Eagle Explorer Gps

Harmony In The State Of Maine

With all the trash talk about how evil government is — all governments, if the far right is to be believed — it’s nice to see one place where public and private interests seems to be well aligned.

Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine is one of the most successful pieces of social and physical engineering in the United States, and it is and has always been a joint public-private effort.

Now, an up-front disclaimer: I can’t call this anything other than a vacation memo.  I’ve just come back from two weeks in Acadia with my family.  However, I will throw in a bit of tech at the end to legitimize it for this section.

First, a bit of family social engineering: Over a fortnight, we managed a fair amount of democracy ourselves, as we learned to negotiate the day’s activities over breakfast.  Everyone got to say what they wanted, and we favored different individuals on different days, working at a plan that covered a good compromise of interests.  Activities tended toward biking on the park’s carriage roads, kayaking, hiking, going to the beach, and shopping in town — with lots of eating and the odd boat trip around the islands thrown in for good measure.  As time passed, we smoothed the process and minimized the whining.  Good on us.

That taken care of, on to the park itself.

Acadia enshrines some of the most beautiful land in North America.  During the last Ice Age, glaciers moving south carved deep gullies in reddish granite, creating a series of parallel steep-sided mountains interspersed with finger lakes as well as one fjord — well, a fjard , actually.  Although Sam de Champlain thought he saw deserts (thus, Mt. Desert Island), only the summits of the whaleback mountains are bare.  The lowlands are densely forested with fir, pine, oak, beach, birch, and maple.  Through the park run many pure streams, filtered by the granite sands eroded from the peaks.  Even in this day and age, I have drunk directly from many of them.

Without belaboring the whole saga of how it was established, Acadia was initially formed from donations of large tracts of land by some of the wealthiest summer residents, the Rockefellers famously among them.  Specifically, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the founder of Standard Oil, financed and engineered the carriage road system in the park.

Engineering Feat

The care with which these roads were planned and built is astounding.  It smacks of an era when people built things to last for centuries.  The native granite was quarried from the uphill side of the road and moved to the downhill side to form retaining walls and barriers.  The culverts and gutters were designed to minimize erosion and manage water from the road separately from water coming down the mountain.  The road beds themselves are multilayered, finished with some sort of crushed metamorphic rock (shale chips?) and rounded so that water runs off easily.  It rains a lot in Acadia in the summer, but the roads never get muddy or pool up and can be traveled in any conditions.  Even when it’s dry, dust is minimal because the stone chips tend not to break up.

Eagle Explorer GPS

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