A map of the island, and why each place matters.
Non-commercial. No ads, no bookings, nothing for sale.
Acadia Compass is a visitor resource for Mount Desert Island, Maine. It maps the island's trails, summits, carriage road bridges, shoreline and tide pools, villages, lighthouses, gardens, memorials, and the ruins and abandoned paths that most maps leave out, and it tells the story behind each one. Live tide and weather data say when to go.
How to read it
- Position approximate means the coordinate has not yet been checked against USGS, NPS GIS, or OpenStreetMap. Treat it as "near here" rather than "exactly here."
- Story only marks abandoned trails and ruins. We publish the history and a single point, never a route or directions. Some of these places were closed or hidden by the park on purpose, after injuries and resource damage, and a few are left off the map entirely.
- Facts carry a source. Where a sentence is tradition or interpretation rather than record, the tale says so.
Sources
National Park Service pages on Acadia's history, historic trails, and structures; the National Register of Historic Places; the Bar Harbor Historical Society; the Mount Desert Island Historical Society; Friends of Acadia; J.R. Libby's Abandoned Trails of Acadia National Park; the Acadia Memorials blog; the Abbe Museum; Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for Register coordinates; NOAA CO-OPS station 8413320; the National Weather Service; and the Bar Harbor Story on Substack. Each waypoint lists the sources used for it.
Data and licenses
Base map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License. Vector tiles served by OpenFreeMap. Terrain from Mapzen and USGS. Trail lines and park boundaries from the National Park Service, public domain. Our own waypoint catalog is released under CC BY 4.0; attribution to Acadia Compass is enough.
Corrections
If a coordinate, date, or story is wrong, write to hello@acadiacompass.com with the waypoint name and a source. Corrections are a one line change in the catalog and go live with the next build.
Companion app
Acadia Compass is also an iPhone and Apple Watch app with offline maps and audio tales. It is described on one page and nowhere else on this site.