A spike in visits to a remote offshore section of Acadia National Park hasn’t sparked the same concerns about crowding and overtourism that have divided neighbors of the much more famous Mount Desert Island section of the park.
The park owns about half of Isle au Haut, which is accessible by a 45-minute boat ride from Stonington. And that section of Acadia hasn’t been spared from the overall growing popularity of park, which has seen a roughly 20 percent increase in total annual visits since the COVID pandemic, from about 3.3 million visits each year to now nearly 4 million
The increase has fueled intense debates in Bar Harbor, which serves as Acadia’s primary gateway community, about how much tourism it can handle. The MDI town has adopted strict voter-approved caps on how many cruise ships can visit, as well as a temporary ban on hotel development as it tries to identify what its tourism capacity should be and whether further limits are warranted.
On Isle Au Haut, which local officials say has only about 60 year-round residents, the relative increase in tourists has been even steeper. Prior to 2020, when the COVID pandemic brought global travel to a near-standstill, the island averaged fewer than 8,000 visitors each year, but since then it has averaged more than 10,000 per year, for an annual increase of 2,500 people, or roughly 33 percent.
But Isle au Haut officials say that increase has not strained the town’s limited resources, or brought any significant boost of income to its residents.
The town’s summertime population swells to around 300, which does boost local activity, but Acadia tourists for the most part come and go by boat from Duck Harbor, inside the park near the island’s southwest corner, and leave them alone.
The peaceful coexistence between the town and that corner of the park is, in part, the result of a unique, decades-old federal law that was passed in response to earlier tensions over visitors. It has required the park service to limit its growth on Isle au Haut — ensuring that most visitors only ever hear about the site through word of mouth.
“We have not found the increased admission to Acadia to impact the town very much,” said Select Board member Abigail Hiltz, one of the town’s three Select Board members. “It is seldom that the campers getting dropped off in Duck Harbor make their way into town.”
If park visitors want to make their way from Duck Harbor to the village at the island’s north end, they either have to ride the ferry back or hike for 90 minutes along trails or a gravel road. Most explore the southern end of the island and, whether they camp overnight or just stay for a few hours, usually ride back to the mainland from Duck Harbor.
“It’s a walk to get here,” said Mike Fedosh, another selectman, about making the trip into town. “It’s a long way for a soda or a bag of chips.”
What’s more, local residents say they’re OK with it. They don’t mind getting a few daytrippers who buy snacks at the local cooperative store, or a souvenir at Shore Shop Gifts. They are not interested in trying to draw more tourists to spend money in the village. They’ve never had any desire to become a tourist destination, residents say.
“They help out at the store some,” Jason Barter, a local fisherman who stopped at the store recently to buy himself a cool drink, said about business from park visitors. “Most of the people that come to the park stay down there.”
1960s tourism
It hasn’t always been that way. In the 1960s, Isle au Haut residents did take exception to both tourists and the national park’s management.
According to an oral history the National Park Service published in 2013, the park did nothing to help visitors identify where to go or what to do once they stepped onto Isle au Haut, which older island residents found to be a growing issue as “hippies” of that era migrated to rural areas for simpler lifestyles. On Isle au Haut, it fell to reluctant locals to step in and tell them where to go.
“Many interviewees recall that visitors commonly held impromptu picnics in residents’ front yards, used private outhouses without permission, and sometimes even tried to pitch tents in front of their homes,” the report says. “Sometimes, if tourists were told to depart from private yards they became confrontational.”
Those tensions eventually gave rise to new federal legislation in 1981 that prohibited Acadia from any further expansion on Isle au Haut and authorized the park and the town to trade parcels of land in order to concentrate the park’s holdings further away from the village.
The park service also built and staffed a ranger station in the village, created a marked trail leading from the village into the park and built a dock at Duck Harbor where the ferry can directly drop off Acadia visitors. Rangers also direct visitors into the park or accompany them on the ferry
The legislation specifically called for Acadia to “strictly” limit visitation, to protect the character and quiet of the island, according to a park spokesperson. As a result, it does nothing to promote Isle au Haut as a destination, leaving that instead to people who want to tell others about their visits.
Nonprofit ferry service
If any aspect of Isle au Haut has benefited from the increase in visitors, it is the nonprofit year-round ferry service, which is essential for the town’s survival.
While the service does not transport vehicles, it does have a year-round contract to bring out the mail. It also gets what a ferry service official called a “modest” annual payment from the park service for transporting staff and visitors. That’s on top of the fares the ferry charges each passenger.
The increased revenue from more tourist passengers — a single roundtrip costs $48 — has helped to minimize fare increases for local residents, who often buy multi-trip tickets at a cheaper rate, though the service did raise its rates earlier this year, said Nick Filler, who is president of the ferry service board and also serves on the board for the island’s cooperative store.
The ferry service also gets funding from the town, the state and from fundraising, he said. So far this year, overall ridership is behind where it was in 2024, he said, but the new rates have kept revenue consistent with last year.
“There’s no question there are more people in the park” on Isle au Haut than just a few years ago, Miller said.
Island visitors
Some of the ferry passengers who rode out to Duck Harbor recently said they were seeking peace and quiet, which can be elusive on MDI in August, Acadia’s busiest month. Going into the local village, they said, was not why they made the trip.
Newlywed couple Sarah Skorpinski of Philadelphia and Beth Pearson of Raleigh, North Carolina, was visiting relatives in Deer Isle and decided to travel out to the park on Isle au Haut, after Skorpinski’s great aunt recommended it. They visited MDI one day, and then Isle au Haut the next morning.
“We hit all the big spots and did downtown Bar Harbor for lunch,” Pearson said of their MDI trip, as they stood near the dock at Duck Harbor. “We are ready to be more with nature, with fewer people, so that’s a little bit of our hope for [coming] out here.”
A mother and daughter duo, Patricia Brunker and Anya Brunker of Boxborough, Massachusetts, also said they had just visited MDI as well as another section of Acadia at Schoodic Point — which is on pace to have its busiest year ever — earlier in the week. They had a reservation for two nights at Duck Harbor and were looking forward to the quiet of the island.
They were planning to make the trek to the ranger station in the village, but only so they could stamp their national park passbook as a memento of their visit.
“We’re big backpacking people,” Anya Brunker said. “I’ve never camped on an island before.”
Other island issues
Beyond forming a more peaceful relationship with the park, the town also has been able to overcome a rough period a decade ago when it failed to hold its legally required annual town meeting, and last fall it completed installation of a broadband cable from Stonington, which officials hope will lead to more economic development.
Still, Isle au Haut continues to face challenges common to offshore island communities, including shortages of jobs and affordable housing that have made it harder to attract younger families with children to attend the island elementary school, selectmen said. At the other end of the age spectrum, limited health care options and difficulty staffing an emergency medical service make it harder for older residents to stay there.
Stronger storms driven by climate change so far have not caused widespread damage to the town’s public infrastructure, as they have elsewhere in Maine, according to town officials. But the park’s gravel roads are vulnerable to washouts, which could in turn prevent local firefighters from responding to wildfires.
Other challenges include limited funding for road repairs, a harbor that needs to be dredged and higher costs for goods and services than on the mainland.
And while local concerns about visitors to Acadia are now decades in the past, island officials still keep tabs on what’s happening in the park.
For the first time in recent memory, the town sent one of its selectmen to Acadia’s Advisory Commission meeting in Bar Harbor in June. The 16-member body, which meets three times a year, is composed of local citizens charged by Congress with advising park officials on management and development. The town of Isle au Haut, however, is not represented on the commission.
Mike Fedosh, the selectman who went to the meeting, said the town is aware of the park service’s funding and staffing challenges and wants to keep a line of communication open with its administration — particularly as it relates to visits to Isle au Haut.
“We’re going to make ourselves present,” Fedosh said at the June meeting. “We just want to make sure we are heard.”
