I once nearly slipped and broke a leg or whatever body part would be first to get caught in a rock crevice as I slid downhill on autumn leaves. That's my most impressive memory of Camden Hills State Park.

A week or so ago, Dolores and I drove down to Camden Hills State Park, her to discover parts of it she hadn't known existed, me to revisit parts of it I hadn't seen since the 1970s.

That slip-and-slide "hike" of probably three-quarters of a mile haunted me, and I had no desire to "revisit" it.

I can't say the park hadn't changed. Improved is the way I describe it, except for a path we stumbled onto which turned out to be one our family used to walk back in the 70s.

We didn't hike up Megunticook, the third highest point on the Eastern Seaboard* between Florida and the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia at 1,385 feet above sea level, or even up 800-foot-high Mount Battie which we had visited by Miss Kitty Yaris several weeks earlier with our daughter and her husband from western Maine.

Besides the autumn day our family was clambering and sliding down the leaf-covered trail from Mount Battie to the parking lot off Mount Battie Street, if I'm remembering the street correctly, my other fascinating memory of Mount Battie was of a day I stood atop the stone viewing tower on her summit.

That day, while I leaned against the stone wall contemplating little or nothing, I overheard a "knowledgeable" tourist tell another man that, "...there is this mountain and Mount Washington. There aren't any others in Maine."

This, of course, claimed my immediate attention, since I knew of the 26 in Acadia National Park, the five in and near Camden Hills State Park, the 46 in Baxter State Park 150 miles north from Camden, and the hundreds along the more than 270 miles of the Appalachian Trail in Maine as well as the hundreds -- at least -- that are located all over the state.

"Isn't that right?" the tourist asked me.

"Yup," I replied.

Why try to tell someone who already knows everything anything?

This day a week or so ago I had suggested to Dolores that we walk a path on the ocean side of Route 1 that cuts through the eastern side of the park.

"There are paths there?" she asked.

"There are," I replied.

We drove into the ocean side, found a new rest and shower building that hadn't been there in my earlier days of visiting, and chose the "south" parking lot rather than the "north," because I happened to nudge the steering wheel to the right more than to the left.

"Back in the day," which was for me in the 1970s, our family and sometimes groups of students I brought to Camden Hills State Park ambled down this stone-step trail from the "south" parking lot to the seaside path and a picnic table where an unremembered amount of goodies were gobbled by us. When we walked it the other day, I had to be a bit more careful not to catch my walking stick in some small cracks among rocks and roots. Times do change. Milt Gross photo.

We parked and saw a trail that obviously led down to the ocean, since we could see the ocean through the trees. We followed it down over rock steps and roots that made my "healing" leg unhappy. When we arrived at the bottom, an intersection with the path that parallels the short, I saw a picnic table above a drop off to the ocean some 60 feet below.

"Wow," I may have said, since I don't remember exactly, "this is the table we used to have picnics at back in the 70s -- unless it's that table's replacement."

This day we didn't cross the highway and follow any of the approximately 29 miles of mountain trails, some of which I'd walked years before. Instead, we walked a bit less than a mile on the ocean side of the park. To my happy surprise, my "healing" leg felt pretty good afterwards.

And it didn't bother while we ate at the Village Restaurant in the village of Camden, one of those that overlook the harbor with better views than most restaurants on Mount Desert Island.

The therapist, who is pulling my "healing" leg to get it to behave better, has been giving me exercises for the leg. I think walking, plain walking, may be the best yet. I hinted at that to her a week or so ago. She showed me another exercise to bend my leg backwards to some position that is probably necessary but doesn't feel all that good.

I've known the park since the 1970s, but I didn't know until I looked it up online last week that it became a park in the 1930s by The National Park Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps created the park in the 1930s. It's not that the forest and mountains had not already been there, but before then it had been known as the "Camden Hills Recreation Development Area." In 1947, the name became Camden Hills State Park.

During this visit, we drove up to Mt. Battie's summit since we didn't have much time. The ranger at the summit-road gate looked at my lifetime pass to all Maine's state parks, which you can get as your lifetime moves well beyond the 29.5 range.

Then, as he leaned in the window and noticed Dolores, Paul, and Faith, he said, "Of course, your pass doesn't cover them."

I could see the math wheels spinning under his ranger uniform cap, while my spinning wheels under my graying brown hair wondered many big bucks this short uphill drive would cost.

Finally, the ranger said, "That will be three dollars."

I didn't faint, but I remembered that there are actually places in Maine where life is indeed as it should be.

Camden Hills State Park is one of them.

* The highest summit on the Eastern Seaboard is Cadillac Mountain's 1,530-foot-above sea level in Acadia National Park some 80 miles north up the coast from Camden and then south to Mount Desert Island or perhaps 30 miles northeast across the ocean. Megunticook is the second highest with the third highest, Sargent Mountain in Acadia National Park rising to 1,373, a dozen feet lower than Megunticook. Most tourists know of Cadillac, as just under 3 million visitors a year typically drive up its auto road. Almost none know of Sargent, about 2.5 miles west of Cadillac. (You have to walk up that one.) From my conversations with tourists, I would say less than the number who know of Sargent know of Megunticook or Camden Hills State Park. Acadia National Park is visible on the horizon from Mount Battie. From no place in Acadia, can you really see Camden Hills State Park largely because you don't look for it from Acadia's highest mountains and there are few open viewpoints in Acadia that aim toward Camden.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2011