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Bar Harbor/ Anyone visiting Acadia National Park can believe its claim of having more scenic variety per square mile than any other part of the national park system. Rugged ocean coastline first comes to mind when one thinks of Acadia, which occupies the better part of Mount Desert Island – the country’s third largest (after Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard). There also are towering cliffs and mountain summits (including Cadillac Mountain, the highest along the East Coast), the East’s only natural fjord, fresh-water lakes, sandy beaches, and wetlands and forests full of wildlife. Such scenic diversity produces the widest range of outdoor activity in one place in Maine, if not the East. The visitor can explore the jagged shoreline, climb mountains, swim in the ocean or lakes, go sailing or lobstering, canoe through salt marshes and kayak along the coast, watch for birds and whales, walk along nature trails and through exotic gardens, hike or bicycle or go horseback riding on 50 miles of carriage paths, and camp near the sea, among other pursuits. They used to call it "rusticating," when thousands of city folk descended in the 19th century on Bar Harbor – the island’s largest town – to pursue the active outdoor life, eschewing what they considered the pretentious activities of such summer colonies as Newport, Lenox and Saratoga. In the 1880s, Bar Harbor’s eighteen hotels could accommodate more than 25,000 guests, and the elite began building fashionable cottages that were the largest in Maine. Residents like John D. Rockefeller Jr., fearing commercial encroachments, bought up vast tracts of land. In 1919, they donated them to the federal government for the first national park in the East. The advent of the automobile made the island more accessible, the hotels disappeared and the Great Fire of 1947 destroyed many of the large homes remaining from Bar Harbor’s heyday. Today’s visitors find vestiges of the island’s Golden Era in the mansions of West and Eden streets in Bar Harbor and in the enclaves at Seal Harbor and Northwest Harbor. But they’re more likely to find campers and hikers and bicyclists who appreciate the outdoor wonderland that led the residents who settled Bar Harbor in 1796 to name the town Eden. With more than four million visitors annually, Acadia ranks second only to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as the country’s most visited national park. Many are rusticators – the kind of people whom local publisher Frank Matter describes as "more bohemian than sophisticated." After all, he says, the old Bar Harbor was the bohemian resort for the wealthy. Although elements of high-living and luxury creep in this far Down East, Acadia National Park gives the island a sense of rugged individualism in sync with nature. When Bar Harbor swarms with tourists, the rusticators seek refuge in the park and the other harbor towns – Seal, Northeast, Southwest and Bass – on what their boosters call the "Quiet Side" of the island. Material excerpted from Waterside Escapes in the Northeast, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2005. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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