Camping in Acadia: Blackwoods, Seawall and How to Get a Site

Camping is the best value bed in Acadia by a distance. A tent site runs about $30 a night while a Bar Harbor hotel room in August is comfortably ten times that, and Blackwoods Campground puts you five minutes from the Park Loop Road, which is closer to the sunrise than most people paying $400 manage.

The catch is the booking window. Sites release six months ahead on recreation.gov and the good ones are gone in minutes. Here is how the three campgrounds compare, how to actually win a site, and the one rule about camping in Acadia that surprises everybody.

Blackwoods, the one to want

Blackwoods sits in spruce forest about five miles south of Bar Harbor, right off Route 3, and its whole appeal is location. You are minutes from the Park Loop Road, which means the pre-dawn drive to the Cadillac North Ridge trailhead is a genuinely short one rather than an hour of misery.

Sites are wooded and reasonably private, there are flush toilets and running water, and there is a token-operated shower and a small camp store just outside the entrance. No hookups, no RV dump station on site. The free Island Explorer shuttle stops here from late June through Columbus Day, so you can genuinely camp at Blackwoods without a car and still reach the trailheads.

It is the busiest and the first to fill. If you want one campground in Acadia, want this one.

Seawall, the quiet alternative

Seawall is over on the west side near Bass Harbor, and it is the one locals suggest when you say Blackwoods is full. Quieter, more spread out, closer to the ocean, and a short walk from the Seawall picnic area where the stargazing is excellent.

The trade is distance. You are 30 to 40 minutes from Sand Beach, the Precipice and Cadillac, which is a real cost if your plan is built around east-side mornings. But you are on the doorstep of Acadia Mountain, Ship Harbor and Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse, and the west side is a nicer place to wake up.

Same facilities as Blackwoods: flush toilets, water, no hookups.

Schoodic Woods, if you have the days

Schoodic Woods is on the mainland peninsula, about an hour from Bar Harbor by car. It is the newest of the three, the only one with electric and water hookups, and by some margin the quietest. Sites are large and well designed.

It is also an hour from everything on a standard first-visit itinerary. Brilliant on a five day trip, a mistake on a three day one.

The one rule that surprises everybody

There is no backcountry or dispersed camping in Acadia. None. You cannot pitch a tent off a trail, you cannot sleep in your car at a trailhead, and you cannot camp anywhere in the park except a designated campground site you have booked.

Acadia is small and heavily visited, and the rule is enforced. People arrive expecting western-national-park freedom and get moved on. If the campgrounds are full, your options are a private campground off park land or a room, not a quiet spot in the woods.

The single exception is Duck Harbor on Isle au Haut, five lean-tos reached by mail boat from Stonington, which requires its own reservation and is an expedition rather than a fallback.

How to actually get a site

All Acadia campgrounds book through recreation.gov on a rolling six month window. A date opens exactly six months before, at 10:00 AM Eastern, and popular summer weekends at Blackwoods can be gone inside a few minutes.

• Work out your release date and set an alarm. Six months to the day, 10:00 AM ET. Not 10:05.
• Have your account set up and logged in beforehand, with payment details saved. The checkout timer is short and people lose sites filling in a card.
• Know your second and third choice site numbers before the clock starts. Browsing the map while the good sites vanish is how this goes wrong.
• Check back three to four weeks out. Cancellations are constant, and this genuinely works. Set up a notification if you have one.
• Shoulder season is wide open. Late May, early June and October are easy, and October in Acadia is the best month of the year anyway.

What it is actually like

This is coastal Maine, so plan for damp. Fog rolls in most weeks in July, dew is heavy, and a tent that has been shut up all day smells like it. Bring a decent rainfly, something to sit on that is not the ground, and dry socks in a bag.

Nights are cold relative to the day, even in August. A summer-rated bag is not enough in late September, when it can drop into the forties.

Food storage matters. There are no grizzlies, but there are plenty of raccoons and the occasional black bear, and they are practised. Everything scented goes in the car overnight.

Firewood must be sourced locally to avoid moving invasive insects. Buy it at the camp store or in Bar Harbor, do not bring it from home.

Both island campgrounds are open roughly May to October and shut for the winter. Neither has hookups, so an RV works but you are dry camping.

If everything is full

Private campgrounds ring the island and the Trenton approach, and they usually have space when the park does not. They are more expensive and less atmospheric, most have hookups and pools, and several are perfectly pleasant. Bar Harbor Campground, Mount Desert Narrows and the Trenton cluster are the usual suspects.

Or reconsider a room. Our Acadia lodging guide compares Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor and Ellsworth on price and drive time, and Ellsworth in particular tends to have beds when the island has none.

Building the days around it

If you land a Blackwoods site, you are five minutes from the start of a very good three days. Our Acadia National Park 3 day itinerary runs Cadillac at sunrise and the Park Loop coast on day one, the Precipice and Champlain on day two, then Jordan Pond, the carriage roads and Bass Harbor Head on day three. Every stop is mapped, and camping at Blackwoods makes the early starts the easiest they will ever be.

One last piece of arithmetic: book three nights, not two. Day one starts before dawn, so you need to already be in the tent the night before your first full day.