Mt. Desert Island, located off the coast of Maine, is blessed with more than twenty-five lakes and forty streams, but most visitors to the island are attracted by its granite coast and never get to explore “the lake country.” The revised and expanded edition of this one-of-a-kind guide is designed to give visitors the tools they need to get the most of this remarkable feature of Mt. Desert. In collaboration with students, graduates, and a professor from College of the Atlantic, author and longtime island summer resident William Newlin offers tips on what lakes are best for activities like boating, swimming, fishing, hiking, biking, and picnicking and provides readers the specific details they will need to make the most of their visit. Just where do you launch your kayak? Where are the best picnic rocks? What fish are available? Containing beautiful photos and illustrations, detailed, full-color maps, and informative sidebars that fill the reader in on interesting bits of natural history and local lore, this is an essential resource for vacationers and local adventurers alike.

The Chakra System of Mount Desert Island takes the reader on a tour in which the actual hike or journey from locale to locale becomes a vision quest and operates on an internal as well as an external level. As we are led along the path of discovery, not only do we learn about the seven major chakras of Mount Desert, we are also taught how to discover chakras in every local, large and small. The traveler gets a chance actually to go to rocks and tiny bodies of water that have special power. He or she gets to look out from the hills and mountains across vast vistas and understand the energy of an entire system made up of islands, glacial moraine, a fjord (Somes Sound), and Cadillac Mountain itself. In a classic feng-shui mode Kaiser views the Mount Desert system of mountains, islands, kettle ponds, hillocks, etc., as a system of energy gates. Placing oneself in the correct alignment with these leads to insight and healing.

Robert R. Pyle Our sense of place and community is made up of memories—personal memories of first-hand experience; oral memories that recount our ancestors’ experiences; and f- mal, codified civic memories set down in laws, ceremonies, and rituals. Together they are vital building blocks of citizenship. In a vivid and meaningful way this book p- serves memories relevant to understanding the roots of communities on Mount Desert Island, Maine. The surnames of many of Mount Desert’s earliest settlers are still found in today’s telephone directories. In these families many oral traditions are passed down from generation to generation, building outward from a historical core like the rings of a tree. “Dad used to farm this field,” Fred L. Savage’s great-nephew Don Phillips told me once, gesturing toward an alder growth. “His father grew vegetables for the hotel, and my great-grandfather grew grains. This road used to go right on up over the hill, and they used it to move the cemetery up there from where the hotel is now. ” Describing the field, Don ignores the alders and the towering evergreens beyond them, for in his mind’s eye he sees yellow, waving wheat and rye, bare ground, and a narrow cart track leading up the hill into the distance, on which his ancestors tra- ported the remains of their own forebears to a new resting place. Oral traditions, living memory, set the stage for him, and he accepts the reality of things he has never seen.

An evocative exploration of the natural life of Maine's Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park.