Acadia Park Loop Road: Hulls Cove to Cadillac Mountain

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Acadia Park Loop Road

Welcome to Acadia National Park, and to the Park Loop Road. This tour follows the loop around the eastern side of Mount Desert Island: from the visitor center at Hulls Cove, to an overlook above Frenchman Bay, past the spring where the park began, along the granite shore at Sand Beach, Thunder Hole and Otter Cliff, inland to Jordan Pond and the Bubbles, and finally up to the summit of Cadillac Mountain.

This island is the homeland of the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawnland, and some of them called it Pemetic. A French explorer gave it the name on today's maps in 1604.

The park was pieced together from land that people gave. It began in 1916 as a national monument, became Lafayette National Park in 1919, and took the name Acadia in 1929. The road came the same way, a piece at a time, from the 1920s to 1958.

Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. On the longer stretches you'll hear a few more. In between, I'll leave you to the views.

Point 1 · At the stop

Hulls Cove Visitor Center

This is the Hulls Cove Visitor Center, the park's main information stop from May into October. The building stands above the main lot, at the top of fifty-two steps, with a separate accessible lot and entrance behind it. Inside are wall maps of the park's three networks: the roads, the hiking trails, and the carriage roads, which were built for horses, not cars. A park pass is required all year, and an automated machine by the lot sells one at any hour.

The road you're about to follow is a work of patience. It went in as a series of separate projects, built out of order, over more than thirty years. John D. Rockefeller Junior paid for most of the early work, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Junior helped plan several sections, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews and local tradesmen did much of the labor.

The builders kept to a few rules. No grade steeper than seven percent. Guard walls of big stones and quarried granite blocks, not steel. Twenty bridges along the way. Speed limits here run from twenty-five to thirty-five miles an hour, and that suits a road that was made for looking, not for hurrying.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Paradise Hill Overlook

Next, we're heading to the Paradise Hill Overlook.

This first stretch is one of the younger pieces of the loop. The Bureau of Public Roads built the Paradise Hill section in 1940 and 1941, on land Rockefeller donated, so that people coming onto the island by the main highway could reach the park without fighting the traffic in Bar Harbor.

Its big bridge over Duck Brook had to wait. The Second World War delayed it, work began in 1950, and it was finished in 1953 for three hundred thirty-six thousand dollars. It's the largest road structure in the whole park.

Point 2 · At the stop

Paradise Hill Overlook

From the Paradise Hill Overlook, you look out over Frenchman Bay.

In September of 1604, Samuel de Champlain landed on this island. In his journal he wrote that the mountain summits were all bare and rocky, and he named it Isles des Monts Déserts. Over the years from 1604 to 1618, his expeditions mapped this coast from Cape Cod up into Canada, and laid the groundwork for French colonization. That same year, 1604, Pierre Dugua established a French settlement on Saint Croix Island, farther up the coast.

The French named this place, but they couldn't keep it. In 1613 French Jesuits founded a mission on the island, and an English ship under Captain Samuel Argall destroyed it. The contest lasted another century and a half, until the British victory at Quebec in 1759 ended French rule.

The ice that shaped these mountains left their tops bald, and they are still bare and rocky, just as the Frenchman wrote.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Sieur de Monts

Next, we're heading to Sieur de Monts, a spring at the heart of the park's founding.

The name was a title. It belonged to Pierre Dugua, a French nobleman whom King Henry the Fourth commissioned lieutenant governor of New France in 1603, and who came to this island in 1604. Three centuries later, a Boston man named George Dorr gave that title to a spring.

Dorr was born in Boston in 1853 and first came here on vacation with his parents in 1868. In 1901 he and others formed the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, to hold land for the public. By 1913 the trustees had six thousand acres. That year, when some in the Maine legislature tried to revoke the group's nonprofit status, Dorr spent days in Augusta and defeated the measure.

He wanted a national park, but a national monument was quicker, so he took it. In 1916, after more than two years of work, President Woodrow Wilson created one here. At the start, Dorr ran it for a dollar a month. Over four decades he gave scores of parcels of land and persuaded others to give theirs, and he spent his inheritance doing it.

They call him the father of Acadia National Park. He never married. In 1934, after a heart attack during his morning swim, he was told he had six months to live. He lived ten more years, and died in Bar Harbor in 1944.

Point 3 · At the stop

Sieur de Monts

This is Sieur de Monts. In 1909 George Dorr built the octagonal, tile-roofed spring house over the spring here, at the south end of the Great Meadow, and piped its water to a pool. On a rock nearby he carved the words: The Sweet Waters of Acadia.

Around the spring are the Wild Gardens of Acadia: more than four hundred native plant species, in thirteen sections that each recreate a habitat found in the park, from mountain and heath to seaside and coniferous forest. The Bar Harbor Garden Club developed the garden in 1961, and today Friends of Acadia looks after it with the park. In its season it's open every morning until dusk.

Next to the gardens are the Nature Center, staffed in the summer months, and the Abbe Museum's building here, now closed. The museum tells the history and living culture of the Wabanaki people. On the south side of the Nature Center, a bronze plaque honors Dorr, and the mountain above the spring now carries his name.

A spring, a garden, a plaque and a mountain. That's how the park remembers the man who gave it most of his life.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Sand Beach

Next, we're heading to Sand Beach, the largest sandy beach in the park.

This part of the road came with an argument. In 1928, George Dorr and John D. Rockefeller Junior began to disagree about where the road should run near Sieur de Monts. It had been designed to pass alongside The Tarn, a small pond there. In 1931 the dispute became public, and island residents joined in. In the end the road went another way, around Champlain Mountain.

Sand Beach itself was a destination long before there was a road. On July twenty-first, 1888, a party from the Westtown School, on a trip around the island, passed Sand Beach by buckboard, in a horse-drawn wagon.

Point 4 · At the stop

Sand Beach

This is Sand Beach, in Newport Cove. Pick up a pinch of it if you walk down. It isn't mostly rock. Seventy to eighty percent of this beach is broken shell, from barnacles and mussels and other sea creatures. It's one of only two beaches on the Atlantic coast north of Cape Hatteras with both dunes and sand made almost entirely of shell.

There are reasons it collects here. The cove faces south, into the summer waves that carry the shell fragments in. Out in the water, a small rocky ledge called Old Soaker breaks the surf just enough for the fine grains to settle and stay. And very little sand washes down from the island's granite.

The water is cold, usually fifty to sixty degrees, even in summer, and strong tides and rogue waves can surprise strong swimmers. From here, trails lead to the Beehive and Gorham Mountain, and the Ocean Path starts at the upper lot.

The cold, oxygen-rich water off Maine grows more shelled creatures than it can dissolve. That surplus is what you're standing on.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Thunder Hole

Next, we're heading to Thunder Hole.

This shoreline road is known as Ocean Drive, and it was the hardest part of the whole loop to build. Rockefeller built its first section, near Thunder Hole, in 1929, on top of an old town road. The Bureau of Public Roads didn't finish the last piece until 1958, and that final section completed the Park Loop Road.

Along this shore runs the Ocean Path, a trail of two point two miles from Sand Beach to Otter Cove. Civilian Conservation Corps crews rebuilt it during the Great Depression.

Point 5 · At the stop

Thunder Hole

This is Thunder Hole, a narrow inlet carved into the granite shore. When a storm or the turning tide forces waves into the channel, the trapped air escapes with a deep, booming roar. Your best chance to hear it is one to two hours before high tide. At low tide, you can follow the stairs down for a closer look at the walls the water has carved.

Be careful here. Spray can shoot more than forty feet into the air, and even in calm weather rogue waves can suddenly wash over the ledges around it. The lower stairs and deck are often wet and slippery, especially in winter, and parts of the walkway close during storms. The upper viewing deck is wheelchair accessible.

If it's quiet when you visit, that's the tide, not the place. Thunder Hole keeps its own schedule.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Otter Cliff

Next, we're heading to Otter Cliff.

When the First World War began, the government wanted more secure communication across the ocean. Alessandro Fabbri, a wealthy island resident and inventor, built a radio station at Otter Cliffs and offered it to the federal government, in exchange for a commission as its commanding officer. The U.S. Naval radio station there was commissioned in 1917, and it became the most important facility of the war for receiving messages from across the Atlantic. In 1918 it received the first bulletin about the armistice.

The station stayed in service into the 1930s. Then the park's road plans grew to include Otter Cliffs. Rockefeller lobbied for the station to move, and paid for it, and a new Naval radio station was commissioned on the Schoodic Peninsula in 1935.

Point 6 · At the stop

Otter Cliff

These are the Otter Cliffs: pink granite about a hundred and ten feet high, the highest point along the Ocean Path. The granite of this island is about four hundred twenty million years old. It began as molten rock that rose up through older rock, broke it apart and cooled. Over time, erosion carried away the softer rock around it and left the granite standing, as mountains and as cliffs like these.

Nearby is Otter Point, where flat slabs of granite have the ocean on both sides. The radio station stood close to here, and a memorial to it now stands at the picnic area named for Fabbri. The decision in 1932 to move the station is what made room for the road out to Otter Point, built in 1938 and 1939 on land Rockefeller gave.

A war that ended on the other side of the ocean was first heard of on this rock. Now it's just the sound of the sea again.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Jordan Pond

Next, we're heading to Jordan Pond.

The pond takes its name from the Jordan family. In 1839 George and John Jordan bought the land here and ran a sawmill, harvesting timber from the hillsides around it. In 1847 they built a farmhouse and planted a small apple orchard.

Before the century was out, the farmhouse had become a place to eat. In 1895 new owners, Thomas and Nellie McIntire, added popovers to the menu, along with chicken dinners, lobster stew and ice cream. Thomas kept a highly manicured lawn and cleared the trees, so diners had an uninterrupted view of the Bubbles, the two mountains beyond the pond.

John D. Rockefeller Junior bought the property in 1928 and donated it to the National Park Service. The old house burned in 1979, and the building that stands there today was built in 1982. Tea and popovers on the lawn are still a tradition.

Point 7 · At the stop

Jordan Pond

This is Jordan Pond. From the shore by the Jordan Pond House, the pond stretches north toward two mountains, North and South Bubble.

It's the deepest lake in the park, about a hundred and fifty feet deep, and at a hundred and eighty-seven acres, the second largest. Glaciers shaped the land around it. The pond supplies drinking water to the village of Seal Harbor, so swimming isn't allowed, and motorboats over ten horsepower are banned.

The Jordan Pond House is the restaurant with the lawn, and its observation deck has a wayside telling its story. The restaurant and store run from spring into the fall. Through the woods around you run the carriage roads, about forty-five miles of them, all free of cars.

Deep water, two mountains and a lawn for tea. People have been stopping here for the same view for well over a hundred years.

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History, on the way there

On the way: The Bubbles and Bubble Rock

Next, we're heading to the Bubbles and Bubble Rock.

Up on South Bubble sits a boulder that doesn't belong there. It weighs about twenty-eight thousand pounds, as heavy as two large African elephants, and it's made of Lucerne granite, a different rock from the Cadillac granite underneath it. That granite comes from hills thirty to forty miles to the northwest.

The ice brought it. Geologists call a rock like this a glacial erratic: a boulder carried by a glacier and dropped on different bedrock. Erratics lie all over this island, in the valleys and on the mountaintops, some carried twenty miles or more. This one has been sitting where the ice left it since the last glacier retreated from here, about fifteen thousand years ago.

Point 8 · At the stop

The Bubbles and Bubble Rock

This is the parking area for the Bubbles, the two mountains at the north end of Jordan Pond: North Bubble and South Bubble. The trail from here climbs through the forest, up steep, rocky sections and wide stone stairs to open granite. Bubble Rock is reached by a side route marked with blue blazes, after the top of South Bubble. It isn't an accessible trail, so check the elevation profile before you set out.

From the top of North Bubble, the view takes in Jordan Pond, Pemetic and Sargent Mountains, and the Cranberry Isles out at sea. From South Bubble, you look out over the pond and the mountains around it.

Even if you don't climb, it's good to know what's waiting up there: a boulder that rode the ice for thirty miles or more, and was set down on a mountaintop.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Cadillac Mountain summit

Next, we're heading to the summit of Cadillac Mountain.

For most of the eighteen hundreds, this was Green Mountain. In the 1850s a trail up it was widened and made a toll road. The U.S. Coast Survey set up on the summit in 1858 to help map the coast, and in the early 1860s the Brewer family built the Mountain House near the top, first for the survey workers and later as a hotel.

Then came a railway. In 1883 the Green Mountain Cog Railway went up between February and July. Visitors crossed Eagle Lake by steamboat, then rode the train up at about two miles an hour, for two dollars and fifty cents round trip. The hotel burned in 1884, and a new Summit House opened within a year. But by the 1890s too few people were coming, the railway was about fourteen thousand dollars in debt, and it closed.

In 1918 the mountain got its new name. It honors Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a French noble who in 1688 received about a hundred thousand acres along this coast, all of this island included, from the king of France. He and his wife soon abandoned it.

The road to the top is newer. The Bureau of Public Roads designed it to climb the whole way, with no dips, using smooth spiral curves. Its guardrail is a line of rough granite blocks, three to four feet long and set about four feet apart.

In the Second World War, the mountain had a job. In 1941 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose the summit as the site for a radar station, and the Army Air Corps ran it through the war. The summit was closed to the public for security and didn't reopen until October 1945. The radio antenna from that time is still in use.

Today, getting to the top by car takes some planning of a different kind. In 2015 the park began work on a transportation plan, released in final form in 2019, and in 2020 it started building a vehicle reservation system. For most of the busy season, driving the summit road now takes a reservation bought online in advance: in 2026, from May twentieth to October twenty-fifth, for six dollars. Vehicles over twenty-one feet long, RVs and trailers aren't allowed on it at all. Whatever the season, the view at the top is the one people have enjoyed for thousands of years.

Point 9 · At the stop

Cadillac Mountain summit

This is the summit of Cadillac Mountain, fifteen hundred thirty feet above the sea, the highest point on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Around you is a landscape the glaciers shaped: Frenchman Bay, the Porcupine Islands and the islands beyond. From October seventh to March sixth, this is the first place in the country to see the sun come up.

The paved Summit Loop Trail makes a short circle around the top. Parts of it are wide enough for a wheelchair; other parts are steep or have steps. The true summit, the highest of three, is about five minutes' walk down the South Ridge Trail.

Look at what grows up here. The soil is shallow and dry, sometimes missing altogether, the wind off the Atlantic is strong, and there are few nutrients. Pitch pines get by with waxy needles that resist drying and freezing. Keep to the rock and the paths. Every bit of soil here counts.

Thank you for taking this tour with me. It followed a road built a piece at a time, through a park assembled from gifts of land, so that anyone could stand where you're standing now.

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