Hiking the Precipice Trail at Acadia National Park! (+ Gorham Mountain Loop & Great Head)

This reminds me of the via ferrata we did in West Virginia except without any safety measures like a harness or the leashes or anything that made us feel safe. Yesterday we explored part of Acadia National Park for the first time. We caught the sunrise from the top of Cadillac Mountain, hiked a couple gorgeous trails, and ate the famous popovers at Jordan Pond House. And for our final day in the park we're going to hike more trails, explore Bar Harbor, and experience coastal views and we're starting with a pretty intense hike on the Precipice Trail. There are four iron rung hikes here in the park which have ladders, narrow ledges, and other challenging features. And yesterday we did the Beach Cliffs Trail which is probably the easiest of them all. And today we are conquering the Precipice Trail which we hear is the most challenging, most thrilling, and most exposed. Sorry in advance mom. Made it to our first set of rungs. These are little baby warm-up ones though. This isn't like a ladder of rungs. This kind of looked like a you have to move your body in weird way kind of run. Yeah. All right let the adventure begin. Let's do it. We're scaling that wall. You get to climb one of these massive boulders. I will say this hike is not for those with a fear of heights but also for those with a fear of tight spaces. All right we just made it onto the main trail. So this hike is a loop and the part we were just on will actually be going down as well. So I think that means that the next part of the trail is going to be significantly harder. So that was just the warm-up. Get the adrenaline pumping a little bit. This hike really stretches out your legs. All right we've made it to the first section. It looks just straight up vertical with multiple levels. I know we keep saying the real fun is going to begin but right now the real fun begins. Lots of rungs. Yeah. Like a ladder to the top. Yeah. This reminds me of the via ferrata we did in West Virginia except without any safety measures like a harness or the leisures or anything that made us feel safe. Just your yourself. Your body and confidence. This part's definitely making me nervous. Those turns are tricky. Yeah. Don't always know what to do. Oh I'm kind of scared now. Stand up and grab it kind of at the same time. There you go. There you go. You got this. I got this. We think the hardest part is over but check out these sick views. Amazing. We've had views almost the entire hike which has made it even better. Made it even more enjoyable. Take your mind off of the scary exposure a bit. Well we took a wrong turn on the trail and are now walking along Park Loop Road on accident. There were a few people in front of us and they all just kept going straight so we did too and we thought we were going the right way but that's okay. This will get us back there. We just have to walk along the road which right now there's a shoulder. We'll see if that continues. So this junction is where we went wrong. There was a sign that said orange and black path to the loop road straight. We didn't see a sign for the right side and since we knew we needed to be on the orange and black path or the trail we just kept going straight but I guess there was a trail to the right that was the real one we were supposed to be on. That's okay. To be honest this means we don't have to do any more like scrambling or climbing down rungs which would be really hard with two-way traffic so kind of worked out for the best. We made it back to the van in one piece safe and sound and to be honest it's kind of shocking that they have this trail in a national park and just let anyone do it without any safety measures because it could be really dangerous if you're not careful but we had a blast. We thought it was so fun. Yeah it was just so much fun. If you have a little bit of a fear of heights it might not be for you. We have a slight little fear of heights in different ways but if you just go slow concentrate on what you're doing you'll make it through just fine. We think the via ferrata we did in West Virginia significantly helped us on this experience because we only felt nervous a couple times and I think it's because we had done something more intense and like this in the future but if you want to do one of these iron rung trails and you think this one might be too intense for you there is one called the beehive trail which is a little bit shorter and we hear it's a little bit less exposed it's kind of like one level down from this one so that could be a good starting point and then you can conquer this one but yeah such a unique fun hike. Thrilling, got the adrenaline pumping it's a full-on you know full activity you get to use all fours I don't know what we're doing here you get to use all fours and it was oh yeah highly recommended. For our final hikes at Acadia we're at the sand beach area of the park and holy cow this area is very very busy one important thing to know about driving in this area is that it's a one-way so if you see a parking spot take it because you cannot just be looping around and circling you have to just keep going and you'll have a really long detour if you pass up a spot. We ended up parking on the side of the road with a bunch of other vehicles because it's just very very packed here and for our hike we're combining the great head ocean path and gorham mountain trails to make kind of a five-ish mile loop. Kona's new thing over the last few months you know with the great lakes and all that she loves the water and the waves crashing on the on the shoreline she just cries and cries until you let her go in it but she still does the eating thing she'll bite at the waves and I think she's quickly learning that the ocean is a little different than the lake water not as tasty. The water is so blue and contrasted with the fall colors so gorgeous. We're about halfway through this great head loop trail and there are tons of little overlooks that you can hop out and get great views of the ocean since you're going around the edge of this like in a circle each view is a little bit different from the last. And despite how busy the parking area was we shockingly have not seen that many people on this hike. For the next part of our hike we are taking the ocean path which goes along the park loop road so you could drive this to get to some of these spots but we are taking the path to a spot called thunder hole. We made it to thunder hole which is basically a cave that's been carved underneath this ledge that's behind me and so that fills with air and then when water rushes in it creates a loud boom and the water sprays all over the place. The best time to see it is two hours before high tide but unfortunately we're not here at the right time. I don't think there's a bad view in this park every single hike we have done has just blown me away with all the views. We're almost back to the van after completing our mega loop that was a great combo of hikes and like Katherine said earlier you cannot go wrong on the hikes here it is gorgeous everywhere. We've headed just outside of the park to Bar Harbor which is the largest town on Mount Desert Island it's located right on the water and has tons of shops and restaurants and just like most towns we've been to in New England it is super cute. The top place we wanted to visit here in Bar Harbor is Mount Desert ice cream it's small batch homemade ice cream which is our kind of ice cream place and we got one, two, three scoops of ice cream each. So we both got the exact same thing because they just sounded so good together so the bottom one is pumpkin because it's fall the middle one is butterscotch miso which sounded really really good the top one is maple pecan the maple pecan is so good it has a really good maple flavor and it's crunchy the pecans that nice nutty flavor. The only downside is you hold it with your hand your hand is freezing off everyone in town's walking around with hot drinks but it's never not ice cream weather for us all right on to flavor number two the butterscotch miso i'm not gonna lie i'm shivering right now the butterscotch miso is even sweeter than the maple pecan just by a little bit you can definitely taste that butterscotch in there and then a little bit of the tang of the miso which is apparently we read is fermented soy so i guess it's a little bit of a tang to it oh it is such a good combo a little sweet little salty little tang all right on to the pumpkin with a little miso on there that's okay that is straight up pumpkin pie ice cream there's so much fall spices in there if you can hear my shivering i know the camera's shaking so bad maybe we should have done hot chocolate yeah it's so cold we're normally freaking out because it's so hot and it's melting now we're like gonna turn into ice cubes we clearly can't ever eat ice cream without a problem yeah oh that pumpkin one is so good though it's like like look at it it's like almost like battery looks like pumpkin pie batter yeah and that is a wrap on acadia national park we've said this before but we've been looking forward to coming here for years and it was totally worth the wait it's definitely in our top 10 national parks maybe even top five we actually don't really like have a written list but we'd have to reevaluate and figure it out but it's up there for sure but our time in maine is not over with yet next up we're gonna head to portland for a couple more fun adventures one rhymes with bobster adam thinks we should lie to you and tell you we only got one ice cream but y'all would know better than that so we ended up having to park on the side of the road because the parking lot looked full and what else bye