Kate and the boys on the one-mile path that encircles the summit.

Still, one never knows.  As described in Cadillac Mountain Sunrise, we once went up Cadillac on a rainy, dismal, predawn morning and watched the most astounding sunrise imaginable.  Ironically, it was the first one that we watched from the summit of Cadillac; others since then have been washouts by comparison, so we no longer bother.

Weather, of course, can significantly transform the view.  Once, Grace and I were at the Cadillac summit when the fog started rolling in across the ocean.  It came like a shroud, gradually covering the water with a grey mist and then slowly blanketing the town.  When the fog rolls in like that, one might think that it's not worth going up the mountain; however, on the summit, one is hundreds of feet above the fog, and the view of vaporous fingers of mist reaching into the clefts and valleys between the mountains can be very picturesque.

Looking east from the mountain to Bar Harbor; the cruise ship Rotterdam is in port.

Cadillac is actually low enough and the view clear enough that one loses the sense that one is 1,532 feet above sea level.  This lack of perspective enables the natives to pull off an outlandish joke on the tourists every fourth of July.  They encourage the tourists to "go up the mountain" to watch the fireworks that are launched from the town pier.  It sounded like a good idea to us, so, on our first July 4 in Bar Harbor, we joined a hundred or more other people on Cadillac's summit.  We weren't thinking.  The typical skyrocket goes maybe 300 feet (max) in the air before it bursts.  It's spectacular if you're a few hundred feet away vertically and horizontally.  But place yourself on a mountaintop about 1,200 feet above the burst (vertically) and maybe five or six miles away horizontally, and . . . well, you get the picture.  We spent the evening watching virtually soundless fireworks that were, from our vantage point, less than an inch high at the most.  Of course, those of us who went up the mountain that night freed a lot of parking spaces for the folks who watched the show from the village green near the docks.  (Maybe that's why they told us to go up the mountain.)

Nature's fireworks are quite different, though.  We usually go at least once to Sunset Point – a broad, gently sloping area on the western face of Cadillac not far from the summit – to watch the sunset.  I always try to observe the sky during the day so as to pick the evening for observing the sunset.  If we have too many clouds or none at all, the sunset will be less dramatic than if we have the right balance.  But, again, nature can be unpredictable.  On one occasion, as we were watching the sunset in the west, a storm was brewing in the southwest.  Within minutes, we heard thunder and saw lightning over the mountains to one side of us, while the sun in the distant west was still clearly visible in all its setting glory.  We dashed to the car and watched the sun sink far away, as thunder roared, lightning flashed, and rain pelted the mountaintop.

Shortly before sunset, clouds caress the mountains to the southwest of Cadillac.