The 2010 JustinRussell.com Acadia Visitors Guide

June 1, 2010

Now that the tourism season has arrived once again, Acadia National Park has started to awaken with visitors from around the world. As a public service to the readers of JustinRussell.com, I thought it would be helpful to provide a guide to the types of people you may see in the park. See how many you can spot!

Rangers

Rangers, though one of the most recognizable classes of people, are sometimes hardest to spot. Dressed in clean, slightly olive gray outfits, these officials patrol the park to make sure everything runs smoothly. They’ll also occasionally station themselves at popular spots on busy weekends to assist other visitors in the park.

Bikers

Bikers, with their easy-to-spot bright tops and black bike shorts, often keep to the Carriage Roads, but they may also be spotted along the Park Loop Road or the state and town roads within the park. Popular entry spots include the Carriage Road crossing at Eagle Lake and the Park Loop Road stop at Bubble Pond.

Hikers

If you see someone in an earth tone or white t-shirt, rolled up cargo pants, and a hat donning a large, full backpack, congratulations! You’ve spotted the Hiker. These folks spread out evenly around the park’s dozens of miles of hiking trails and Carriage Roads. You’ll often see them sipping out of a bottle of Poland Spring water. 

Photographers

The most elusive class of Acadia visitor, you may see a Photographer stationed at an odd angle just off a trail or road while holding a digital SLR camera in their hand and wearing some sort of bag or backpack. They may appear to be standing in a spot looking aimlessly around Acadia’s dense forests, but they’re probably just waiting for you to pass so they can get a shot of the “real” Acadia, untouched by humans. This process may take hours.

Daytrippers

You may see the Daytripper wearing casual, everyday clothing while exploring spots not too far from main roads in the park. You’ll often see them climbing out of vehicles with a chickadee or loon license plate or with an Acadia annual pass sticker affixed to the windshield. A Golden or Labrador Retriever may follow.

Tourists

If you visit Thunder Hole, Sand Beach, or the Jordan Pond House, you’ll likely see a large portion of people wearing light shirts, large sunglasses, and garish hats. These are Tourists, and they provide a significant portion of Maine’s revenue. They often congregate around popular spots taking snapshots with small point-and-shoot cameras. They also frequent the hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, and shops around Mount Desert Island, sometimes pushing children in strollers (or attempting to control them while running around). The telltale sign of the Tourist: a long-sleeve shirt or sweater in the middle of July or August. Seventy or eighty degrees is cold, after all.

Cruisers

A storm is brewing in downtown Bar Harbor. On a calm Maine morning, you hear a rumble on the water and spot a ship the size of a city in Frenchman Bay moving toward the shore. While it idles, small sentry crafts emerge from its towering decks and send hundreds of loud visitors to flood downtown with bright polka-dot shirts and hats with an absence of style that makes the Tourist’s headwear look like it came straight from Milan or Paris. The Cruiser saunters around the narrow sidewalks of the town at a snail’s pace with little or no awareness of others around him, not venturing any farther in the park than the downtown shops or a scheduled bus excursion to the top of Cadillac Mountain. Bikers, Hikers, Photographers, and Daytrippers go out of their way to avoid this group at all costs and silently cheer when the ship turns around and heads back into the Gulf of Maine.

Keep in mind that this post is written in good humor and that all visitors to Acadia contribute to the economy and help with awareness of the park. It should be noted, though, that as I sit here overlooking Jordan Pond at the one spot in the park where the types above intersect the most, stereotypes are sometimes frighteningly accurate.