Cadillac Mountain's summit plants, and what is being done for them

One of the cedar tripod waysides on Cadillac's summit. NPS photo by Jay Elhard.

At 1,530 feet, Cadillac Mountain is the highest point on the Atlantic coast of the United States. More people watch the sunrise from its bare granite than from almost anywhere in the national parks — and the plants they stand among are some of the rarest and most easily damaged in Acadia.

The park has put cedar tripod panels on the summit to explain what is happening to them. These are the four things the panels say.

NPS Photo by Jay Elhard.

This is special ground

The Wabanaki people have long held this mountain as a significant place. They call it Wapuwoc — White Mountain of the First Light. Visitors from everywhere now find their own meaning here, and generations more will come.

The plants are northern plants, stranded on a coast

Wind is strong on the summit and the soil is thin, so what grows is krummholz: twisted shrubs, stunted trees and plants that hug the rock.

The ocean keeps it cool enough for communities you would normally find on much taller mountains or much farther north. Botanists have recorded about 145 species, among them the rare alpine blueberry, Nantucket shadbush, mountain firmoss and mountain sandwort.

Look down

They are built for wind, fog, ice, snow and full sun, and they are still fragile: a few footsteps are enough to damage roots and leave soil bare to erode. More frequent storms, harder rain and hotter summers make it harder for anything to grow back. Stay on the rock and the marked trails.

What the park is trying

Keeping out what does not belong. Staff remove glossy buckthorn, a shrub that crowds out everything else along the North Ridge Trail, and cut back the non-native grasses and wildflowers that have established near the trail and the parking area.

Testing how to rebuild. Keeping people off is not enough to bring the summit back. With Friends of Acadia, the Schoodic Institute and the Native Plant Trust, the park is trying different combinations of soil, seed and transplanted plants in degraded patches — including species suited to the warmer summit the models expect. What works here is meant to inform mountain restoration well beyond Acadia.

NPS Photo by Jay Elhard.

Protecting the cold spots. Even as the summit warms, some pockets stay cooler than their surroundings. These refugia can shelter sensitive species for longer, and the park wants to protect them while managing an unavoidable shift toward plant communities that like warmth.

How you can help

Log what you see on iNaturalist and eBird —
go.nps.gov/AcadiaData — which is how the park
tracks change and whether its responses are working. At home: plant natives.

A matching set of panels at Great Meadow wetland is described here, and the park publishes the summit panels in full, with visual descriptions for visitors who cannot read them in person.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's Changing Acadia: Summits, a work of
the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.