Getting Hives.

Quite the view. Just not down.

Bar Harbor, ME – I clung to the gnarled iron bar, admiring the sheet of rock that rose above me. No way was I going to look down.

A misshapen tree only bearing needles on the side facing the sun jutted out from the cliff. I twisted myself from the wall just as awkwardly.

Small chips of slate tumbled from my feet as I tried to melt farther into the rock, probing for narrow stone steps built into the mountain's smooth rock at the turn of the century. While I tried to limit how much I diverted my gaze, I kept a nervous eye peeled for the small blue flashes of paint struck on the rock. Without them, there was no path.

I missed several before finding myself on the edge of a precipitous drop.

I began to question my decision to hike the Beehive in Acadia National Park, one of the park's most popular and most challenging peaks. While it only took 20 minutes to scale the 520-foot summit, it's known for cliffs that fall out onto the tops of pine trees, and iron bars that make hoisting yourself up possible. And the trail opens with a sign warning of deaths on the mountain.

My breath deepened. My legs quaked. I looked down. I suppressed the urge to vomit.

But when I finally widened my view, it was well worth it.

From atop the summit, the greens melted into the blues and the browns: the sea into the rocks, into the forest.

And a gentler way back down.

(For a particularly vomit-inducing account of climbing the Beehive, check out the GoPro footage below.)