Acadia National Park is trying to figure out how to manage hot spots that get congested during its busy summer tourist season, but its top priorities aren’t the places that social media users might think.
Last week, a video of a long line of hikers slowly snaking its way up the ladder trail on The Beehive mountain got ample attention online — including from the Bangor Daily News — and discussion about conditions at Acadia.
But crowded trails on the mountain, where hikers can climb up a series of iron ladders fastened to a steep rock face that overlooks scenic Sand Beach, are not a new phenomenon during the post-COVID boom, according to park officials. Adam Gibson, the park’s social scientist who oversees the park’s visitation data, showed members of Acadia’s advisory commission a photo from 2024 that also showed a crowd of people slowly climbing up the steep trail on the same holiday weekend.
“It’s something we’re accustomed to,” Gibson told the commission Monday.
In 2020, when the park first conducted studies on where it might implement vehicle reservation systems as a way to control crowding, the places it considered were the summit of Cadillac Mountain, which is especially popular during sunsets, and Ocean Drive, where popular sites such as The Beehive, Sand Beach and Thunder Hole are located fairly close to each other.
The park implemented a reservation system for Cadillac Mountain in 2021, but for a variety of reasons decided against adopting one at that time for Ocean Drive. Four years later, it has decided that the next place where motorists will need to make appointments to visit is not Ocean Drive — it’s at Jordan Pond, where a popular seasonal restaurant draws big crowds during the peak of summer.
“Jordan Pond is overparked on a regular basis,” Kevin Schneider, Acadia’s superintendent told the commission. “Bass Harbor Head Light gets congested frequently too.”
Schneider said after the meeting that it is likely to take three to four years for the park to develop and implement a reservation system at Jordan Pond, in part because the restaurant itself needs to be rebuilt and, in conjunction with that, there likely will be some redesign of the access road and parking lots near the restaurant.
Though the attractions along Ocean Drive continue to draw large crowds, especially during holiday weekends and the peak months of July and August, they have a better ability to absorb an influx of vehicles because there are a series of parking lots along the one-way road, Schneider said. Cadillac Mountain and Jordan Pond each only have two parking lots that fill up quickly, he said.
Visitors to Acadia, and to national parks in general, seem to be getting more familiar with vehicle reservation systems such as the one on Cadillac Mountain, officials said. Gibson told the commission that the park sold 213,000 reservations for Cadillac Mountain last year, its highest annual total in the program’s four-year history, but also had fewer sold out days and a lower rate of turning cars away than any of the previous three years.
Both Schneider and Gibson said that visitation to Acadia, which has hovered at close to 4 million visits a year in the post-COVID era, is expected to remain comparatively high in 2025.
Gibson speculated that visits probably won’t rise above 4 million a year without more lodging options on Mount Desert Island or in places like Ellsworth, or even Bangor, that aren’t too far away. Gibson did not speculate how high the total number of visits to Acadia could feasibly rise.
“Most visitors are staying on the island, so there likely is an upper limit for visitation,” he said.
