The view from the top is magnificent, but getting to the summit of Cadillac Mountain at Acadia National Park has been taking a little longer this year.
Increasing numbers of visitors have been coming to Mount Desert Island, and this month alone, the roads leading to the summit and other popular park attractions have been closed 10 times after parking areas reached full capacity.
Many of the tourists who used group transportation at Acadia National Park over the July 4 holiday got to the Cadillac summit in reasonable time, compared to those who brought cars. But even buses and trollys were eventually shut out after rangers closed the upbound traffic lane due to heavy traffic.
Ensuring that park attractions such as Cadillac, Ocean Drive, Sand Beach and Schoodic Point remain readily accessible by car can be a challenge for park officials and tough on visitors.
“I think it would be a little bit discouraging, yes,” said Adrian Gill, who drove up to Maine from Montville, N.J.
Gill said this kind of congestion is manageable, but visitors have to take some responsibility.
“If they plan ahead, then it shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “I mean if you’re going to New York and you try to go into any of the major sights there, you’ve got to plan ahead sometimes two or three months ahead, otherwise you’re going to not be able to get on things like Ellis Island and the Statute of Liberty — you’ve got to plan ahead.”
“We got up here and there was no place to park,” said Gardner Fogg of Missouri. “We didn’t have to wait at the base, but we had to drive around and drive around and there was no place to park.”
Fogg said he makes a fairly regular pilgrimage to Acadia each year. Last summer, during the park’s 100th anniversary, he ran into some traffic snarls. He said he’s had better luck this year, but traffic issues could be improved if the park were to put more information online and on-site.
“I think it’s interesting if they were to post something that this is not a day that you’re going to get onto the top of the mountain, or something similar to that, would be really helpful either at the entrance or one of these places where you’d be warned ahead of time,” Fogg said.
At park headquarters, spokesman John Kelly said that kind of advance warning system is already in place, with rangers stationed at the entrances to popular attractions and movable signs to advise visitors of current traffic conditions.
Encouraging visitors to use the Island Explorer buses, Oli’s Trolley or even bicycles, he said, helps reduce traffic jams. And Kelly said the National Park Service is halfway through a three-year, comprehensive, long-range transportation plan to alleviate traffic and parking issues.
A number of potential solutions have been offered.
“We actually heard a full range of ideas,” Kelly said. “We heard monorails and aerial trams and closing the park entirely to all vehicles.”
But he said the challenge is to safely manage traffic and still provide tourists with a quality Acadia experience. Over the last two years, Kelly said park officials have become much more in tune with the dynamics of when and where bottlenecks will occur.
“So if we get a couple of days in a row of really bad weather, rainy cloudy weather, we know that next day after that stretch of bad weather, we’re going to get a big influx of people,” he said.
In addition to the transportation study and careful monitoring, the park is also working with the Friends of Acadia, a Bar Harbor-based organization that promotes the ecological stewardship of the park. Friends President and CEO David MacDonald said the group has paid for parking stewards at popular sites and is providing the park service with information on traffic movement in the area.
“We’ve been tracking it, we’ve been commenting on it,” he said. “While it’s a little frustrating that the process takes 2-3 years, we really do support the more comprehensive approach.”
In the meantime, there are no signs that Acadia has become any less popular. Last year, more than 3.3 million people visited Acadia National Park, shattering all records. MacDonald said visitation could match or surpass that number this year.
Correction: Island Explorer buses do not go to the summit of Cadillac Mountain.