This morning started out with some light snow with large puffy flakes. Things were looking good! We visited a few spots in Acadia National Park and did two short hikes. Unfortunately, the snow stopped pretty quickly and it started raining in the afternoon. We ended up just checking out a few more spots along the road on the way back.
Echo Lake
We were planing on hitting the Echo Lake Beach on the southern end of Echo Lake. Unfortunately, the NPS access road was closed for the winter! We ended up backtracking to a boat launch near the opposite end of the lake that was still open. The rather large lake was partially frozen, a bit of a surprise given that Jordan Pond was completely free of ice yesterday. We ended up just taking a few photos before moving on.
Seawall
Our next stop was the Seawall Picnic Area in Acadia National Park. The Seawall area gets its name from large stones that have been deposited along the shoreline by the waves creating a natural seawall. We should have read about that earlier and actually looked out for the seawall as the picnic area didn’t seem to have this natural feature!
Wonderland Trail
After our brief stop at the Seawall Picnic Area, we stopped at the nearby Wonderland Trail for a short hike. The half mile or so trail started out in a forested area with a few open areas about half way through. We also encountered a very icy section but luckily it was flat and easily passable.
The coastline didn’t come into view until reaching a little loop at the far end of the trail. The trail led through the woods but had various spurs leading to the rocky shoreline. There are quite a few islands offshore in this area!
This cove came into view as we headed back towards the trailhead. It is labeled as Bennet Cove on Google Maps. We’ve been seeing quite a bit of wet rocks and seaweed as high tide currently occurs early in the morning or in the evening, we’ve only experienced tides on the lower half of the 12-foot range.
Ship Harbor Trail
Our next stop was the nearby Ship Harbor Trail. Once again, it was short trail about half a mile in length forming a figure 8. We spotted this little American Red Squirrel seated on a branch. It was busy eating a seed! It didn’t care that we were relatively close to it but we didn’t try to get any closer.
Ship Harbor consists of two points of land with a channel of water in between. We noticed quite a few lobster pots on the opposite shore. Some are visible here in the center of the frame though they appear quite small at this distance. We’re not sure what the pots are doing there. It seems like a rather odd place to stash lobster pots so we think maybe they were lost and washed up during a storm.
The far end of the Ship Harbor Trail consisted of a large rocky shoreline with most of the tail elevated perhaps 30 or 40 feet above sea level. Similar a bit to what we saw on the eastern edge of Mount Desert Island on our first day in the park, but at a smaller scale. The rocky landscape provided a few nice places to sit and relax.
Bass Harbor Head Light Station
The lighthouse at Bass Harbor was supposed to be a quick easy sight to see. But we were greeted with this set of stairs headed downwards towards the rocks below us.
No lighthouse in sight at the bottom of the steps! Just the typical rugged Maine coastline!
A little bit of mild scrambling over rocks resulted in a structure coming into view. The lighthouse!
We tried to get closer but this is as good as it got. There was a fence in the way! There was no way to get any closer!
We took a quick look back at the lighthouse as we made our way back up the cliff.
We saw a number of fishing vessels going in and out of the adjacent Bass Harbor. Here, we have a tiny lobster fishing boat returning to port and a small trawler, followed by a multitude of gulls, headed out to sea.
As we returned to the parking lot, we saw someone coming up from a path that we hadn’t seen before. Surprise! There is a paved trail leading to the other side of the lighthouse! Unfortunately, the lighthouse is rather ugly from this angle and there’s no room to move around to try and get a better view.
Along The Road
Although we saw a few boats going here and there today, things were relatively quiet in all the ports that we drove by. Here, a few boats are moored at Bernard on the other side of Bass Harbor from the lighthouse. We did see what appeared to be fishermen loading up a truck, perhaps with the catch of the day, on the pier behind us.
We stopped for a short time at a picnic area by Seal Cove. We saw lots of places for boats to be moored but there wasn’t a single on in the water.
We had planned on stopping at a place called Pretty Marsh but unfortunately like many of the NPS sites it was closed. We ended up making our final stop at a boat ramp at the north end of Long Pond, a rather large and long body of water that is probably better described as a lake. This part of Long Pond was completely frozen! It seemed like it would likely support the weight of a person though we didn’t try to test it out. Yesterday, we saw locals ice skating and playing ice hockey on the surface of a different frozen lake though!