Acadia National Park, Maine Mount Desert Island
Acadia National Park is located in the state of Maine, southwest of Bar Harbor. The park reserves most of Mount Desert Island and its associated smaller islands along the coast of Maine. More than 3.5 million people visited the park in 2017 and Acadia National Park is the oldest national park in the United States east of the Mississippi River. Of all sixty national parks in the NPS, Acadia is the only one in the entire Northeast United States, a region comprising nine states.
The wealthy philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. financed, designed, and directed the construction of a network of carriage trails throughout the park.
Geology:
Mount Desert Island bedrock consists mainly of Cadillac Mountain granite. Perthite lends itself to the granite’s pinkish color. The Silurian age granite ranges from 424 to 419 million years ago. Diabase dikes trend north-south through the complex. Almost 300 million years of erosion followed before the deposition of glacial features during the Pleistocene. These include glacial polish, glacial striations, and chatter marks.
