Acadia National Park

Bass Harbor Head Light stands on a low cliff at the south-western corner of Mount Desert Island, and it is probably the most photographed lighthouse in a state that has around sixty-five of them. The classic shot is taken from the rocks below and to the west of the tower, reached by a short set of stairs from the car park.

The orientation matters more than people expect. The rocks face west, so this is a sunset light. Turning up at dawn gets you the tower in flat shade with the sun behind it, which is the wrong way round and a long drive to discover.

It is also on the quiet side of the island, and that is half the reason to go. Tremont and Southwest Harbor see a fraction of Bar Harbor's traffic, so the journey out here doubles as an escape from the Park Loop Road. The car park is small, though, and at sunset in August it is full.

The light itself is an active aid to navigation and the keeper's house is a residence, so the grounds immediately around the tower are not generally open. What you come for is the view from below, not a tour.

Thunder Hole is a narrow slot in the granite on the Park Loop Road where an incoming wave traps air in a small cavern at the back and forces it out again with a boom you feel as much as hear. When it works it is genuinely startling. The problem is how often it does not.

It needs two things at once: a rising tide, roughly the couple of hours before high water, and a real swell running in from offshore. On a calm, flat day at low water it is a wet hole in a rock with a viewing platform and a queue, and a great many visitors see exactly that and wonder what the fuss was. Check the tide before you go rather than arriving when the car park happens to have a space.

The corollary is the safety point, and it is not a formality. The conditions that make Thunder Hole spectacular are the conditions that wash people off the lower stairs. When a storm swell is running, the lower platform closes, and the day to be most careful is precisely the day it is most worth watching.

It sits on the Ocean Path between Sand Beach and Otter Cliff, so the best version of the visit is to walk to it rather than drive, which also sidesteps the parking entirely.

Hulls Cove is the park's front door, sitting just off Route 3 at the northern end of the Park Loop Road. It is where you buy a pass if you have not bought one online, pick up the official map, and ask a ranger the question you cannot resolve from a website.

It earns a stop mainly at the start of a first visit, and specifically if your plans are not yet fixed. Rangers know which trails are closed, whether the Precipice is shut for nesting peregrines, what the sea state is doing to Thunder Hole today, and which car parks are already full — none of which a website can tell you in real time.

It is also the sensible place to get on the Island Explorer if you are leaving the car for the day. Note that facilities here are seasonal: outside the summer operating window the building itself may be closed even though the park is open, and the park's information moves to Bar Harbor.

Cadillac is the summit the whole park is organised around. At 1,530 feet it is the highest point on the Atlantic coast of the United States, and for part of the year it is the first ground in the country the sun touches. That claim is usually stretched: it is often repeated as running from October to March, but ranking Cadillac against Maine's other candidates — Mars Hill, West Quoddy Head, Katahdin and Eastport — puts its stint at roughly ten weeks around midwinter. For most of the year the first light lands somewhere else. Our first sunrise tracker computes the winner for any given day.

The summit road is a 3.5-mile drive, not a hike, which is what surprises people: you can be standing on the highest point in the park twenty minutes after leaving Bar Harbor. During the reservation season you need a timed vehicle slot to make that drive, booked through recreation.gov and entirely separate from your park entrance pass. Sunrise slots are the first to go, and they go early.

Two things worth knowing before you commit to the dawn version. It is cold and exposed up there well outside summer, considerably colder than the town you drove from. And sunset is the easier trip by a wide margin: the same view, the same road, no alarm, and far less competition for a booking. If the first-light claim is not the specific thing you came for, go in the evening.

You can also walk up. The North Ridge and South Ridge trails both reach the summit and both need no reservation, because the booking applies to the road rather than to the mountain.

Sand Beach is a short crescent of pale sand held between two granite headlands, and it is unusual enough on this coast to be a destination in its own right. The sand is not really sand in the ordinary sense: a large proportion of it is ground-up shell and the remains of marine organisms, which is why it is paler and coarser underfoot than a southern Maine beach.

The water is the thing to be realistic about. Even at the end of August, when Maine's sea is at its annual warmest, this stretch of open coast sits somewhere around the mid-fifties Fahrenheit. People swim, briefly, and mostly loudly. Treat it as a place to sit and look rather than a beach day, and it is superb.

Its real strategic value is as a trailhead. The Ocean Path starts here and runs flat and wide down to Thunder Hole and Otter Cliff. The Beehive starts across the road and goes almost straight up. From one car park you can choose the easiest good walk in the park or the most alarming one.

The car park fills early in summer and is one of the strongest arguments for the Island Explorer shuttle.

The Wild Gardens sit in the Sieur de Monts area and are small enough to walk in half an hour, which undersells how useful they are. The planting is arranged by habitat rather than by family: a bog section, a coniferous woods section, a mountain section, a seaside section, each holding the species you would actually meet in that part of Acadia, labelled.

Do this early in a trip and the rest of the park becomes legible. The plant you cannot name on the Jordan Pond loop or the shrub growing out of bare granite on Cadillac is almost certainly in here with a label on it.

Sieur de Monts itself is worth the stop regardless: it is the spring and the small nature centre where the park effectively began, and it is a short, flat, shaded walk in a park where most things involve granite.

The Beehive is a small mountain with a large reputation. The climb is short — it is well under a mile to the top — but a good part of it goes up a cliff face on iron rungs, ladders and narrow ledges bolted into the granite, with a long drop beside you and no way to step aside and let your nerve recover.

This is the single most important thing to understand about Acadia's trail network: difficulty here is not measured in distance. The Beehive would be a trivial walk if it were laid flat. What makes it hard is that it is vertical and exposed, and that the exposure arrives quickly and does not let up until the top.

Do not start it in the wet. Wet granite and wet iron are a different proposition entirely, and the descent route is not the way you came. Do not start it carrying a small child, and think hard about it if heights are a problem for you, because the point of no return comes early and the traffic on the ladders is one-way in practice.

For everyone else it is one of the best half-hours in the park, and the view back down over Sand Beach and the open Atlantic is the payoff. If it sounds like too much, the Ocean Path from the same car park gives you a version of the same coastline at ground level.

Jordan Pond is the postcard: a long, exceptionally clear glacial pond with two rounded hills, the Bubbles, sitting at the far end of it like a matched pair. The loop path runs 3.3 miles all the way round, and the northern half crosses boggy ground on log bridges — the famous, occasionally treacherous, plank walkways — while the southern half is easy going.

The clarity of the water is not an accident and it is protected: this is a public water supply, which is why there is no swimming and no wading. It is also why the pond looks the way it does in photographs.

The Jordan Pond House sits at the southern end and has been serving tea and popovers on the lawn since the nineteenth century, which makes it the one genuinely traditional thing to do in the park. It is extremely popular and the wait can be long in season.

The loop is also a good introduction to the carriage roads, which pass close by, and it is one of the easier places in Acadia to spend a couple of hours without a climb.

Twice a day a gravel bar surfaces at the end of Bridge Street in Bar Harbor and you can walk, dry-shod, straight out to Bar Island. It is one of the few places anywhere that a national park trailhead is at the end of a residential street and only exists for part of the day.

The window is roughly an hour and a half either side of low water, so about three hours in total, and the crossing itself takes ten minutes or so. Once across, a track climbs to a clearing with a view back over Bar Harbor and the harbour full of boats.

The failure mode here is well documented and entirely avoidable. The bar floods from both ends at once rather than gradually from one side, people get cut off on it every single summer, and the return walk always takes longer than it looked from the island. Cross early in the window rather than late, and set an alarm rather than trusting your sense of how long you have been gone.

Tide times for Bar Harbor are published daily and are the only thing that determines whether this walk exists on the afternoon you are free.

If you only have time for one walk in Acadia, this is the one to choose. The Ocean Path runs roughly two miles from Sand Beach along the top of the granite shore, past Thunder Hole, to the cliffs at Otter Point. It is wide, largely level, and it never leaves the coast.

What makes it exceptional is the ratio. Almost everything people come to this park to look at — pink granite meeting open Atlantic, spruce growing out of rock, surf in the inlets — is visible from a path that requires no fitness and no equipment. You can turn round at any point, and the Island Explorer shuttle stops at both ends in season, so it works as a one-way walk.

Go early or late. It runs parallel to the Park Loop Road and shares its crowds in the middle of the day, but at seven in the morning it is close to empty and the light is coming straight up the coast at you.

Stay on the path where it is marked. The granite slabs beside it look inviting and are steeper and more slippery than they appear, particularly where they are wet or have algae on them.

The Shore Path runs from near the town pier around the eastern edge of Bar Harbor, with the Porcupine Islands offshore on one side and the back gardens of some very large houses on the other. It is flat, it is about half a mile each way, and it takes twenty minutes at a stroll.

It has been open to the public since the 1880s, which is a genuinely unusual arrangement: the path crosses private land by long-standing agreement rather than by right. That is worth knowing because it is the reason to stay on it.

As a piece of trip planning it is the answer to the awkward hour — the time before a dinner reservation, the wait for a boat, the evening when the park itself feels like too much effort. It is also the best place in town to watch the light go off the islands.