I visited Acadia twenty-one times between May and October 2018. While I had made countless trips to Acadia over the years, this season I concentrated on exploring less familiar places in the park and on viewing familiar places from a different perspective. During some visits, I spent countless hours on the rocky headlands and beaches along the coast, mesmerized by the incoming surf as it crested and crashed on the rugged shoreline. Other visits brought me to most of the park’s granite peaks. On still other visits I hiked through lush spruce and fir forests, along mountain brooks, through meadows, and around lakes and ponds. 

Acadia is a photographer’s dream. To experience and capture the vastness of this place in its many moods -- and the more intimate landscapes of its weathered granite coastline, its tide pools, and its forest floor -- could take a lifetime. I’ll be back for sure. 

Of course I was not alone.  Acadia is one of America’s most-visited national parks, and I met many people from all over the country -- and the world. Like me, they stared in wonder at the ocean’s vastness, marveled at the sight of Acadia’s wildlife, and felt exhilarated as they hiked through the forests and climbed Acadia’s mountains. In an era in which we’re so divided, my many conversations with visitors from “away” were a testament to perhaps one of the most powerful forces of nature: it reminds us, if just for a fleeting moment, that we’re not so different after all.