Schoodic Point

Author's Comments

An hour east of Bar Harbor, across the long detour of Frenchman Bay, the crowds simply fall away. That is the whole proposition of Schoodic Point. It is the same Acadia, the same pink granite reaching into the same Atlantic, but the parking lots are half empty and the ledges go on and on without another camera in sight. I came here first on a gray morning in late October, expecting to spend an hour and ending up staying until the light went flat in the afternoon. The granite is what holds you. Broad sheets of it, tilted toward the sea, cut through with dark veins of diabase that run like ink across the pink in patterns no painter would dare invent. At low tide the geometry is fully exposed and you can walk it slowly, working close with a normal lens, finding compositions in three feet of rock that would take a week to exhaust. The waves are the other argument. On a calm morning the swell comes in long and slow and a long exposure turns the surface to silver. On a storm morning, and storm mornings here are not rare, the Atlantic hits the ledges with a violence that sends spray thirty feet into the air. Both are worth the drive. Both ask different things of you. Come early. The loop road is one-way and the pulloffs are generous, so you can move at the pace the light asks for rather than the pace traffic allows. Bring a wide lens for the ledges meeting the horizon and a longer one for the patterns underfoot. And do not rush back. The reason this place stays quiet is that most visitors never make the drive. Be one of the few who does.

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