Carriage road, Acadia National Park

Forty-five miles of carriage roads weave through Acadia’s mountains and valleys. Gifted to the park by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and family, these roads are an excellent example of broken-stone roads, which were commonly used at the turn of the 20th century. Maintaining the carriage road network is costly and is done in part by funds and volunteer labor from non-profit organizations. Alex Bryan, a climatologist with the DOI Northeast Climate Science Center (managed by USGS) is implementing scenario planning techniques to help Acadia National Park identify potential future climate conditions, enabling managers to start planning for how to best protect the park's resources, like these historic carriage roads, now. In climate scenarios that project wetter conditions and more intense storms, these carriage roads could be threatened by flooding and erosion.