United StatesDateline July 25, 2012, Acadia National Park
From Campobello across the FDR Bridge into Maine, and on to Mount Desert Island for Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. The island is the second largest on the US east coast, with 26 mountains on it, including 1,530-foot Cadillac, the tallest along the Atlantic seaboard. Bar Harbor itself, a Gilded Age resort that once rivaled Newport, was largely lost to a fire in 1947 that smoldered underground through the winter, then was rebuilt. Plus a stop at the Desert Mountain Oceanarium for a hatchery tour with lobsterman David Mills, who explained how Maine's lobstermen voluntarily protect their own brood stock with size minimums, size maximums, and notched females, and why the catch has been growing year over year because of it. Then the history of Acadia itself, George Dorr's 43-year campaign, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s carriage roads, and the long story of how 47,000 acres got preserved.
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