Dolores Kong - Best Easy Day Hikes Acadia National Park

Dolores Kong and Dan Ring have backpacked all of the more than 270 miles of the Appalachian Trail in Maine and have climbed virtually all the peaks that are 4,000 feet and higher in the Northeast. They are members of the White Mountains Four Thousand Footer, the New England Four Thousand Footer, the Adirondack 46Rs, the Northeast 111ers, and the New England Hundred Highest Clubs.

Dolores is a Certified Financial Planner professional and senior vice president with Winslow, Evans & Crocker, Inc. (member of FINRA/SIPC), in Boston. A Barnard College graduate, she is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in public service from her previous career as a staff writer at the Boston Globe .

Dan is an operations professional with Winslow, Evans & Crocker, Inc. (member of FINRA/SIPC), in Boston, and a writer who has been a statehouse bureau chief in Boston for a variety of newspapers. He graduated from Boston College with a bachelors degree in English. Dan and Dolores are married and live outside Boston. They write a blog, acadiaonmymind.com.

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For sharing their knowledge and passion for Acadia National Park, and for being so generous with their time, wed like to thank Wanda Moran, Charlie Jacobi, Gary Stellpflug, Christian Barter, Jeff Chapin, Bruce Connery, Lynne Dominy, Vincent Sproul, John Kelly, Christie Anastasia, David Manski, Kathy Grant, Stuart West, Karen Anderson, Anne Warner, Maureen Fournier, and the rest of the Acadia National Park staff, past and present; Margaret Coffin Brown of the National Park Service; Ann Marie Cummings of Eastern National; Jill Weber; Marla S. OByrne; Gerry Fournier; Michael Good; Susan Hayward; Tim Henderson; Jim Linnane; Jack Russell; and the Friends of Acadia.

And wed like to thank family and friends whove already hiked the trails of Acadia with us, or one day will: April, Thomas, Sharon, Michelle, Judy, Stacey, Jen, Phil, Sebastian, Miranda, Laura, Mike, Jenna, and Winston, and too many others to name.

Maines Acadia National Park is a place like no other.

You can stroll along Ocean Path and be awestruck by the contrast of pink-granite cliffs, blue skies, and white surf. From atop Cadillac, the highest mountain on the US Atlantic Seaboard, you can see fog rolling in over Frenchman Bay below, even as the sun shines brightly above. And over on the shores of Jordan Pond, you can take part in one of the most civilized of afternoon rituals, tea and popovers, with the distinct mountains known as the Bubbles as natures backdrop.

No wonder artists, millionaires, generations of families, and even presidentsnotably Barack Obama in 2010have been attracted to all thats preserved in Acadia.

In fact, the place means so much to area residents and visitors that Acadia in 1919 became the first national park created east of the Mississippi, after starting as a national monument in 1916. It is also the first national park to consist primarily of privately donated lands, and the first to have trail maintenance funded by an endowment, Acadia Trails Forever, coming from $4 million in park user fees and federal appropriations and $9 million in private donations from Friends of Acadia, a private nonprofit organization based in Bar Harbor.

Over the years the scenery here has inspired such passion that nineteenth-century painters Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, of the Hudson River School, came here to capture the landscape; one of the wealthiest men in America, John D. Rockefeller Jr., donated millions and left miles of picturesque carriage roads and uniquely designed stone bridges; and prime mover George B. Dorr dedicated his life and exhausted his family fortune to create the park.

The scenery at Acadia even drew President Barack Obama and his family in July 2010 to the views from the top of Cadillac and along the Ship Harbor and Bass Harbor Head Light Trails.

The year 2019 marks the hundredth anniversary of Acadias establishment as a national park, although the big centennial took place in 2016, celebrating its founding as the Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916. The motto on the Acadia Centennial logo unveiled in 2014 was Celebrate Our Past, Inspire Our Future.

Today more than 3 million visitors a year make Acadia one of the top-ten most visited national parks, even though its the thirteenth smallest in land area. In fact, in two separate 2014 polls, viewers of ABCs Good Morning America , as well as readers of USA Today , voted Acadia number one.

Acadia is so attractive that visitation since 2007 jumped by 69 percent to 3.5 million visitors in 2017, prompting the National Park Service to launch a major effort to approve new ways to deal with frequent overcrowding and increasing traffic at the park during peak season.

In 2018 the park revealed a proposal for a possible vehicle reservation system with an additional fee for the Cadillac Summit Road, the Ocean Drive corridor, and the north lot of the Jordan Pond House from about mid-May to mid-October. If approved, the reservation system and other possibilities, including phasing out right-lane parking on some one-way sections of the Park Loop Road, would go into effect for the 2020 season under a new transportation plan.

But with about 155 miles of hiking trails and 45 miles of carriage roads throughout its nearly 50,000 acres (including almost 13,000 acres under conservation easement), the park still provides plenty of opportunities for tranquility and for experiencing nature, history, geology, and culture.

This guide is for those with limited time to hike Acadia, or for those who want to sample only the easiest or most popular trails. This fourth edition of Best Easy Day Hikes Acadia National Park was researched as part of an update of our more comprehensive guide, Hiking Acadia National Park , and comes just as Acadia celebrates the hundredth anniversary of its founding as a national park.

Many of the trails described here are very easy and suitable for families with young children, but some are more challenging hikes that are among the most popular in the area, bringing you to grand mountaintop vistas. The Trail Finder section of this guide offers a listing of hikes by characteristic, such as Best Hikes for Children or Best Hikes for Great Views.