Acadia National Park

John D. Rockefeller Jr. wanted to keep traveling by horse and carriage without meeting a motor vehicle, and his solution was to build 57 miles of road where cars would never be allowed. Mount Desert Island had banned the automobile in 1903; when Bar Harbor relented and cars returned in 1913, Rockefeller responded by personally financing and overseeing a network of car-free carriage roads, along with 16 of the island’s 17 stone-faced bridges, a project that occupied him until 1940. Forty-five of those miles now run through Acadia National Park, where Cadillac Mountain, 1,530 feet, is the first place in the United States to catch the sunrise from early October to early March.

This map captures the distinctive terrain of an island shaped by glaciation, where rounded granite peaks rise abruptly from the sea. The contour lines trace the deep U-shaped valleys carved by ice, the narrow ridgelines that connect summit to summit, and the fjord-like intrusion of Somes Sound, the glacially carved arm of the sea that nearly splits the island in two. The result is a portrait of compression, an extraordinary amount of topographic drama packed into a small island at the edge of a continent.