Acadia National Park Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
47 free Acadia National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Acadia was the first national park east of the Mississippi and the first assembled entirely from private land given to the public, on an island Samuel de Champlain named for its barren peaks. This quiz covers the whole story: the Wabanaki and the Mi'kmaq word behind the name, Champlain's pinnace holed on a rock in 1604, the French mission colony destroyed by Virginians, Cadillac's grant from Louis XIV, the rusticators and the Hudson River School painters, the 'cottages' of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, George Dorr and the Eliots, Woodrow Wilson's monument, the Lafayette years and the anglophile heirs who forced the name Acadia, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s 57 miles of carriage roads and 'Rockefeller's Teeth', the cog railway on Green Mountain, the great fire of 1947, Somes Sound the fjard, Bubble Rock the erratic, the sea caves, the 1,530-foot summit that sees the first sunrise, the Island Explorer buses and the four-million-visitor years. Early questions suit anyone who has eaten a popover at Jordan Pond House; later ones are for regulars who know the Precipice from the Beehive: which islands the park owns in Frenchman Bay, what perthite does to the granite, when the summit road needs a reservation, and where the walrus fossils were found. Good for a road-trip car game or a Maine pub quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the park, Cadillac Mountain, Jordan Pond House and Bass Harbor Head Light, and each question shows its source.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Besides Mount Desert Island, Acadia takes in most of which island Champlain named for its height?
Isle au Haut
It also owns the tip of the Schoodic Peninsula and parts of sixteen smaller islands.
Q 02Roughly how high is Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the US Atlantic coast?
1,500 feet
Only about 1,500 feet up, Cadillac's summit still grows fragile sub-alpine plants, and visitors have trampled them so badly that areas are roped off while crews bring in soil to replant them.
Q 03Cadillac Mountain is the first place in the US to see the sunrise only during which part of the year?
Fall and winter
Fall and winter, from October 7 to March 6, are when the low sun reaches Cadillac first, so the big summer dawn crowds are chasing a title the summit does not hold then.
Q 04Which king ruled France when Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac received Mount Desert Island as a land grant in 1688?
Louis XIV
Louis XIV was on the throne; Cadillac and his bride soon abandoned their feudal estate, and he later won lasting fame as the founder of Detroit.
Q 05Before it took the name of a French adventurer, Cadillac Mountain was known as what?
Green
Green Mountain was the name 19th-century tourists knew, when a cogwheel train hauled them up its slopes.
Q 06Tourists riding the 1880s cog railway up Cadillac Mountain boarded it on the shore of which body of water?
Eagle Lake
Eagle Lake was the start of the line, and a steamboat ferried passengers down the lake to the cogwheel station at the mountain's foot.
Q 07One popular theory traces the name Acadia to 'akadie', a word for a piece of land in which language?
Mi'kmaq
Mi'kmaq 'akadie' is one proposed root, but etymologists lean toward Verrazzano's 1520s label Arcadia, borrowed from the idyllic region of ancient Greece.
Q 08The name of the Wabanaki, whose homeland includes Acadia, means the people of what?
The Dawnland
The Dawnland's people reached Mount Desert Island in seaworthy birchbark canoes, coming to hunt, fish, gather berries and harvest clams.
Q 09Which explorer named the island Isle des Monts Deserts, 'Island of Barren Mountains', in 1604?
Samuel de Champlain
Samuel de Champlain came ashore in September 1604, sixteen years before the Mayflower, so this coast was New France before it was New England.
Q 10The 1613 French mission on Mount Desert Island was destroyed by an armed vessel from where?
Virginia
Virginia's Captain Samuel Argall led the raid, only months after he had abducted Pocahontas on the Potomac.
Q 11Which craft did Wabanaki artisans sell to Mount Desert Island's 19th-century tourists, now the pride of the local Abbe Museum?
Baskets
Baskets are woven with sweetgrass, which park rules stopped the Wabanaki from gathering in Acadia for a century, until a 2024 decision cleared the way for harvests to resume.
Q 12What were Mount Desert Island's mid-1800s visitors called, who boarded cheaply with local fishermen and farmers?
Rusticators
Rusticators followed Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church to the island, and by 1880 thirty hotels were competing for them.
Q 13What did the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age families call their elegant Mount Desert estates?
Cottages
Q 21Which sun-loving trees replaced the spruce and fir Acadia's 1947 fire burned?
Birch and aspen
Birch and aspen seeded themselves across the sunlit burn, but they are short-lived, and the spruce and fir now sprouting in their shade may one day take the ground back.
Q 22Somes Sound, which nearly divides Mount Desert Island in two, is technically what kind of feature?
A fjard
Fjard is the Scandinavian word for a drowned glacial valley smaller than a fjord, and Somes Sound was long billed as the East Coast's only fjord until geologists judged it too shallow and too well mixed.
Q 23Acadia's Bubble Rock, balanced on a mountain ledge, is an example of what?
A glacial erratic
Cottages was their euphemism for mansions, and the 1947 fire that swept Millionaires' Row destroyed 67 of them.
Q 14Who is known as the 'Father of Acadia National Park' and served as its first superintendent?
George B. Dorr
Landscape architect Charles Eliot had the original idea; his father, Harvard's president, backed it with land and advocacy.
Q 15Under what name did President Woodrow Wilson first give the area federal protection in 1916?
Sieur de Monts National Monument
Sieur de Monts National Monument was pieced together from 5,000 acres of private land handed to the public, a first among national parks.
Q 16When Congress made it a national park in 1919, it was named after which Revolutionary War figure?
The Marquis de Lafayette
It was the first national park east of the Mississippi and remains the only one in the Northeast.
Q 17Acadia's Sand Beach looks ordinary, but its sand is made mostly of what?
Shell fragments
Shell fragments make up most of it, because waves in the sheltered cove grind mussels, sea urchins and other marine life into sand.
Q 18John D. Rockefeller Jr., heir to the Standard Oil fortune, built Acadia's carriage roads as a refuge from what?
Automobiles
Automobiles were banned from Mount Desert Island for years, and when the ban was lifted Rockefeller built a separate road network that stayed closed to cars.
Q 19The granite coping stones that edge the carriage roads as guard rails are nicknamed what?
Rockefeller's Teeth
Rockefeller's Teeth are the rough granite blocks lining the roads, and the volunteers who weed between them call the job flossing.
Q 20Which landscape architect, who summered at Reef Point in Bar Harbor, designed the planting for Acadia's carriage roads?
Beatrix Farrand
Beatrix Farrand drew up the planting plans at Rockefeller's request around 1930, using native plants to frame vistas and heal construction scars.
A glacial erratic is a boulder that rode inside the ice and was dropped when it melted, and some of Acadia's travelled 20 miles or more before landing on a mountaintop.
Q 24How did the black stripes that cut across Acadia's pink granite at Schoodic Point form?
Magma filled cracks in the rock
Magma filled cracks in the rock deep underground, after the granite had formed, and the black stripes were only exposed once erosion wore away everything above them.
Q 25Acadia's oldest rock, the 500-million-year-old Ellsworth Schist, began as what?
Sea-floor mud and ash
Sea-floor mud and ash were buried, heated and squeezed into the Ellsworth Schist, and erosion and shifting plates later hauled the deep rock back up to the surface.
Q 26Geologists think the ice sheet that buried Mount Desert Island in the last ice age was about how thick?
About one mile
About one mile of ice pressed the Maine coast down so far that the sea flooded in as the glacier melted, leaving old beaches stranded high above today's shore.
Q 27The ice-age sea clay that blankets the Maine coast around Acadia has yielded fossils of which large marine mammal?
Walruses
Walruses swam here when the sea flooded the ice-weighted coast some 15,000 to 11,000 years ago, and the same clay gave up a mammoth that had washed out to sea.
Q 28When snow closes most of Acadia's 27-mile Park Loop Road to cars, which of these may legally take to it?
Snowmobiles
Snowmobiles may run the whole loop in winter, yet dog sleds are banned outright because park rules demand a six-foot leash.
Q 29What makes the boom at Acadia's Thunder Hole when waves surge into the inlet?
Air forced out of a cavern
Air forced out of a cavern at the inlet's end makes the clap, so on a calm day visitors hear almost nothing, while a storm swell can throw spray 40 feet high.
Q 30Which cliffside trail on Champlain Mountain is famous for its exposure and iron rungs?
The Precipice
The Precipice usually closes from late spring into summer so peregrine falcons can nest on its cliffs, and rangers set up telescopes in the parking lot below instead.