BAR HARBOR, Maine -- The famous granite shoreline is sheathed in ice, most of the shops are shuttered, and the high-society crowd has flown to Palm Beach, Fla., and Santa Barbara, Calif. Save for cross-country skiers gliding along the carriage roads, neighboring Acadia National Park is all but deserted.
In short, what's not to like about Bar Harbor in winter?
Anyone who has visited Acadia, Bar Harbor, or the smaller seaside villages of Mount Desert Island knows that driving on the island in summer can be a clutch-and-brake nightmare. Winter changes everything. Parking? Ample. Traffic? Virtually nil. Restaurant lines? Hardly, and there is some wonderful food to be had in the off-season, along with plenty of affordable lodging. A spacious room with a gas fireplace and private bath at The Kedge, a bed-and-breakfast in a grand 1870 home in the historic district, costs $85, including a glutton's breakfast.
Besides, with limited shopping, it's easier to focus on Bar Harbor's natural assets, the reason it became a resort town to begin with. Even many people who have never visited Bar Harbor know it by reputation as the "Newport of the north." Wealthy industrialists began arriving here in the 1880s, building mansion-size "cottages" in the fishing village of Eden -- Bar Harbor's name until 1918. Romantic painters such as Frederic Church and Thomas Cole preceded the summer-home set in the 1850s, and their radiant seascapes served as veritable travel posters. By the end of the 19th century, "summer" had become a verb, and Eden's coves were as studded with mansions as Lenox, Mass., and Rhode Island's jewel, Newport. Even today, 75 years after the Depression dropped the curtain on the Golden Age, conspicuously gated driveways disappear into the woods.
A more publicly accessible relic of that glamorous past winds along the town's waterfront cliffs. In the 1880s, when Eden was in its first blush as a resort community, vacationers built a scenic promenade along the shore. Known simply as the Shore Path, it is still well traveled by visitors and year-rounders alike.
On a bright day when temperatures soared into the high 20s, we set out to explore the village on foot, starting with a stroll on the 125-year-old walking trail. The restored promenade follows the lip of Frenchman Bay for almost a mile, overlooking granite crags and inlets hammered out by the relentless percussion of the sea. However picturesque the views of this coast are in summer, in winter they are sublime: forbidding, stark, light-scattering. Over the bay, the sky had a scrubbed blueness rarely seen in warm weather. Frigid waves had iced the rocks, freezing mid-drip like glaze hardening on a Bundt cake. Near the waterline, a conspiracy of ravens conducted some mysterious business, their calls boomeranging off the stone shelves of the cove.
The Shore Path ends by right-angling away from the water and looping back to Main Street. Though most stores on this part of the street were closed, we found a warming latte ($2.95) on Mount Desert Street at Benbows, an espresso bar occupying a corner of the Alternative Market, a health-food grocery store.
A few storefronts down, the Abbe Museum displays art and artifacts made by Native Americans from the area. Known for its extraordinary basket collection, the museum also exhibits tools of stone and bone dating back 10,000 years.
Because it was a school vacation week, the College of the Atlantic's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History -- a window into the island's year-round flora and fauna -- was closed, but locals recommend it highly to visitors.
The corner of Mount Desert and Holland Avenue marks the eastern edge of the 1947 fire that consumed 67 summer houses, 170 year-round homes, and 10,000 acres of the national park. So traumatic was it that many islanders still refer to "the fire" as though it happened last week.
An onshore wind blew us down Cottage Street, lined with shops (most closed) and restaurants (several open) and back to Main Street, where we lunched at Geddy's (pronounced JED-eez) Pub near the harbor. Water views complemented average pub fare -- pizza, sandwiches, and salads -- plus steaks and seafood. The menu's highlight may be the Maine microbrews ($4.25 for 16 ounces, $7.25 for 22). Moose Breath, anyone?
Across the street, Sherman's Book and Stationery Store houses a good bookstore and an eclectic assortment of office supplies, toys, and games, a time capsule of mercantile New England in the mid-20th century. This sets the mood for West Street's historic district a few blocks away, a row of sprawling "cottages" that survived the fire. Built between the 1870s and the early 1930s, when Bar Harbor was in its heyday, many of these grand dames sport shingle-style details. Still grander houses lie on the outskirts. Where West Street joins Route 3, snow-shrouded gateposts mark the entrance to a mansion claimed by fire.
At Acadia's winter visitors center a few miles east of town, a ranger pointed out open roads and trails (not all roads are plowed). We stopped first at Eagle Lake, where we found cross-country skiers enjoying the park's Carriage Roads, designed in the early 20th century by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who donated all 45 miles of them to the park. The skiers, some with dogs in tow, seemed to take pleasure in the quiet, broken only by the snicking of their skis on the crusty snow and the distant boom of the Atlantic.
Next, we pulled into the frozen parking lot of the Wild Gardens of Acadia, where in summer, a ¾-acre naturalistic garden displays flora from the various habitats on Mount Desert Island. With the garden under snow, the surrounding birch forest loomed with stark beauty, casting shadows more corporeal than the trees themselves. Only a few other hikers interrupted the solitude.
Later, we followed the Park Loop Road to Thunder Hole, where we parked in a deserted lot and made our way, gingerly, to the ledges below. Raking sunlight caromed off granite monoliths rising from the chop, and the ocean thumped against the rocks in heartbeat rhythm.
In the solitude and the crystalline light, it was easy to imagine the world as clean, devoid of problems.
Jane Roy Brown and Bill Regan live in Western Massachusetts.
