Cadillac Mountain and the First Sunrise
Near Bar Harbor, Maine
Rising to one thousand five hundred and thirty feet, the pink granite dome above you is Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the entire Atlantic seaboard of the United States. For part of the year, roughly from early October to early March, this summit is the very first place in the country to catch the light of the rising sun. That is why, in the cold pre dawn dark, you will find cars lined up and people bundled in blankets waiting for the horizon over the ocean to turn gold.
The mountain takes its name from Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, who styled himself the sieur de Cadillac. In sixteen eighty eight the governor of New France granted this Frenchman a huge tract of land that included Mount Desert Island. He never really settled here.
He later drifted west and, in seventeen oh one, founded the city we now call Detroit. His name would later be borrowed again, for a luxury automobile. The rounded shape and rosy color of this summit come from granite scoured smooth by glaciers, ice that ground across this island during the last great age of cold and left the bare rock you see today.
