There is a street in Bar Harbor, Maine named Bridge Street. The name is appropriate because at the north end of the street there is a bridge to Bar Island, a former dairy farm which is now part of Acadia National Park. Bar Island sits maybe a quarter to a half a mile off shore from the town of Bar Harbor and it is a popular hiking destination with a manageable amount of trails.
If you want to take a trip over to Bar Island, you can get there by boat or by driving or walking over the bridge. However, there's a bit of a catch on the driving or walking part of getting there. For most of the day, the bridge isn't there. That means most of the time the only way you can get to Bar Island is by boat. Or I guess you could swim. If you are a pretty strong swimmer, I'd imagine.
Our first visit to the north end of Bridge Street was on a Saturday afternoon just after lunch. We were not surprised to find no bridge when we drove our car down what effectively was a dead end street at that time. We knew we'd have to come back later. The fact that there was no bridge in sight didn't faze us in the least. It would be there later. And we'd cross when it was there. No big deal.
Bar Harbor gets its name not from the many bars in town but from the sand bar that defines the western edge of the town's harbor. You wouldn't know that from visiting the town on most hours of most days because the sand bar isn't usually visible, except at low tide. To get a good look at it, you'll have to travel to about the end of Bridge Street, which explains why we were not surprised when we drove down Bridge Street on that Saturday afternoon and found only ocean at the end of the road. The bridge is only there at low tide.
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| High tide = no bridge. |
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| Low tide = bridge. |
We didn't do a lot of hiking at Acadia National Park. The focus of our Maine trip was getting out on the water, not walking around on the land. But knowing there was a hike out there that we could only do when the tide was low and that we could walk to an island without walking over something man-made like an elevated bridge...well, we HAD to do this.
Hiking sometimes comes with risk. Most of the time, that risk is that you might fall or get dehydrated or tired or get bitten by a mosquito or run into a bear or moose or something. The risk of hiking to Bar Island is that you might get stranded. The low tide - bridge thing? Only stays there for so long. After that it's gone and if you are too late, the next bridge is coming around about nine or so hours later. Don't be late getting off Bar Island!
Fortunately, the availability of the bridge is well known. According the Acadia National Park website the bridge is walkable for an hour and a half either side of low tide. That would theoretically give us three hours to walk there and back over a distance (assuming we didn't hike on the actual island) of maybe a mile total. Should be pretty easy to do, right? Right! So we got out our tide charts (otherwise known as looking it up on the internet) and found out that low tide on the Saturday we were in town was at 6:48 p.m. Let's do it!
Just to be sure we were there on time, we actually arrived at the end of Bridge Street a little more than two hours before low tide and found the bridge intact all the way from Bar Harbor to Bar Island. So much for the 90 minutes each side. Either that or I read the tide chart wrong. We didn't double check but there is a tide chart right as you arrive on Bar Island.
Given the apparent abundance of time we had before the tide came back in, we decided to take a little walk into the woods. And in case you are wondering if this is a story about us thinking we had way more time than we actually had and getting stranded for nine hours, it's not. Our hike was actually a nervous hike. Were we leaving enough time to get back to the mainland was a constant back of the head worry. We elected to not walk all the way to the summit but instead turned back so we'd have plenty of time to not get stranded.
We are not the most adventurous of hikers. Sometimes I feel guilty about that. We pick our spots when we hike. We hiked all day to Machu Picchu two years ago so we are up for it when we need to be up for it. The point of hiking to Bar Island was to walk over a piece of land that is not always there. We accomplished our mission that day. And more.
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| Sign on the Bar Harbor side...you have been warned. |
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| The tide charts on the Bar Island side. |
Turning back early was one of the best decisions we made. Not because we stood any danger of getting stranded. We made it there and back to Bar Harbor before the tide was even at its lowest point. Turning back early was a great decision because when we got back to the bridge, we realized we had tons of time and we slowed our walk back down. Way down.
There's a lot of value in slowing down. We probably don't do it as much as we could or maybe even should. There's a flip side of what we do and that's we pack a lot of experiences in the places we go. But that Saturday night we walked slowly, looking at what was below our feet and checking out, in as much depth as we wanted, the temporary tide pools that the ocean had left behind as it withdrew from land and out to see.
I had so many visions of amazing finds on this walk we never really intended to take. Anemones maybe. Brightly colored tentacles bringing dashes of color to a brownish sea bottom now exposed. Or starfish and little fish left behind stranded for a few hours before the ocean could allow a reunion with his or her fish friends. Crabs too. Maybe even multiple species.
There was none of that. We did find a couple of small crabs and a lot of mussels and barnacles clinging to rocks. But nothing like I briefly imagined. Maybe the herring gulls got to them all first because there were certainly plenty of those around. So we contented ourselves with shell collecting. And even then that was just taking pictures and leaving in place the actual shells or peekytoe crab bodies that were probably eaten by the very gulls we saw that night. And that was all cool. After all, we didn't even expect any of this.
In years past, by the way, I would likely have written "seagulls" rather than "herring gulls" in the paragraph above. But we took a boat ride on this trip where the naturalist pointed out to us there is no such species as a sea gull. My Maine resolution is never to use that term again.
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| Looking back across the tide pools to Bar Harbor. |
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| An almost perfect razor clam shell. |
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| One of the actual live and very small crabs we found. |
It took us 15 minutes to walk from Bar Harbor to Bar Island. We took a quick walk in the woods and then walked back across the bridge. That return trip just from beach to beach took us 45 minutes. Three times as long.
Sometimes some of the most enjoyable times on vacation are those that come with no expectations. If you don't expect anything other than a walk there and back again across a normally hidden ocean floor, you are bound to be excited when it becomes anything more than that. We were here. Just slowing down and being with each other taking a walk and looking into pools was a great way to spend about a couple of hours in Maine. There was enough time to do it right and there was enough space to be away from anyone else you didn't want to be near. And considering the number of people we walked with, around and past elsewhere in Acadia, we were glad of that last part.
It still seems a little crazy to me that we walk across a piece of land that's normally covered by water. I can't think of anywhere else I've been where we did something quite like this. The tide in the harbor north of Bar Harbor can affect the ocean levels by as much as 14 feet. That's an insane amount but I'm glad that's the way it works. It got us an experience to remember before we headed off for the next lobster roll. And yes, we did go straight for lobster rolls after we got back to town.
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| Bar Island as seen from near the top of Cadillac Mountain. It's the long island just left of center. |
How We Did It
There's not a lot that's very complicated about this one. While Bar Island is technically part of Acadia National Park, there's no park ranger or any other sort of staff charging admission or checking tickets for you to walk over to Bar Island. Just check the tide charts and allow 90 minutes before and after the low tide mark, although you may find out that you have more time than that. I can't remember the website we used to check the low tide time but just Google "tide chart bar harbor" and you should find what you are looking for.
If you want to see Bar Island like we saw in the last picture of this post, you'll have to head to the top of Cadillac Mountain and you will need to pay to get into the Park and will very definitely need to have a special timed ticket to drive to the top of Cadillac Mountain. We did but as we were waiting in line to start our drive to the summit, we saw drivers in car after car after car plead with the park ranger to let them through and then pull a U-turn back the other way. Plan ahead, folks! The Acadia National Park page that describe the Cadillac Mountain summit access procedure is here.
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