Summer's End Hiking and History in Maine -- Coast and Interior

open to hikers, after the Peregrine Falcons have left. This offers great steep rock hiking and great coastal views. I planned this for Sat. morning of the trip weekend. It's a long drive to Maine, so we'll leave Thursday NLT afternoon, and camp out at Salisbury Beach State Preserve, MA, near the coast and NH border. Then we'll have a less exhausting drive Fri. up the Maine coast, seeing either small boardwalk coastal marsh nature preserves (part of Rachel Carson NWR), and/or Colonial and Federal buildings from the 18th- and 19th-C. near York and up to just south of Kennebunkport, in the southern tip of Maine. These include lighthouses painted by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Further up the coast, we might also visit the Olson House, the setting for Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World, which you may know from the MoMA's collection. The campgrounds in Acadia NP are in the SE and SW parts of Mt. Desert Island, and we'll stay in one of these (probably the SE one) Fri. and Sat. night. Late Sat. morning-early afternoon, we'll drive to the less-visited western area of Mt. Desert Island and hike the peaks there: Mansell, Bernard, Beech and if time permits, Acadia and St. Sauveur. These aren't as tall as the peaks further east, but offer the same great views of coastal inlets, beaches and inland forests and ponds. We'll then have dinner at an out-of-the-way and relatively inexpensive lobster restaurant. We'll drive inland on Sunday morning into Maine's interior for one or two short hikes and another night of camping. We can reach Mt. Blue State Park and have time enough to hike up and down Mt. Blue, then camp at the SP Sunday. The small but gorgeous Tumbledown Mt. is a short hike NW of the Mt. Blue campground; we'll hike that Monday morning if we haven't done so on Sunday, then drive home.

How to find us: Salisbury Beach State Reservation Campground in NE Massachusetts (E. of and on the coast from Salisbury town relative to the map above). We'll exchange numbers and coordinate tent sites closer to the event.