Going way, way back, of course, the story of Acadia had nothing to do with park making and everything to do with homemaking, initially by Native Americans whose middens date back at least 5,000 years, and then by the French, whose sailcloth rover, Samuel de Champlain, scouting the Maine coast in 1604, pronounced a certain island's mountains to be "all bare and rocky" and dutifully dubbed the place Isle des Monts Deserts. But European settlement here never quite caught on over the next 150 years while colonial French and English wrestled for control of the territory. finally, in 1761, a handful of English staked a claim at the north end of Somes Sound, and it wasn't long before Mount Desert was speckled with villages, lumber mills, fish-drying racks, and shipyards.

Tourists began arriving in the mid-19th century. Among the first were a couple of brushstroke masters from the Hudson River school, the artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church. Their land- and seascapes (Cole's brush favored Frenchman Bay) alerted America to the wonders of the island, and in the 1890s tourism became a flourishing industry. Mount Desert sprouted vacation hotels and elegant seaside "cottages" for such privileged patricians as Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Astors.

One fine estate in Bar Harbor was built by the Dorr family of Boston. Young
George B. Dorr, a Harvard graduate and an ardent conservationist, was alarmed by the increasing pace of development across the island. To counter it—and to preserve land for public use—he and several affluent colleagues founded the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. By 1913 the corporation had acquired some 5,000 acres (2,000 hectares), including lands donated by Dorr. The trustees then offered the tract to the federal government, and in 1916, the year the National Park Service was established, President Woodrow Wilson declared the donated land a national monument. Three years later, as more acreage was added to the monument, the government made it a national park, the first east of the Mississippi, and later renamed it Acadia, in memory of the maritime colony France lost to Britain in the 18th century.

Nothing links the past and present of Acadia quite so much as the challenge of moving people around the park—on hiking trails, on carriage paths, and along the conventional roads that had never heard the clatter of internal combustion until Maine lifted its island-wide ban on motor vehicles in 1915. The organization Friends of Acadia, headquartered at Bar Harbor, is helping the Park Service meet the challenge on each of these fronts.

Many of the island's trails predate the park, having served as connectors between some of the roadless villages. But as recreational hiking came into vogue, George Dorr and his colleagues began to introduce stone stairways and iron rung ladders to conquer the cliffs of the taller mountains. I didn't know it at the time of my own ascent that long-ago morning, but a fellow named Rudolph Brunnow conceived the wicked design of the Precipice Trail, an almost vertical thousand-foot climb up the eastern escarpment of Champlain Mountain. Fortunately, the fog obscured everything except the granite in front of my face and the next iron rung awaiting my outstretched hand. Don't look down, the climber below me kept repeating unnecessarily. And don't look up, warned the one above me.

Now, with time marching on and with a handsome endowment from Friends of Acadia, park crews and volunteers are rehabilitating the park's 135-mile (217-kilometer) trail system and resurrecting some older trails long abandoned. As for my old nemesis, the Precipice Trail, it continues to chill and thrill climbers to this day, though the Park Service suspends its use mid-March through mid-August to protect nearby nests of peregrine falcons.

A Friends endowment also maintains the park's winding carriage roads, open to hikers, bikers, and equestrians but not to motorists. These byways are the legacy of John D.

Rockefeller, Jr., who purchased a summer home at Seal Harbor in 1910, cherished the island's motorless serenity, and enjoyed exploring Mount Desert by horse and carriage. Over the next 27 years, Rockefeller and his wealth presided over the construction of an extensive network of narrow carriage roads, surfaced with hand-laid stones and bordered with rough-cut blocks of granite—rustic guardrails some islanders affectionately call "Rockefeller's teeth."

And finally there are those other roads, including the Loop and the run up Cadillac Mountain. For years they have taken a pounding as hundreds of thousands of cars poured across the mainland causeway, creating backups and fouling the air. Notices are occasionally posted on busy summer days advising visitors that ozone has exceeded safe levels. But here, once again, park supporters have pitched in to ease the strain. Following an example first set at Yosemite Valley to get visitors out of their cars, Acadia since 1999 has operated a fleet of propane-fueled shuttle buses (17 now in service) and dramatically increased the number of folks happy to leave the driving to others. "It's going gangbusters," says Ken Olson, president of Friends of Acadia. "In its first six years the program has picked up a million and a half riders. That adds up to more than half a million vehicles off the park's roads—enough cars to stretch from here all the way down the coast to Charleston, South Carolina."

The shuttle service now extends into October to enhance the visitor's experience of Acadia's autumn palette: the golds and yellows of birch, beech, and aspen, the reds and russets of maple weaving their way across a black-green tapestry of spruce and fir. But wait! Don't turn away when those deciduous leaves begin to shrivel and flutter from the hardwood trees. There'll be new secret places and scenic vistas to enchant your eye in the forest openings. After all, when autumn retreats from Acadia, wonders of a different sort won't be far behind.