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September 2023 (Part 08)

Maine Trip - Wednesday, Sep 27: Beehive Trail, the Bowl, and Gorham Mountain Trail

After lunch, we headed back east to the Sand Beach parking area and upped the ante, heading up the Beehive Trail.  We combined this route with a loop to the Bowl, then descended along the Gorham Mountain Trail and came back to the parking lot along the Ocean Path.  Note Steve forgot to stop the trail app, so the GPS recorded part of our drive after the hike.

This is one of Acadia's "iron rung routes," similar to the via ferrata trails in Europe and other parks (via ferrata, Italian for “iron path,” is a protected climbing/hiking route that uses steel cable affixed to rock, metal ladder rungs and rock holds to ascend and traverse through the mountains).  In Acadia, instead of trying to find the easiest way up the mountain, these ingenuous routes negotiate the steep mountain cliff contours with the aid of iron rungs, ladders, and handholds, offering hikers exhilarating exposed views.  The Beehive Trail lived up to this, with several steep or exposed sections requiring use of iron rungs to help traverse.

As we ascended, we could look back over Sand Beach and the eastern side of Mount Desert Island and Acadia NP.

Made it

Steve had to share the image from the top of Gorham Mountain with an old friend from college, Mark Gorham.

The trail then headed a bit north and into a saddle between to peaks which included a small pond called The Bowl.

The small squirels were clearly not happy we were disturbing them.

From there, the path led up then down Gorham Mountain.

We opted to drop down along the Cadillac Cliffs Path, which was so worth it.  It ran along the bottom of the cliffs, taking us through some narrow clefts and even through two caves.

Once down, the Ocean Path ran along the Park Loop Road back to the Sand Beach parking lot.  Stopped to admire this bird along with a mother showing it to her toddler.

We stopped to take a couple pictures of the shoreline as we drove down Park Loop Road.

We had signed up for an online class through the Smithsonian Museum for this evening, so dinner was pizza and calzone delivery, which were amazingly good.