"One of the most visited national parks is also one of the most vulnerable"
"Mount Desert Island is a rare place on the Atlantic coast where mountains rise directly above the ocean, their pink granite shoulders studded with glacial kettle ponds. In between the peaks, the island’s many gorges are crowded with vertiginous white pines and aromatic spruces. For over a century, the beauty of this spot, far up the Maine coast, has given it a reputation as a paradisiacal escape from cities like New York and Boston. Its principal town, Bar Harbor, was originally named Eden. It’s no wonder that Mount Desert Island hosts the Northeast’s sole national park: Acadia.
In January 2024, a pair of nor’easters detonated Acadia’s aura of untouchable remoteness when they battered the island with hurricane-force winds. A storm surge of over 15 feet drowned shoreside paths across the eastern edge of Mount Desert Island and eroded much of its only sandy beach at the same time the formidable waves tossed massive stone steps into a hillside, causing it to partially collapse. On the other side of the fjord that cleaves the island in two, picnic areas and campgrounds were transformed into thickets of fallen timber by the punishing wind. A particularly vulnerable state highway that crosses a natural breakwater known as Seawall fractured, its asphalt slabbing off as the rocks underneath were drawn back out to the Gulf of Maine—a body of water that has warmed by more than 2°F in just the past 30 years, three times faster than the global average.
Walking Seawall Road a few months after the storms, I was struck by the quiet. With the breakwater still closed to vehicles, I could hear the soft swell of rocks being tugged by the waves and the occasional crack of a seagull opening a mussel by dropping it on a boulder. Nature’s reassertion of its own rhythms over the hurly-burly of humanity was not to last: By midsummer, the road was back open, as were practically all of Acadia’s trails and the rest of the infrastructure serving a stream of tourists. With about 4 million visitors a year, Acadia is as popular as Yosemite and Rocky Mountain National Parks."
Kyle Paoletta reports for Sierra magazine with photos by John K. Putnam December 11, 2024.
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