Granite, Fire, and Fog: The Natural and Cultural History of Acadia

University Press of New England

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© 2017 University Press of New England

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NAMES: Wessels, Tom, 1951– , author.

TITLE: Granite, fire, and fog: the natural and cultural history of Acadia / Tom Wessels.

DESCRIPTION: Hanover: University Press of New England, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016038459 (print) | LCCN 2016043914 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512600087 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512600452 (epub, mobi & pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Natural history—Maine—Acadia National Park. | Natural history—Maine—Mount Desert Island. | Acadia National Park (Me.)—History. | Mount Desert Island (Me.)—History.

CLASSIFICATION: LCC QH105.M2 W47 2017 (print) | LCC QH105. M2 (ebook) | DDC 508.741/45—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038459

DEDICATED TO FRIENDS OF ACADIA AND ALL ITS VOLUNTEERS WHO WORK FOR THE WELL-BEING OF THE PARK

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 ▪ The Rock of Ages

2 ▪ Life Returns

3 ▪ The Dawn Land

4 ▪ Fire and Fog

5 ▪ Pathmakers

6 ▪ The 1947 Fire

7 ▪ A Look to the Future

8 ▪ Let’s Take a Hike

APPENDIX A▪ List of Species

APPENDIX B▪ Glossary

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Bubbles, classic granite domes

Glacial polish on the North Ridge Trail of Champlain Mountain

Glacial striations along the Shore Path in Bar Harbor

Two crescentic gouges, where the glacial ice advanced from left to right

The Beehive

A small roche moutonnée with its quarried side on the right

A small glacial notch between the summits of Dorr and Cadillac Mountains

Balance Rock, a glacial erratic along the Shore Path in Bar Harbor

Green map lichen on both sides of a drainage on the north slope of Dorr Mountain

Cinder lichen on a diabase dike

Black-on-black lichen on the wind-exposed north side of Champlain Mountain

Target lichen on the right-hand side of the step

Toad skin lichen and plated rock tripe

The pincushion-shaped sea foam lichen growing on granite

Alpine, green, and common reindeer lichen

A crevice community composed of moss, reindeer lichen, and sedges

A wind-blasted crevice community composed solely of three-toothed cinquefoil

A well-developed lichen outcrop community

The Rodick House and formal lawn

Advection fog rising over the Beehive and Gorham Mountain

Old man’s beard lichen

Lungwort lichen on an unusual substrate—granite

A flagged red spruce

Serotinous cones on a jack pine

Jack pine and pitch pine

The Eyrie

Bates cairns

George Bucknam Dorr

Sieur de Monts Spring in 1916

A section of the granite-slab sidewalk on the Beechcroft Path

A stairway on the Homans Path

The 1916 boundary of Sieur de Monts National Monument

John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Hemlock Bridge, one of the seventeen carriage road bridges

A section of the carriage road built across the talus slope on the northwest side of Jordan Pond

Acquisitions making up Acadia National Park between 1916 and 1941

Wabanaki summer encampment near Cromwell Brook

The De Gregoire Hotel prior to the 1947 fire

After the fire: The site where the De Gregoire Hotel once stood

The Turrets, one of the Eden Street cottages that survived the fire, now the administration building for College of the Atlantic

Stumps of dead conifers cut down following the 1947 fire

A stand of paper birch generated by the 1947 fire

A coppiced red oak—the downed dead trunk was the original tree killed by the fire

The extent of the 1947 fire on Mount Desert Island

Dead red pine killed by the red pine scale on the southwestern end of Norumbega

Dead paper birch in a stand southwest of the Beehive

Effect of hikers on a depression community

A depression community eradicated by hikers, showing a visible lichen line

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank Alamy Stock Photo, Earl Brechlin, Acadia National Park Archives, the Library of Congress, Down East Books, and the Maine Historic Preservation Commission for granting permission and providing the historic images used in this book. I also want to acknowledge all my former Antioch University New England graduate students who participated in my Ecosystems of Mount Desert Island course for over twenty years and collectively helped develop, and flesh out, a full portrait of this amazing island. Thanks also to Phyllis D. Deutsch, and all the production staff, at University Press of New England for being so easy to work with and creating this beautiful book. My particular thanks to Anne Rogers, who was such an attentive editor. My deepest thanks to my wife Marcia for proofreading the manuscript to help clarify my writing. Finally, thanks to both Marcia and our daughter Kelsey, who patiently waited for their hiking companion so I could finish my daily work on the book before we set out to explore the amazing trails of Acadia National Park.

Introduction

Wind lashed the summit, making us turn our faces from the ice-blasting sting. Protected by my parka, I could hear nothing but the rustle of its fabric and what sounded like blowing sand hitting the back of my hood. The gusts were so strong we couldn’t get our backpacking stoves lit, and it became clear that breakfast would be a less than satisfying meal. It was early morning, January 22, 1973, on the summit of Cadillac.

The previous day, we had been granted permission by the park to camp in the summit parking lot, because it was closed to traffic during the winter season. This was my first trip to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. Some of my friends from the University of New Hampshire Outing Club suggested that the cross-country skiing would be great on the carriage and park loop roads, making Acadia the perfect choice as a destination for our break between semesters. Back then, the fall term did not end until later in January. When we arrived on the island, the significant snowpack we had left in New Hampshire was not to be found—all plans for skiing quickly became replaced by ones for hiking.

I was used to the exposed, glaciated, granite summits in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but what I experienced in the park was quite different. The granite wasn’t white, it was pink, and graced with an array of lichens that repeatedly compelled us to stop and marvel at their complexity of color and form. Even more striking was the way the ridges ran straight down to an ocean where islands stretched into the distance. I was awestruck by these hikes and quickly became completely captivated by them. This is striking given that Acadia’s mountains are more like foothills when compared to other mountainous landscapes in the United States. I have often wondered what my first experience of Mount Desert Island might have been like if the snow had been fine for skiing and all my time had been spent off the island’s ridges.

I instantly bonded with the land and seascape I encountered on that trip in a way that has happened only once before in my entire life. Hands down, if I could be beamed, Star Trek–style, anywhere in the northeastern United States, Mount Desert Island would be the place.

It appears that I am not the only one attracted to it. In 2015, polls on Good Morning America and in USA Today voted Mount Desert Island as America’s favorite destination spot. The visitation rate to Acadia annually places it within the top ten national parks, which seems surprising. At under 50,000 acres, it is a postage stamp compared to the others on that list. Nor does it have any significant, dramatic features, like the huge walls and waterfalls of Yosemite Valley, or the thermal features and abundant wildlife of Yellowstone, or the grandeur of the Grand Canyon.

Just as it was for me, to most visitors it’s probably the juxtaposition of these bald mountains right alongside a rugged coastline that is the draw. Over the years, I have learned that there is actually quite a bit more.

Many visitors who experience the park solely from the road are there to experience the large-scale views of summit and sea. I also love those grand vistas, but have found equally compelling the smaller-scale, intimate spots that abound along all of Acadia’s hiking trails. I have never been to another landscape that has such an abundance of small places whose visual quality requires me to stop and admire their exquisite beauty—verdant carpets of polypody fern perfectly draped over huge boulders at the base of a talus slope, extensive beds of moss infused with a diverse array of multicolored lichen, or the amazing terraces and stairways that grace Acadia’s hiking trails, displaying an unparalleled level of craftsmanship. It is this banquet of beauty that has been set out for all to enjoy that keeps me coming back for more. These sites can be found while driving, with greater frequency on the carriage roads, but it is on the hiking trails where they abound. I can’t think of one hike that I have done in Acadia that doesn’t hold numerous exquisite spots like these. This is in contrast to so many places that I have been that have dramatic landscapes on a large scale but are otherwise quite homogeneous on a smaller scale. I do believe Acadia is unrivaled in this attribute.

During the past four decades, my experience of this island has only grown, as I have learned, and continue to learn, more of the story behind all this inspiring beauty. It’s a story about a unique convergence of earth, air, fire, and water—in this case more specifically glacially scoured granite, winter winds, fire, and ocean fog—that has created a landscape that can be found nowhere else in the United States.

It is also a story that merges the rich natural history of this island with an equally dynamic cultural history. We often don’t consider it, but landscapes and seascapes directly influence the culture of the people who reside within them, and culture in turn alters land and seascapes. This explains why there are so many diverse cultures around the world. Mount Desert Island is a wonderful place to examine this rich and varied interrelationship—one that has inspired people for thousands of years. Although an important part of this story involves the ocean, the one I will be telling focuses more on the land, with which I am far better acquainted.

This book is an invitation to experience the wonderful natural history found on Mount Desert Island as well as the unique cultural story that developed because of it. It is a narrative of nature, place, and culture—a story that has an intricate plot with lots of unexpected outcomes. For those who like to hike these bald summits, ride the carriage roads, or explore the island’s rugged shoreline, this is a story you just might want to know.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rock of Ages

To truly understand Acadia we need to start with the heart of its essence—granite. Granite is the most common bedrock found on Mount Desert Island, and is literally and figuratively the very foundation of the island’s natural and cultural history.

Granite is derived from the Latin granum (grain), because the rock is coarse-grained, igneous, and intrusive. Igneous refers to rock that crystallized from molten magma and intrusive means that it solidified within older bedrock. In the case of granite, it forms many miles within the crust of the earth, where it cools slowly, allowing large mineral grains to form. Known as the rock of ages, granite is hard and erosion-resistant because of the minerals within it.

The next chance you get, take a close look at some Acadian granite; you will see that it is composed of just three different minerals. Feldspar is the most common mineral in granite and the one that gives granite its color, like the pink Cadillac Mountain granite that forms the eastern half of Mount Desert Island. Roughly two-thirds of granite is feldspar. The next most common mineral is quartz, which makes up about a quarter of the rock’s volume, and finally iron-containing minerals like black mica, which account for about 5 to 10 percent. Feldspar and quartz are the hardest common minerals found in igneous rocks and the reason granite is