Mount Desert Island
It has long been noted that the rising sun touches the slopes of Cadillac Mountain before any other place in the United States. In fact, native people who have called this area home for thousands of years called themselves Wabanaki, meaning “People of the Dawn.” At 1,530 feet, Cadillac is the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard and officially catches North America’s first light from October 7 to March 6. It is one of the more than 20 mountains that rise from the sea and comprise much of the island on which a portion of Acadia National Park is located. These mountains inspired the explorer-navigator Samuel Champlain to name the island Isle des Monts Desert in 1604—the Island of Barren Mountains.
The mountains were built up by tectonic and volcanic forces, and slowly eroded away before a succession of glaciers sculpted out the remnants. The land sank beneath the weight of mile-deep ice as glaciers inexorably ground their way toward present day Georges Bank, Long Island, and Cape Cod. As the glaciers receded, water filled a vast valley surrounding the mountains, creating the Gulf of Maine. Relieved of the great burden of the ice, the land slowly rebounded. These processes, over the eons of time, created the landscape of which Acadia National Park and its mountains are a part.
Life is not easy at the top, but the mountains are not as barren as Champlain described. They are home to forests of spruce and pitch pine. Tiny subalpine plants, such as cinquefoil, blossom in joints in the granite and on the leeward side of rocks. Squat, gnarled trees may survive winter after harsh winter. And, during the spring and summer, peregrine falcons have called some sheer mountain cliffs home.
