Acadia National Park occupies nearly half of Mount Desert Island along the mid-coast of Maine — the first national park established east of the Mississippi River, and still the most photographically diverse landscape on the eastern seaboard. In under a hundred square miles it packs together Atlantic granite headlands, glacially scoured mountains, cobble beaches, a true fjord (Somes Sound), inland lakes, hardwood forests, and one of the most intact networks of historic carriage roads in America.

Cadillac Mountain rises to 1,530 feet directly above the Atlantic — the highest coastal peak on the eastern US, and between early October and early March, the first place in the continental United States to see the sunrise. The park's three distinct sections — Mount Desert Island, the Schoodic Peninsula, and Isle au Haut — offer radically different experiences. Schoodic in particular sees a fraction of the visitors while offering equally dramatic pink granite shoreline.

The 27-mile Park Loop Road is the visual spine of the park, connecting Sand Beach, Thunder Hole, Otter Cliffs, and Jordan Pond in a single route. The 57 miles of carriage roads, financed and designed by John D. Rockefeller Jr. between 1913 and 1945, thread through the interior forests and are among the finest examples of landscape engineering in American conservation history. The park hosts approximately four million visitors annually, making it one of the ten most visited in the country — but its geography means solitude is still available to those who seek it.