Two heavily visited sites in Acadia National Park could get upgrades that will include something they’ve never had.
While the plans and funding are not yet in place, park officials hope that future renovations at Sand Beach and the construction of a new visitors’ center in Hulls Cove will each include the addition of public wheelchair access at those sites.
Acadia’s goals of improving access at the two sites comes at a time when the park and the National Park Service in general are under pressure from sharply increased visitation, mounting storm damage driven by climate change and deep staffing cuts enacted by President Donald Trump’s administration. Even so, Acadia is looking to make infrastructure upgrades and currently is pushing ahead with other building projects on more employee housing and a new central maintenance building.
For several years the park has said it wants to build a new visitors’ center at Hulls Cove, where the main access point to the existing building is a long series of steps that lead up from the nearby parking lot. People in wheelchairs can access the building via a separate basement entrance that generally is not open to the public, and despite some improvements that were made in 2019, the building still is considered small for the current volume of visitors the park gets each year.
Acadia has not yet drafted a specific proposal for a new visitors’ center, but park officials have said it would be larger and built at the same grade as the existing parking lot, so that the front entrance is accessible to everyone regardless of physical ability.
When it comes to future upgrades at Sand Beach, the park is also giving careful consideration to the impacts of climate change.
When the existing stairs at Sand Beach were rebuilt in 2011, recurring damage from storms driven by warming oceans was less of a concern, according to John Kelly, management assistant for Acadia. Though adding a wheelchair-accessible ramp was considered at the time, the park chose to just rebuild the steps in the same location, embedded in the hillside that leads down to the beach, and not to make other improvements, he said.
“We didn’t have storm damage like we do now,” Kelly said. “The stairs were old.”
But now that storms are becoming more frequent, and erosion around the steps is becoming a bigger problem, officials say they are considering redesigning how people get from the parking lot to the beach, as well as making significant changes to the parking lot and access to and from Park Loop Road, Kelly said.
“The project is broader than just access to the beach or stabilizing the slope,” Kelly said, adding that the road and the lagoon behind the beach limit the park’s options. “It’s a very difficult area to work with. It’s an enormous challenge.”
Julia Endicott, spokesperson for Disability Rights Maine, said her organization has researched and advocated for improved access at Maine state parks, but has not done the same with Acadia. Still, the organization would welcome any accessibility improvements that the national park might complete.
“We strongly support all efforts to improve accessibility in Maine’s natural landscapes and at Acadia National Park,” Endicott said. “We hope that the park will intentionally include people with disabilities as they begin their planning process to ensure that perspectives of impacted people are considered when making improvements”.
When it comes to accessibility requirements, it is the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 — not the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — that governs what sort of measures the park must take, according to Kelly. The ADA sets standards for private, state and local government facilities, while the less-expansive ABA applies to federal or federally funded buildings and facilities.
The National Park Service has planners on staff to assess how ABA requirements apply to national park improvement projects, Kelly said, which can present a lot of “complexities and sensibilities” to how they are designed.
Alterations to the landscape beyond trail maintenance in more remote and undeveloped areas of the park, whether to improve disability access or to install safety barriers, is generally viewed as impractical, Acadia officials have said.
But the issue of access to more heavily visited areas of Acadia is something the park service routinely takes into consideration, even though it may decide in some cases, like in rebuilding the stairs at Sand Beach in 2011, not to create new disability access, according to officials.
Acadia has made some accessibility improvements. In 2009, it built a new wheelchair-accessible path on Cadillac Mountain, from the summit parking area to a viewing platform at the top, according to Kelly. And in 2019, the National Park Service decided to allow e-bikes in certain areas of national parks, including Acadia’s carriage roads, in large part to provide greater access to people with mobility issues, who may be able to ride bicycles but cannot rely on muscle power to make their way up hills or cover long distances.
At Thunder Hole, the park has made it easier for people with mobility issues to see the geological formation that often sprays jets of ocean surf into the air, Kelly noted. There is wheelchair access from the parking lot on the far side of Park Loop Road to a viewing deck overlooking the site and surrounding rocky shoreline.
But the park has no plans to try to build an access ramp down the steep rugged dropoff to another existing concrete deck, which is surrounded by railings, where people sometimes get drenched by the spray. To get there, one must walk down a long flight of concrete steps.
“Reasonable accommodation is the usual approach,” Kelly said.