LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK 



401 



Photograph by courtesy of U. S. Geological Survey 



MOUNT McKINLEY. ALTITUDE 20,300 FEET 



Mount McKinley rises higher above its surrounding country than any other mountain in the world and offers untold opportu- 

 nities to the daring mountain climber. 



railroads and by a number of good automobile roads. 



Sullys Hill National Park, North Dakota, is a Park 



of picturesque forested hills bordering a lake. It is a 



wild animal preserve and has historic associations. It 

 is on the main line of the Great Northern Railroad and 

 is accessible during the summer. - . 



LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK 



By George B. Dorr, Superintendent 



T AFAYETTE National Park is the single eastern 

 *^ representative of our National Park System. It is 

 also the only National Park that borders (in the sea and 

 includes ocean waters on a harbored coast among its 

 recreational resources. 



With many of us, sprung from sea- faring ancestry, 

 the call of the sea is in the blood and it is to the sea 

 we turn for our completest holiday. 



One of the greatest recreational assets of the Nation 

 is the New England coast. The health and happiness it 

 brings each summer to an unnumbered multitude are vital 

 elements in our national well-being and of infinite value. 

 Every year that multitude increases, as towns and cities 

 grow and transportation becomes easier. 



The coast is limited, and its western portion, from 

 New York to Portland, is already crowded in the sum- 

 mer period. Its eastern portion, from Portland to the 

 Canadian boundary and the Maritime Provinces, is wild- 

 er, more picturesque, and of far greater actual length, 

 owing to the way in which the sea penetrates it in great 

 arms and reaches. 



At its center from Penobscot Bay to Frenchman's 

 Bay, the two most beautiful sheets of water on our 

 eastern shore, there is an archipelago of islands and rocky 

 islets, great and small, and the greatest of these, domi- 



nating the coast for forty miles with its mountainous 

 uplift, is the Island of Mount Desert, whereon the Na- 

 tional Park is placed. 



Discovered by Champlain in 1604, Mount Desert Island 

 belonged for a century to the Crown of France as a por- 

 tion of Acadia; then passed to England by the right of 

 conquest and presently to Massachusetts, the Province 

 first and then the Commonwealth, of which Maine was 

 a part until a century ago. Settled by lumbermen and 

 fishermen, resort to it began in the middle of last century, 

 when the establishment of the Boston and Bangor steam- 

 ship line first gave access to it. On it, alone on our At- 

 lantic coast, mountains meet the sea, fronting it in a 

 splendid, baretopped granite range Champlain's Monts 

 deserts that was a noted landmark to mariners in old 

 sailing days. 



Lakes lie among the mountains, deep and clear and 

 forested to the water's edge; and at the Island's midst 

 the range is penetrated by a glacial fiord Somes Sound 

 whose passage through the mountains is magnificent. 



These mountains form the nucleus of the National 

 Park. Two hundred miles of trails lead over them, 

 marked with cairns, affording views of land and ocean 

 to a far horizon that for sheer beauty and inspiring qual- 

 iav are in their kind without an equal. 



