On July 29th we continued our Acadia vacation in Maine. Having completed the Beach Path, we moved on to a hike of Jordan Pond. Several web sites told us that we could connect that trail to the Bubbles, two mountains near Jordan Pond that were extremely popular.

Since the parking lots for the Bubbles usually filled up early and our crew didn’t believe in fully coming to life until at least 9am, a Jordan Pond-Bubbles hike seemed to be the way to go. We found a place to park in the more spacious Jordan Pond parking lot and then ran into a problem that plagued us on this trip: restrooms closed for cleaning. I’m not sure what goes on in the Acadia restrooms in the morning, but this was the second of what would ultimately be three closed restrooms we encountered in two days. Finally, we found a restroom that was not closed for cleaning but probably should have been. As it would turn out, our quest for bladder relief added unnecessary milage to our upcoming hike by Jordan Pond to the Bubbles. However, the first part of the hike was shady and easy.

The Jordan Pond hike started well. Although there was some misty dampness, the trail was nice and flat, and the water in the pond is very clear.

About a mile in, we reached the branch for the Bubbles, where we could either continue around Jordan Pond or climb to the summit of South Bubbles. Some people descending from South Bubble along the branching trail told us that the hike was steep but totally worth it.

Steep isn’t adequate to describe the hike, which involved about 500 feet of elevation gain over half a mile. That translates to a thousand feet over a mile, which is more than a 23% grade. Parts of the hike devolved into a boulder scramble. Still, we pushed on.

About three-tenths of a mile up the Bubbles trail, it was clear that the path was so steep that getting back down would be extremely challenging for some in our party. Still, additional hikers assured us that we could do it, although one hiker added the alarming caveat that, at the end of the hike, we might “have to carry your dog.” If you thought that this warning was sufficient to get us to turn around, I can only say that I prefered the prospect of carrying a 50 pound dog up a rocky incline over telling Laura that I had led her up a grueling trail with no payoff.

Finally, we reached part of the trail that turned into a stone ladder, the part that this hiker had warned us might not be navigable for our dog, Finley. Some hikers scampered right up, but watching some mere mortals slowly descend by cautiously sliding on their butts convinced us that we had to turn around.

Fortunately, Laura is good-natured and took the whole mishap in stride.

Already, the Bubbles hike has become one of those episodes of family lore that will be brought up over and over again for all of eternity. And this will be true not just for our family. Dozens of hikers will be able to look back on that hike and recall the angry lady on the trail who informed them in great detail of all the ways this hike was likely to kill her, the precise state of disrepair that her knees were in, and how her presence on that trail could only be blamed on one terrible individual: me. I think we can give Laura credit for getting some hikers to redouble their efforts to complete the hike, if only because summiting South Bubble would take them away from the lady whose yelling was causing them physical pain.

We later learned that the South Bubbles hike from the other direction, where the Bubbles parking lot is located, is fairly easy; from the Jordan Pond direction, not so much. After extricating ourselves from the Bubbles, we returned to the car too late to walk across the Bar Harbor sandbar to Bar Island and too early for our reservation to drive up to the summit of Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain. We gambled that the Acadia rangers would take mercy on us and headed to the Cadillac entry early. I was hoping that seeing the summit of Cadillac Mountain might distract the rest of the family from our failed attempt to see the top of the last mountain we visited.

Having used up all of the bad family karma trying to scale the Bubbles, we were fortunate and the Park Ranger allowed us to go to the top of Cadillac about 45 minutes before our scheduled time. While there were a lot of rocks on Cadillac Mountain, there was much less scaling of rock walls than there had been on South Bubble.

Cadillac Mountain is the highest point on the eastern seaboard of the US, making it an extremely popular place to watch the sunrise over the ocean and rocky shore. Reservations are needed to drive to the top, and I was sorely tempted while planning the trip a week earlier to grab a sunrise pass. This would have been a mistake for several reasons. First, it would have robbed us of this afternoon opportunity to recover from the Bubbles fiasco. Sunrise at Acadia was around 5am, meaning that we would have had to leave our hotel at a mindbending 4:15am. Then there is the fact that there were no visible sunrises during this week, just a gradual lightening of the gray mist. Even on the afternoon while we were at Cadillac, during an apparent gap in the fog, the mists came creeping back in.

Still, the rain held off while we shopped for souvenirs and got ice cream in the nearby town of Bar Harbor, just outside of Acadia. That gave us hope that we would experience relatively clear weather for the “Puffins and Lighthouses” boat tour we had scheduled for the next morning.

The mist got much worse as we headed out to sea. By the time we passed Bar Island the mists were almost impenetrable.

We also cruised by the area where Acadia’s famous Precipice Trail is located. The trail involves significantly more of a vertical climb than the Bubbles, which automatically eliminated it from consideration for our family, but it was closed when were at the park at any rate. I just assumed that the closure was due to the dense fog and moisture, which would make climbing up a cliff using metal rungs maybe even more dangerous than scaling a random boulder to peer into the Thunder Hole. But moist ladder rungs did not force the closure of the trail; the trail was actually closed due to nesting peregrine falcons. Apparently, nesting peregrine falcons are territorial jerks, and they will dive bomb hikers hanging on to iron ladder rungs 200 feet off the ground.

Stories like these were relayed by our tour guides, who were desperate to take our minds off of the fact that no lighthouses or murderous peregrine falcons were visible through the dense fog. By the time we reached the mid-way point, the guides had already described three invisible islands that would have been visible on a normal day.

Every so often, a lighthouse would emerge out of the mist, manifesting as an evil structure that was clearly controlled by the same undead forces as those that ran the hotel in The Shining.

In addition to the mists hiding the lighthouses and wildlife, increasingly the rain was an issue.

Then our luck with the rain ran out. We had been enjoying the mist-obscured views from the top deck of the boat, the worst place to be when the skies opened up. Somehow, we managed to get down the ladder during the downpour and find shelter.

The constant rain was accompanied by rolling seas, leading one of our fellow passengers to unload what appeared to be all of her breakfast and most of her dinner off the back railing. These were conditions that caused people to question the choices that had brought them to this point in life.

Finally, the rain let up and we reached the island where the puffins nest.

Through the mist, the search was on: who would spot a puffin?

As we got close enough to the island to penetrate the mists, we spotted them.

Perhaps as a way to make up for our inability to see half of the lighthouses we passed, the boat pilot kept the boat for quite some time at the island, coming close enough for us to get some great views of puffins.

On the way back, we closely skirted some islands that we had not seen on the way out. Some of those islands were homes to seals.

As with the puffins, we were able to get a close look at some of the more adventurous seals. We could even see the less-adventurous lazy seals that didn’t bother to wake up from a nap when we arrived.

As we closed in on Bar Harbor, the sun began to burn off the mists. We could finally see the famous sandbar that connected Bar Island to the shore at low tide.

Even as the sun came out, it was time for us to leave Acadia and the coast. We were headed west for the next leg of the adventure, to the mountains of Maine and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.