's history the old signs left out.

A small pond below Cadillac Mountain, with a stone bridge that no longer has a job. RVs and trailers can't use the lot.

The mountain's namesake invented his own name. His granddaughter came to collect.

Coming up on your right, the turn-off for Cadillac Summit Road. It's three and a half miles to the top, about half an hour up and back. From about May twentieth to late October you need a timed reservation, and no RVs…

The last stretch of the tour, on the Park Loop Road back toward Hulls Cove. The visitor center is under ten minutes away, and the signs lead on to Bar Harbor. A park pass is good for seven days, so there is time to co…

Sieur de Monts is where Acadia National Park began. George Dorr bought the spring here in 1909 to stop it from becoming a bottling plant, and the land he gathered around it became Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1…

To rejoin the tour, follow this road back out, and at the end, turn right onto the Park Loop Road.

Three and a half miles of steady climbing on a road laid out along the old railway route.

A steamboat, a cog railway and a road war with dynamite on the side of Green Mountain.

The story behind the island's first land trust, and the young man whose essay started it.

The largest lake on the tour, and the old steamboat crossing for the Green Mountain Railway.

The west-facing overlook near the summit, with its own parking lot. The Park Service recommends it for sunset and stargazing.

At 1,530 feet, Cadillac Mountain is the highest point within 25 miles of the Atlantic shore between Nova Scotia and Mexico. Its bare pink granite summit looks out over Frenchman Bay, the Porcupine Islands and Bar Harb…

Same road down. Take the curves slowly, and at the bottom, follow the signs for Hulls Cove and Bar Harbor.

One of America's oldest recorded ghost stories, from the head of Frenchman Bay.