Almost 25 years after publication of our first Falcon guide to hiking Acadia National Park, we’re celebrating with our new book – the newly published fifth edition of “Best Easy Day Hikes Acadia National Park.”

It’s gratifying to look back and realize that our 10 Falcon guides were written with a great deal of help from people who are authorities at hiking Acadia National Park, particularly Gary Stellpflug, retired longtime foreman of the Acadia National Park Trail Crew, and Charlie Jacobi, retired resource specialist with Acadia. Both took a lot of time providing interviews and reading the books before publication to assure they are accurate, comprehensive and meet park regulations, rules and policies.

We also are grateful to Friends of Acadia staff and volunteers, past and present, for their assistance on the books.

Local experts and hikers add personal touch to Best Easy Day Hikes

The fifth edition of “Best Easy Day Hikes Acadia National Park” is a thorough update of the 2019 version. We used some of the same research that was included in the fourth edition of our larger book, the 309-page “Hiking Acadia National Park: A Guide to the Park’s Greatest Hiking Adventures,” which won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2016 and was first published in 2001. (PLEASE NOTE: See sidebar about Amazon.com links)

In addition to those nine editions, we also wrote Falcon Guide’s “Coastal Trails of Maine” including Acadia National Park, published in 2021 and called “a great new guide” packed with “terrific photos, maps, nature observations, and conversations with park rangers and managers” by the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands in its June 2021 newsletter.

“Best Easy Day Hikes,” with only 127 pages and measuring 4.25 inches x 7 inches, is easy to carry in a pocket or a daypack while hiking Acadia National Park. It’s intended for people looking to hike some of the easiest and most popular trails, and most kid-friendly trails in the park. Both the pocket-sized and big books include trail maps, but only the big book features color photos.

The descriptions of Acadia hiking trails in our books are maybe distinguished from similar books because they are often told through the eyes of many local people. We hiked the trails with experts and veteran hikers such as Jim Linnane, a longtime volunteer with the Friends of Acadia; Maureen Robbins Fournier, a retired ranger; Jacobi, who retired in 2017 after working 33 years in the park; and Susan Hayward, a founder of the Maine Master Naturalist Program.

Linnane took us along the Jordan Stream Path, noting that it is often private and quiet despite being so close to the crowds that often descend on the area around Jordan Pond, and Robbins Fournier gave us a tour of the Compass Harbor Trail, where she used to lead a park interpretive program. Jacobi hiked with us on the Gorham Mountain Trail, marked by historic-style cairns that he and Stellpflug helped reintroduce to the park about 25 years ago and are highly valued by many hikers to this day.

And Hayward shared her deep knowledge of Acadia plants during a hike in Wonderland as part of the Acadia Birding Festival.

Hiking Acadia National Park is a multi-generational family event

Perhaps most important, Acadia National Park is a family park, so we also hiked the trails with family members, young and old, and included their impressions in the new book. We received a new appreciation for the Cadillac Summit Loop Trail, for example, when we hiked it with our cousins and their children, Tyler, then 10, and Amelia, then 8.

Tyler, even at his young age, may have summed it up best: “This is the gift of Mother Nature,” he told us on the loop trail, while looking out over Frenchman Bay from the top of Acadia’s highest mountain. “We get to spend time together and we also get to experience all that nature offers.”

On the Jesup Path and Hemlock Path Loop, we found the perfect walk for three generations of the family, from Dolores’s mother, then 82-year-old April, to nieces Sharon and Michelle, to our then 13-year-old niece Jenna and her mother, Laura. The loop hike, picked out by Michelle for her 26th birthday, featured sightings of deer and a pileated woodpecker, brightening our spirits even on a rainy day in Acadia.

Retired ranger Robbins Fournier and her grandson, Henry, then 7, also hiked with us on Schooner Head Path on a June gem of a day that included a stop at Peregrine Watch, a park program that offers spotting scopes for people to view peregrine falcons nesting on the cliffs of Champlain Mountain above the Precipice Trail parking lot.

Henry impressed us by being able to identify falcon preening behavior through the scope, just as he impressed us earlier in the day as we walked through the woods along Murphy Lane on the way to the base of the Precipice:

Without even needing to refer to the birding book he was carrying or his grandmother’s bird ID app, Henry identified the song of the black-throated green warbler.

“Best Easy Day Hikes” can be the perfect guide to forming your own special memories of experiencing Acadia with family and friends.

Each trail tells a history of hiking Acadia National Park

Murphy Lane and other paths and trails in Acadia also occupy their own special place in the history of the park. The trail system on Mount Desert Island was generally constructed or identified over nearly a century, starting with the artist Thomas Cole in 1844 and ending with trails built or improved by the National Park Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 to 1942.

We incorporated the history of trails in “Best Easy Day Hikes” by tapping into the NPS’s 2022 groundbreaking report on the Mount Desert Island Hiking Trail System, which formed the basis for the trail system to be certified in the National Register of Historic Places. The report describes the history and current conditions of 119 maintained trails and paths covering about 117 miles on Mount Desert Island.

Overall, “Best Easy Day Hikes” contains succinct descriptions and detailed maps of 22 trails while hiking in Acadia National Park. The trails are broken into five areas of Mount Desert Island and range from very easy trails like Ocean Path and Ship Harbor Trail to some moderate ones such as Acadia Mountain Trail, the Jordan Pond Loop, at least the west side, and the Champlain North Ridge Trail.

Each hike also includes a distance, a time to complete, dog compatibility, directions to the trailheads, the closest Island Explorer stop, miles and directions and special considerations such as restrooms, access for wheelchairs and strollers, and trail surface. Each trail and path is also rated for difficulty.

It’s the first “Best Easy Day Hike” edition that contains Seaside Path, which starts near Jordan Pond and only becomes seaside two miles later when it reaches Seal Harbor Beach. Seaside Path opened anew in 2020 after a multi-year collaborative effort led by the Acadia Trails Crew.

The book can be found at Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shops, Amazon.com and elsewhere.