Today we went on a hike up to the summit of Gorham Mountain. Neil really wanted to hike up the Beehive Trail instead but Connie was scairt to go up there so we had to skip it. There are a couple of places where the Park Service has installed ladder rungs and wire rope railings to keep climbers from falling off the cliffside. It didn’t look to bad to Neil but with Connie’s balance issues due to her faulty Eustacian Tubes and her lack of depth perception she just didn’t feel comfortable going up there.

Here’s a picture of the Beehive we took from about halfway up Gorham Mountain. On the far right just below the uppermost white cloud you can see (if you look real close) a couple of ledges one above the other. This is one of the places where the railings above are installed with a couple hundred feet vertical drop immediately next to the 4 or 5 foot wide path.

You can’t see it but there’s a guy in a white shirt towards the right side of this picture just above the bright green trees in the center of the frame. Here’s a much cropped version where you can see the hiker.

Anyway; after stopping to get the above couple ofd shots we continued on up to the summit of Gorham Mountain. Here’s a picture of Connie up at the summit and a couple of shots of the view. The first view is of the Sand Beach I talked about the other day; the second is about 90 degrees to the right from the Sand Beach and is just a nice view.

After having a snack at the summit we continued along the ridge top. From the second view above we turned 90 degrees right and continued essentially straight down the ridge until we got to the coastline a bit out of the frame above to the right. From there we turned left and returned to the parking lot (about a mile and a half) near Sand Beach where we had parked the car and headed home. As we passed back through Bar Harbor we looked out in the harbor and saw that the Queen Mary 2 was in port…this means that there were about 2500 additional tourists wandering around downtown Bar Harbor. Once we figured that out we decided it was a good idea we had passed on going into town for a beer as it was already almost 6PM when we took the picture of the QM2.

We headed on home and Neil made some cheesy creamy chicken soup out of the leftovers from a grocery store rotisserie chicken we had a couple weeks ago while at the FamCamp outside Boston. Soup, some hot garlicky bread, and a wine cooler and all was good.

Tomorrow we’re getting up at the crack o’ dawn to go and watch the sunrise from the top of Cadillac Mountain (highest peak in the park). Sunrise is at 0630 and it’s about a 45 minute drive to get there so we have to get up really, really early. After that we’ll come home and Connie will work a bit while Neil does a couple loads of laundry and checks tire pressures and oil levels for our travel day on Wednesday. We’re going to go down and wander around Bar Harbor playing tourist a bit in the afternoon and eat dinner down there somewhere.

Cyas.