Guides to tracks, Acadia hikes tools of trail

Looking for a great little guide to Acadia National Park’s easy day hikes? Look no more. The Globe Pequot Press, which publishes “A Falcon Guide” series, recently printed “Best Easy Day Hikes, Acadia National Park” by Delores Kong and Dan Ring. This $6.95 guide describes 21 fairly easy hikes you could do with the whole family – all in 84 pages!

Actually it’s the little brother of “Hiking Acadia National Park” (Globe Pequot) by Kong and Ring, a more comprehensive guide to the 120 miles of trails within the park. “Best Easy Day Hikes” will fit in most any pocket so you’ll be able to take it with you and hardly know it’s there.

I was pleased to see that at the outset the authors remind hikers that they should practice Leave No Trace principles (they’re called three Falcon zero-impact principles in this book). These simple guidelines urge hikers to leave with everything they brought, leave no sign of their visit and leave the landscape as they found it (don’t pick the flowers). Because Acadia National Park is one of the most heavily used national parks in the country, these practices are extremely important. The authors also urge you to stay on the trail and not to feed wild animals.

Kong and Ring also give you some telephone numbers to call for information on the park as well as some advice on taking water and sun block on your outings. You get a handy checklist for day hikes that urges you to take along: a first aid kit, food, sun hat, sunglasses, hiking shoes, a synthetic fleece jacket or pullover, rain gear, map, compass, signal mirror and toilet paper.

At the front of the book is a list of the hikes, ranking them from easiest to hardest. Then you get to a description of each of the hikes with a map and trip highlights. You get a brief highlight, the type (out and back versus loop), distance, directions on finding the trailhead, then detail of the distances to junctions. Best of all the authors give you their insights of the hike and what highlights to expect.

If you’re shopping for relatively easy hikes ranging from a half-hour stroll to a more strenuous, daylong hike, you should get your hands on this neat little guidebook.

Should your needs be more grandiose, get the big brother “Hiking Acadia National Park” by Kong and Ring (Globe Pequot Press, 262 pages, $16.95). In this expanded version, you get descriptions of all the trails in the smaller guide and another 70-plus trails including those on Isle au Haut and the Schoodic Peninsula. The most visible difference in the larger book is a graphic with each hike’s description that shows the vertical rise in feet over the length of the hike in miles. Plus you get a liberal sprinkling of pictures throughout the book.

Actually, if your budget permits, it would be nice to have each of these books in your hiking library. You never know, one day you might be looking for a good hike you haven’t done in the park. You’ll find a good description in “Hiking Acadia National Park” that should help you make up your mind.

And while you’re out looking for these two books, why not look for “Scats and Tracks of the Northeast” by James C. Halfpenny, Ph.D., and Jim Bruchac, illustrated by Todd Telander. It’s another Falcon Guide published by the Globe Pequot Press. Like “Best Easy Day Hikes, Acadia National Park” it’s nice and small (4 by 7 inches) to fit in your pack or pocket. “Scats and Tracks of the Northeast” is a handy guide to help you identify signs of 70 different animals while you’re out on the trail.

You’ll find gray bars on the edges of pages to help measure the scat diameter and footprint size, the track length and the half-track width. There are detailed illustrations of each animal as well as its scat and tracks and the pattern of each animal’s gait. Similar animals are grouped together, so if you come across some bird tracks, for example, you’ll be able to determine whether it was an eagle, a red-tailed hawk, a ring-tailed pheasant or a turkey.

Along with the animal’s illustration there is a description of it. For example, the mountain lion is described as being “larger than a German shepherd, with male averaging 145 pounds (66 kg) and female about 120 pounds (54 kg). Color gray to red, often called tawny, with whitish underside. Back of ears and tip of tail black to brown. Tail is more than half the length of the body. Also called cougar or puma. May be re-establishing in Northeast, track verification needed – photos or casts.”

If you spend time in the woods and are interested in identifying animal and bird signs you come across, this little guide’s for you. At $9.95 it’s a pretty good bargain and it will settle all those arguments over just what kind of animal made those tracks you just came across.

Jeff Strout’s column is published on Thursdays. He can be reached at 990-8202 or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordalynews.net.