Tag: Outdoors

A few prime strolls around here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Visitors on the street sometimes ask me about good places to hike around here, and looking at them, I don’t always want to recommend anything too strenuous. On my part, I do miss the old carriage road up Garrison Hill back in Dover, New Hampshire, but you can’t beat some of these.

  1. Quoddy Head State Park in Lubec. The parking lot is close to an iconic lighthouse, spectacular bluffs, and an Arctic peat bog. Not a bad combo as an introduction.
  2. Shackford State Park in Eastport. It almost became an oil refinery. The central trail leads to an incredible panorama of Cobscook Bay and a high probability of seeing bald eagles.
  3. Matthews Island. Also in Eastport, this Maine Coastal Heritage Trust site can be reached only at low tide. Getting there will give definitely give you a sense of mudflats. MCHT also has nearby Treat Island, which we intend to explore by renting a water taxi to get us there and back.
  4. MCHT includes other personal favorites, starting with Boot Cove in Lubec. If you like Acadia National Park, you’ll love these lesser known opportunities. Nose around in this Red Barn blog, you’ll find photographic evidence why.
  5. The Bold Coast public lands in Cutler. This is for the serious hiker, one willing to walk 1½ miles to get to the rugged ocean. From there, though, there’s a six-mile breathtaking clifftop trail along the restless ocean, and even primitive camping on a limited first-come, first-served basis at the end. The trailhead parking lot can be overflowing in prime season.
  6. Cobscook Shores. Thanks to a newer family trust, 15 small waterfront sites provide public opportunities for investigation. Most have outhouse or indoor plumbing facilities as well as picnicking, sometimes in screened-in pavilions around a single table. My favorite to date is Morang Cove.
  7. Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. So far, I’ve sampled trails at its Baring and Calais district but there is more in Edmunds township. Former roads, now used only for ranger access, make for broad, easy pathways through a variety of ecosystems. My big caveat for inland trails is to be prepared for black flies from late April into July. They can definitely spoil and outing.
  8. Downeast Sunrise Trail, atop an abandoned rail line. I see it primarily as ATV and snowmobiling in season, but it does offer insights in inland ecologies. Again, note the black fly warning.
  9. Mowry Beach in Lubec and Roque Bluffs State Park south of Machias. Sandy beaches in Downeast Maine are rare. Here are two wonderful exceptions for those who want to indulge in a long barefoot walk.
  10. Back in Eastport, the Hillside Cemetery is worth nosing about. It’s newer than many classic New England burial grounds, but the engraved stones add up to some fascinating stories.

With the Canadian border now reopened, I’m looking forward to some treks on Campobello Island, both at the Roosevelt international park and a few other sites.

 

This is a great place to enter the twilight zones

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here in Way Downeast Maine, many dawns would blow you away, at least if you’re awake in time.

It’s not just when our closest star comes into view but also the vast unobstructed sky over the bay and the ways neighboring Campobello Island interact with the growing light.

As I’ve been finding – and you’re seeing in some of the photos here at the Red Barn – much of the glory occurs in what’s officially the twilight zones, defined by how low the sun is below the horizon.

These zones are otherwise known as dawn and dusk, apart from Rod Serling’s once upon a time spooky black-and-white TV episodes.

And these are longer and more pronounced the further away from the equator they are.

I’m on the 45th parallel, halfway to the North Pole and its days of endless summer light or winter darkness. Meaning our twilights are much longer than what happens in most of the rest of the continental U.S.

Checking our local weather forecasts, I’ve noticed a few unfamiliar terms but not looked into them until recently.

The first is astronomical twilight, which I’ll skip over this round. It seems to apply mostly to the Arctic and Antarctic.

The second is nautical twilight, which apparently has its origins in the era when mariners used the stars to navigate the seas. In clear weather, most stars are still visible to the naked eye but also, finally, the horizon. You need artificial light to do much of anything outdoors.

Around here these days, it begins before 3:10  am Daylight time – or what would be 2:10 Standard. The wee hours, no matter how you slice it.

The next stage is civil twilight. It’s brighter, enough to mean artificial light may not be required for outdoor activities. Only the brightest celestial objects can be observed by the naked eye. These days for us, it’s around 4 o’clock. Yeah, 3 Standard time. Still really early for most folks.

And finally sunrise, about a more than quarter to 5.

That’s an hour and a half of magical natural light.

I think it’s why most people around here are up and about early. Even in winter, the roads are busier at 5:30 in the morning than 5:30 in the afternoon.

Of course, the reverse happens every evening.

The shifts also produce what’s called the Golden Hour, when sunlight turns warmer and softer. Or, in my thinking, buttery and magical. I place it mostly as the hour before sunset, especially when the light shoots in horizontally.

As well as the Blue Hour, when only a few stars or planets are visible. Painter Maxfield Parrish exploited it to the hilt.

During the day, much of our sunlight is reflected from the waters back into the sky, something many classic Italian painters explored as well as more modern artists here today.

So how’s the natural light where you are?

Have you ever been to Acadia National Park?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maine likes to tout itself as Vacationland, and Acadia National Park is definitely a star attraction. I know people who gush that it’s their favorite place ever. Not that I’d go that far.

Still, let’s consider:

  1. With four million visitors a year, it’s among the 10 most popular national parks. Most of them crowd in during the prime summer months.
  2. The official version has the park being named after Arcadia, a region of Greece that it supposedly resembles. New France, however, referred to eastern Maine as Acadia before being expelled by the English in 1763. In their migration, some of those Acadians became known as Cajuns down in Louisiana. I’m siding with the French here, despite my fondness for Greek culture.
  3. It was the first national park established east of the Mississippi and encompasses 47,000 acres, mostly on Mount Desert Island. Not that there’s any desert, it’s just wild. Additional, less well-known tracts are on Schoodic Peninsula (my favorite) and Isle au Haut as well as smaller islands. And a fourth of the land total is privately owned but under easements and similar arrangements.
  4. With 108 square miles, Mount Desert Island is the biggest island in Maine and the sixth largest in the contiguous United States.
  5. The park has 158 miles of maintained hiking trails spanning mountainous terrain, panoramic views, rocky Atlantic shoreline, mixed forests, and lakes. Former carriage roads are also popular with bicyclists.
  6. There’s a private trolley service for those who’d prefer to view the scenery more than the traffic jam.
  7. Backcountry camping and overnight parking are not permitted, but there are campgrounds and lean-tos for those who plan well ahead.
  8. French explorer Samuel de Champlain gets the creds as the first European. He encountered the place in September 1604 when his boat ran aground on a rock. He applied the name Isles des Monts Deserts, or island of barren mountains, to the bigger scene. Well, some are pure rockface.
  9. In the 1880s, the island became a summer retreat for Rockefellers, Morgans, Fords, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Astors who built elaborate vacation dwellings they called “cottages.” Many of those were destroyed by a vast wildfire in October 1947.
  10. Its principal gateway is Bar Harbor, a city of 5,000 full-time residents that swells with summer people and their second homes, tourists, and often a big cruise ship or two that add several thousand more people to the crowd. Be warned that parking is at a premium in high summer.

For more adventurous souls, let me suggest exploring two hours to the east, to the Bold Coast, for a less spoiled alternative.

Flowage

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

 

 

 

Streams passing through Maine forests often open out into a wetland known as a flowage, a flooding typically caused by beaver dams or other impoundments. The resulting broad habit is crucial to waterfowl production, and also provides for excellent kayaking, canoeing, and fishing.

These shots are all from one spot. Note the beaver lodge in the last one.