Columbia Daily Tribune
Keelboat Muskrat:
The pioneer’s destination vacation
Keelboat crew members, from left, Ron Schrotter, Captain William Bailey, Scott Amish Staggs, Jack Mitch and Gerry Messmer fire a salute to William Ashley in front of the famous pioneer’s grave atop a Native American burial mound Wednesday in the Lamine Township of Cooper County. [Allen Fennewald/GateHouse Missouri]
By Allen Fennewald GateHouse Missouri
Posted Oct 5, 2019 at 1:15 PM
URL: https://www.columbiatribune.com/news/20191005/keelboat-muskrat-pioneers-destination-vacation
A lot of people would enjoy a getaway from the daily strains of modern life, maybe by going camping or escaping to a faraway destination. But a small group of amateur rivermen decided to go above and beyond the average vacation by retracing the path of famed pioneer William Ashley by horseback, canoe and keelboat.
Keelboat Muskrat, a 30-foot wooden boat reminiscent of the riverboats used by mountain traders and fur trappers, landed Wednesday at the Franklin Island access point on the Missouri River outside Boonville. The crew came to pay their respects at the gravesite of the man who inspired their journey.
Three years ago, Jack Mitch had the idea to follow Ashley’s path while studying the pioneer’s life, then roped in Gerry Messmer and the rest of the crew — Scott Amish Staggs, John Robert Harvey, Captain William Bailey, and Ron Schrotter.
For a few, the journey started in Green River, Wyoming. Some have joined along the way for the trek that will end on the riverfront in St. Charles.
On Wednesday they took a brief rest under the shade trees near the river with a few men who’d come to see them safely to shore before loading into pickups to drive several miles to Ashley’s gravesite in the Lamine Township of Cooper County.
The crewmen reverently approached the stone burial mound and kneeled for a moment of silence at the foot of the marker which reads “Explorer, soldier, statesman.”
Mitch said it was hard to describe the feeling of finally reaching Ashley’s grave.
“This has been a heck of a journey, and he is obviously our inspiration retracing this trail,” he said. “I kind of didn’t know for a while if we were going to be able to make this site. So it’s real humbling to be here. The man has such a history with the rendezvous system of the West.”
William Ashley — miner, land speculator, territorial militia officer, politician, frontiersmen, trapper, fur trader and hunter — was the co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. He was born in 1778 in Virginia but made his home on land that would become part of Missouri after the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803.
Ashley became wealthy manufacturing gunpowder before becoming a brigadier general in the Missouri Militia during the War of 1812. When Missouri became a state, Ashley was elected its first lieutenant governor in 1820.
While he was serving the state, he also operated the fur company, sending men known as Ashley’s Hundred up the Missouri River for several large scale fur trapping expeditions from 1822 to 1825 in the Rocky Mountains. Ashley created the rendezvous system used by trappers, traders and Native Americans to exchange goods, which helped open the west. After his time in office, he explored the land that would become Utah and Colorado.
Ashley sold the fur company in 1826 and spent several more years in politics before running unsuccessfully for Missouri governor in 1836. His health deteriorated after the loss and he died of pneumonia 1838 at the age of 59.
Mitch, Amish and Messmer laid on the marker an “Ashley Return, 2019” coin in honor of the pioneer and their journey. The crew then lifted their rifles and pistols, loaded a round of gunpowder and fired a salute to Ashley.
The Muskrat crew is retracing the route of Ashley’s 1825 journey back from the fur trappers’ rendezvous known as “Ashley’s Return.”
“I thought that no one has ever done a return from the rendezvous, everyone always rode into the rendezvous,” Mitch said. “A little while later, we thought, ‘Man it would be cool to have a keelboat along the way, just like Ashley did,’ and Bill [Captain William Bailey] said, ‘I’ll build that boat.’”
Bailey is a fur trade historian who also works restoring cabins, barns and other farm buildings. He previously built a buffalo skin boat and a St. Louis horse cart modeled after Alfred Jacob Miller paintings. The Muskrat project began mid-2018 in Savery, Wyoming, where he constructed the frame before taking it with him to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where he was hired to restore a barn. The keelboat was completed in his driveway in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, where a couple friends helped him install the legally required modern lighting system.
Dozens of people also contributed to the project through GoFundMe donations, and more than 1,000 people have tracked the keelboat’s progress on the Journey of the Keelboat “Muskrat” Facebook page.
The crew set off on horseback for about 500 miles to the Bighorn River before taking canoes and a bull boat 525 miles to the confluence of the Yellowstone River. They then boarded the keelboat for the 860-mile third leg of the expedition down the Missouri River toward their final destination in St. Louis.
The crew spent Wednesday morning navigating through dangerous debris containing pieces of the 103-year-old Norfolk Southern Railroad bridge that was washed away the prior evening near Brunswick by a large log jam.
At this point in the expedition, the crew consisted of Bailey, Mitch, Messmer, Scott Amish Staggs, Ron Schrotter and John Robert Harvey.
“We’d been coming through that [log jam] all day,” Harvey said.
The crew already experienced a scare when the Muskrat narrowly avoided crashing into a low railroad bridge in Atchison, Kansas.
“We shot across the river as best we could and managed to get the boat to shore or we would’ve been swept down and underneath the bridge and lost everything,” he said.
Not all members of the crew who landed in Howard County have been on the journey from the beginning, Harvey said.
“We have a rotating crew, people have been coming on and off,” he said. “Three of these men started in southwestern Wyoming, and Captain Bill built this boat himself [in a year].”
They landed in the early afternoon at the nearest safe place, having reviewed information about potential landing sites sent the previous day.
Bailey said they can’t go blind into a landing site. The river is narrower, deeper and faster than it was in Ashley’s time. It can be very dangerous, especially for inexperienced rivermen. The jam made for a “white knuckle” morning of avoiding large logs, Bailey said, but adapting to conditions is one of his favorite parts of the trip.
“We aren’t rivermen, and we’ve got a lot left to learn, but we’ve learned a lot of survival things,” Bailey said.
When they stopped to visit Ashley’s grave, they were about 170 river miles from their final destination at the Blanchette Landing in St. Charles.
People have helped the crew along the way, offering supplies and places to camp, which is especially important because the crew isn’t traveling with a support vehicle.
“We’ve had 30 to 50 people give us food or fresh water, which is important on the Missouri River,” Messmer said. “We’ve had everything from antelope meat to elk meat, it’s been great.”
Amish said his highlight of the trip was teaching children along the way about pioneer life, like how to light a fire with flint and steel, load a flintlock rifle or make horsehair fishing line.
“To me, you’re reaching out to the public or the children, and maybe they’ll remember us and talk about us for a long time,” he said. “Maybe it will make an impact to where maybe they want to try something like this.”
Jefferson City News Tribune
Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie and the Osage: visions of native Missouri
Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie is a vision of the past. Standing in the massive expanse, a person can feel alone in the world.
The only sounds were of song birds and wind rustling through the prairie grass and wildflowers, the air fresh with approaching rain. It’s easy to imagine a covered wagon rolling over the verdant countryside, maneuvering between broad-leafed sumac bushes.
The land is located in western Missouri, near El Dorado Springs. Of the approximately 3,000 acres that make up the state’s largest natural tall grass prairie, 1,800 have never been developed by modern society, according to Missouri Department of Conservation wildlife biologist and Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie manager Matt Hill.
“Roughly half of it is what we would consider intact native, virgin tall-grass prairie,” Hill said. “It’s never been plowed, never been heavily altered in any way. Those places are as good an undisturbed native prairie as you’re going to find in Missouri. The plant and wildlife, insect, bird diversity is as good there as anywhere on any prairies.”
Hill said the rest of the prairie is under reconstruction after — like much of Missouri — it was used for row crop farming and ranching. A small section was even used as Minuteman nuclear silo during the Cold War. “A lot of the plant diversity is not there,” Hill said.
Maintaining native plants
The prairie is also one of a few places where certain sensitive plant, insect and animals species can survive, such as federally endangered meads milkweed, regal fritillary butterflies and prairie chickens. Hill said regal fritillary butterflies are only found near growing violets, a plant closely tied to native prairies. Prairie chickens are even more dependent on Wah’Kon-Tah.
“They are the species that really have to have these large expanses of open grasslands,” Hill said. “Their predators nest in trees, and they won’t stay anywhere near a treeline.”
Although Wah’Kon-Tah isn’t the only native prairie in the state, Hill said it is the only one large enough to comfortably house these native hens that were just removed from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife last year. “They are a very vulnerable species,” Hill said.
Honoring the Osage
On a hill near the prairie, a tribe of 200 warriors used to build 100 wooden lodges every spring. The Village State Historic Site and representative trail remains to memorialize the home of the most powerful Native American tribe from the Grand Prairies to the Great Plains. The U.S. government seized the land beneath Jefferson City from the Osage in 1808. One of their primary hunting trails followed the Osage River to its mouth at the Missouri River outside Osage City, about 10 miles from the Capitol.
The Osage are believed to be descended from the mysterious mound builders who constructed America’s largest prehistoric city in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Ceremonial mounds are all that remain of their society throughout the Midwest.
About one-third of Missouri used to be prairie. Now, Wah’Kon-Tah’s virgin grasslands are among the few that remain as if the Midwest had never been settled by Europeans, when the Osage tribe called it home. Before MDC began removing invasive plant species, the Osage were negotiating treaties with settlers. Prior to MDC’s controlled burning and systematic cattle grazing, the Osage people set massive fires in the tall grasses — so stout a meadowlark can perch on a single blade — to promote new growth and attract buffalo. Where small farms and ranches fence in the landscape, the Osage planted pumpkins and hunted wild game.
“The Wah’ Kon-Tah Prairie is about 20-25 miles east of the Osage Village State Historic Site. (It) was a very large Osage Village that was occupied in the late 1600s through about 1777,” said Sarah O’Donnell, Osage Nation Historic Preservation office employee and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) assistant. “So, this is an area that would have been occupied and almost continuously traversed by the Osage, but really, the entire state of Missouri is considered part of the homeland of the Osage National. And it is one of their longest occupied ancestral territories.”
Wah’Kon-Tah is the Osage word for great spirit or great mystery. The Osage prayed to the spirit each morning and before battle, which became increasingly frequent as other tribes were pushed into their territory by European colonization. Wah’Kon-Tah makes up the world, guides life and led deceased to the happy hunting grounds.
But, after the Louisiana purchase, Eastern tribes were pushed west, and more Europeans were allowed to settle the new American land. The Osage ceded the vast majority of their territory in Missouri through several treaties in the 1800s made by Missouri Gov. William Clark (of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition). The Osage who didn’t assimilate with European communities were banished to an Oklahoma reservation.
“The Osage ceded over 113 million acres of land, and the state of Missouri was a large portion of that,” O’Donnell said. “When you actually add up all of the acreage from the treaties in 1808, 1818 and 1825, the amount that the Osage received for the cessions actually represents a payment of about one penny for every 6 acres.”
Most of their ancestral mounds have been leveled. Many of these Native American grave sites were sacrificed to expand St. Louis. Maintaining Wah’Kon-Tah is important for the modern Osage who travel there to experience their heritage.
“Maintaining these spaces as they were originally used and occupied by the Osage allows modern day Osages to revisit those sites and to experience them as their ancestors did,” O’Donnell said.
Balancing promotion with protection
Hundreds of people visit Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie every year. Although the MDC wants more visitors to enjoy the prairie’s purple cone flowers, slender glass lizards and Henslow’s sparrows — the project wouldn’t get much funding otherwise — they also have to protect it. MDC wants hikers to inform the department if anybody finds some meads milkweed, but Hill hopes visitors stay on the trails to limit wildlife disturbance. Visitors should not alter the land in any way, like picking wildflowers or building campfires.
“It’s a kind of balancing act to do my best to promote what we have and make sure we share that with the public, because these prairies are rare,” Hill said. “We’ve got less than one-tenth of 1 percent of our prairies left in Missouri than what would have been here pre-European settlement. So, it’s important for folks who are interested to be able to come out and learn more about them, and see them first-hand. In a special place like Wah’Kon-Tah, it’s big enough you can get the feeling of what it would have felt like (centuries ago).”
Return of the Osage
Hill said representatives of Osage Nation — now numbering more than 13,000 — returned to Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie last year to bless the land. They’ve been gone a long time and experienced a lot since they were banished from the Missouri prairies.
The Osage were once known as the wealthiest people in America per capita after large oil fields were discovered beneath the Oklahoma reservation. Since the tribe maintained mineral rights, every member of the tribe became very rich.
Although the Osage enjoyed the spoils of luxury, they faced dangers of greed and prejudice. The Osage Massacre took place over several years in the 1920s, when area white people swindled, extorted or murdered for money. In a case highlighted in New York Times best-selling author David Grann’s book “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a white husband and his ruthless uncle conspired to inherit Osage money by killing his Osage wife’s entire family before attempting to poison her, too.
By now, the black wells have dried up. The Osage’s torrent of income has become a trickle. But, as they have proven throughout history, they are resilient.
The tribe has returned to Missouri to retake small pieces of their former homeland. In 2009, the Osage purchased Sugarloaf Mound, the last in St. Louis. The tribe plans to tear down a house and build an educational center on the grounds.
The Osage Nation has even broke into Missouri politics. The tribe announced it gifted more than $50,000 to Gov. Eric Greitens’ nonprofit organization, Committee for A New Missouri Inc., which was used to fund the governor’s inauguration. Chief Standing Bear said the donations were intended to establish a good relationship with Greitens while they look for a location to build a casino on Osage native lands. Cuba has voiced interest in the project. The city’s largest highway, I-44, was an Osage trail when much of Missouri still looked like Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie.
A trip to ‘Vacation Land
of the Middle West’
May 21st, 2017 Bin Life & Entertainment Read Time: 7 mins.
Flipping through wrinkled 50-year-old Missouri travel guides offers visions of a welcoming state from long ago, before the 1992 I-70 Killer made the slogan “Where Highway Hospitality is Tops” seem awfully ironic.
One guide reads, “Missouri’s modern highways are built today to serve the needs of tomorrow,” but how does the present compare to the glossy pages printed in the 1960s as culture and technology have progressed?
The Show-Me State was called “Family Vacationland” by the Division of Commerce and Industrial Development. One of its popular vacation destinations remains the Lake of the Ozarks, touted as the premier Midwest getaway.
A rural community evolves
Bagnell Dam created the lake by impounding Osage River in the Ozarks region. A lot of the businesses on its strip retain a regionally rural style. On a spring afternoon in April, gray-haired men parked classic cars in front of beer and burger joints. Old Time Photos offered monochrome photography with period attire. Easy Street Dessert & Wine Bar prepared to open.
“The strip still maintains a lot of its old character,” said Mike Page, lifetime resident and owner of several lake-area businesses, who also heads the Lake Ozark Betterment Committee. “The strip is funky. It’s both family and nightlife. It’s kind of always been that way. For the most part, as these new things come along, we try to maintain the old character and architecture.”
But there are some unique additions to the old strip. High school students gathered around a Taiwanese bubble tea stand beside the Thai restaurant. Some of the lake area’s old mom-and-pop resorts have been replaced by corporate condominiums. Part of an old motel is being converted into an escape room — a life-size puzzle inspired by video games — aptly named Lake Escape.
“Obviously the lake has changed a lot over the years, just as everything else in the country has changed,” Page said. “It’s not the sleepy little community with fishing and waterskiing that it used to be, that’s for sure. But a lot of its charm remains. People still come here for the beauty of the lake. We don’t have as many of the little resorts that we used to have, but that has switched to where people stay in condos, just like everywhere else in the country.”
Page said the lake area will likely continue to develop as a place for second homes and retirement as well as vacations. The challenge is keeping the strip’s eclectic rural atmosphere along the way.
Growing sport blossoms
According to a ’60s travel guide, motorboating was considered the fastest-growing sport in the state at the time. It’s still flourishing, if the increasing Lake of the Ozarks Shootout attendance is any indication.
The motor sport was gaining ground on traditional kayaking and canoeing, and now engines have replaced paddles for many boaters. While the old forms of boating are being revitalized over the summer at Ha Ha Tonka State Park by the Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance, the masses are coming to the lake for the Shootout’s high-speed entertainment.
The Shootout began in 1988, when a group of boaters requested support for speed trials on a closed course. They wanted to determine the fastest boat on the lake, and three local fire departments offered assistance.
“Performance boating at the Lake of the Ozarks has been popular for a long time,” said Ron Duggan, owner of Captain Ron’s Bar and Grill. “They started doing (the Shootout) every year, and the fire departments got more and more involved, and they started trying to raise some money for the fire departments through this event, and it just grew for about 19 years.”
Captain Ron’s Bar and Grill began hosting in 2008 when Shooters 21 closed. Attendance increases yearly, and Duggan said almost $1 million has been donated to charity through the event since 2008.
The Shootout has become an international affair. Its current Top Gun record holder is the 50-foot Spirit of Qatar at 244 mph in 2014. It dwarfs 21-foot boats that once sped through the Shootout at merely 100 mph. The Mystic powerboat, driven by owner Sheikh Hassan bin Jabor Al-Thani, of Qatar, was built specifically to break that record.
“They had about $22 million to build this boat and put a crew together from all over the world,” Duggan said. “It’s kind of a must-see event. The spectator crowd is up to 120,000 people now.”
Amenity evolution
More people on the lake didn’t necessarily translate to better business for the Ozark Opry, a quintessential remnant of the area’s past, located off the water in Osage Beach.
The Ozark Opry — credited for helping put Lake of the Ozarks on the map — can now be enjoyed only through its albums, KRCG broadcasts and the Ozark Opry Museum. But at its height, it boasted 10 shows a week.
Opry founder Lee Mace, a local boy with a bucolic voice, created the first area comedy and country variety show.
Mace once said, “The first thing (tourists ask is), ‘Where in the world can we find a hillbilly?'” He liked to point to himself and say they already found one.
Back then, the lake was where city slickers came to find characters from “The Shepherd of the Hills.” Although he embraced the hillbilly brand, Mace wanted to make the place he loved into more than a novelty, according to his wife, Joyce.
The museum shares a building with a Sears in the old Opry hall.
Joyce, Lee’s partner in life and business, rented most of the space to Sears and opened the museum years after the Opry closed in 2005. Three glass cases display Lee’s original stand bass with a baseball bat neck, along with other memorabilia from the old days.
“If someone’s car broke down in the parking lot, Lee would give you his car and say to leave the keys with the ticket booth when they were done with it,” sound tech and musician Jim Phinney said.
“Those were different times,” Opry assistant Cathy DeGraffenreid added.
“You wouldn’t do that these days,” Joyce concluded.
The Opry peaked after Lee — the star emcee, bassist and producer — died in a 1985 plane crash in Gladstone Cove near Gravois Mills.
Phinney said the opry ran on the motto, “The show must go on,” and they knew Lee, who never missed a performance, wouldn’t have wanted it to stop when he died.
“It was hard, but I knew that everybody needed a job, and we just had to do it,” Joyce said, looking as though she might cry but deciding to smile instead. She took over as executive producer and kept the show going another 20 years, and DeGraffenreid assured Joyce that Lee was proud of her.
“It shows how far Lee got the opry that it took 20 years to coast to a stop,” Phinney said.
Exercise equipment is on display where the stage once was, but Phinney said he can still feel the music emanating from the walls.
In the end, the development Lee dreamed of helped lead Joyce to close the Opry. She said Lee had wanted the roads expanded to bring in more tourists, but many Osage Beach residents fought against it. After Lee’s death, the Missouri Department of Transportation built Osage Beach Parkway, but the road expansion cut into the Opry’s parking lot. Attendance was down, as well. Joyce said tourists rarely need to leave the shore for entertainment with live music at lakeside bars like Shady Gators. “And I wasn’t getting any younger,” she said.
Osage Beach City Administrator Jeana Woods said that area of Osage Beach has become a retail hub with clusters of businesses, after a sewer and water system expansion offered opportunities for places like Osage Beach Premium Outlets, Prewitt’s Point Shopping Center and Lakeview Pointe Shopping Center to house local and corporate retail businesses.
“Over the past decades, we’ve been fortunate enough to see a lot of positive growth to our economic base here in Osage Beach,” Woods said. “We were the first in the area to really go with a major water and sewer system. That brought attraction from developers. Retail attracts retail, and restaurants want to be around restaurants, so with that the change grew from there.”
The show is still going on at Main Street Music Hall, where classic rock and electric guitars moved over traditional banjo numbers. “It’s more like the CMA awards than it is the Grand Ole Opry,” owner Judy Blair said.
She has also noticed more tourists staying on the water than when her theater opened in 1987, but she said there are also more potential customers if venues can reel them in.
Quaint past meets modish future
In the ’60s, the lake was a prime spot for honeymooners who wanted an affordable getaway. They spent summers days waterskiing over smooth waters in the main channel. Small cabins were occasional gaps in wooded shoreline.
The lake isn’t the hideaway it once was. Despite strides to maintain a rural spirit, modernity reached the Ozarks. The Tom Sawyer Paddle Wheeler tours are no more, but there are multiple luxury yacht cruises to choose from. The Ozark Opry is gone, but nationally known touring acts now visit the numerous concert venues. Condos and houses line the shores, with the real estate market expected to grow through 2017. The main channel can be the sort of bustling thoroughfare waterskiers loath. Paradise Cove’s pyramid-stacking Ozark Water Ski Thrill Show is gone, but now people can jet around on water-propelled flyboards.
The changing times have brought economic gains and cultural prestige to the lake. Its progression from low-key hideaway to a getaway for celebrities has benefited many people. But some still look back on the old days of little cabins and open waters with nostalgia.
Lake area historian and writer H. Dwight Weaver remembers the lake as it was in the old travel guide photos. He recalls the past with some longing. The winner of the Missouri Humanities Council’s Exemplary Community Achievement Award summed up the lake’s progression by saying, “In the 53 years that I’ve lived at the lake I’ve seen it change from a remote, laid-back getaway for the middle class of the Midwest to a playground for the affluent in our society who love their $500,000 boats and houses. It’s not your grandpa’s lake anymore.”
There are a few places where people can pretend it’s still yesteryear at the lake. There’s nothing but nature on the opposing side of the Grand Glaize Arm from a peaceful beach near Lakeview Bend Trail in Lake of the Ozarks State Park. Party Cove is not far away, and bass fishing tournaments are regularly held on the arm. The bluffs and trees extend around the bend.
The area parks are respites from most economic development, offering small sections of nature protected from the gears of time and progress. The air is fresh and full of bird songs, the lake’s original soundtrack.
But this is 2017, and few things last forever. A couple fishing boats motor by, drowning out the birds’ songs. A child’s plastic Batman-themed kite ruffles in the breeze, stuck in a tree — a tree with branches old enough to remember catching kites made by hand with sticks and fabric.
Out and About Magazine
POPOVERS AWAIT HIKERS TAKING ASTICOU PATH
Freshly brewed tea and popovers served with butter and jam reward a hiker after walking the Asticou Path from Northeast Harbor. PHOTO BY ALLEN FENNEWALDFor more than 130 years, people have hiked the Asticou Path to a reward of freshly brewed tea and homemade popovers at Jordan Pond.
Starting in the late 1800s, Nellie McIntire began serving refreshments at her farmhouse situated at the pond’s southern end. Acadia National Park’s Jordan Pond House Restaurant replaced the rustic teahouse, which was destroyed by fire in 1979, but the views of the tranquil pond and the distant North and South Bubble Mountains remain. The tea-and-popover tradition still thrives there too.
Asticou Path is among the lesser known hiking trails in Acadia, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. The 2.2-mile gravel path, winds through dense forests of pine, cedar and striped maples. Hikers will only encounter a few steep inclines as the trail ascends Penobscot Mountain. Another striking feature is the Little Harbor Brook Bridge comprised of large stepping stones across the stream.
“It’s a beautiful path, and one of the quintessential gravel paths of the Village Improvement Society construction era (circa 1891-1933),” Acadia’s trails foreman Gary Stellpflug said. “It is an excellent walk not just because of its innate beauty as it passes through quiet woodlands, but also because of the multiple connections to other loop hikes and features of Acadia.”
Stellpflug has worked in the park more than 15 years and is charged with 148 trails. In the summer-fall season of 2014, he oversaw the Asticou Path’s historical restoration carried out by the 50-plus trail crew, Acadia Youth Conservation Corps and Friends of Acadia’s stewardship volunteers. The project entailed the construction of five wooden bridges, restoration of two stone culverts and 29 new ones and addition or resetting of 146 stone steps on Faint Hill.
To walk the recently restored Asticou Path to Jordan Pond, the route from Northeast Harbor affords diverse sights and vistas. Parking at Asticou Terraces parking area on Peabody Drive, hikers ascend Asticou Hil via a footpath to the rustic Thuya Lodge built by Boston landscape architect Joseph Henry Curtis in 1912.
Entering through hand-carved cedar doors, Thuya Garden unfolds within a wooden fence to keep the deer out. The multi-tiered formal garden was created the late garden designer and local innkeeper Charles K. Savage. At the rear, a wooden gate and footpath leads to the Asticou Path.
Taking the path, hikers pass by Savage’s Map House containing an area map made his gifted cousin Augustus Phillips.
On this summer day, park visitors Gary Cattarin and daughter Emily were planning to planned to hike up nearby Eliot Mountain after walking over from Jordan Pond June 15 on their 21st park visit. The Asticou Path is a favorite of the Cattarins, who climbed every peak in Acadia last year.
“That [challenge] hurt me a bit,” the father said as his daughter giggled.
Farther along, the Asticou Path intersects with the Hadlock Pond and Little Harbor Brook carriage roads. Eventually the woods open up, revealing Jordan Pond, the Jordan Pond House Restaurant and the much-anticipated tea and popovers enjoyed inside or out on the lush green lawns flowing down to the
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