The bastard child known as “glamping,” which embraces the dissonant conceit that we can get closer to “nature” by keeping it at arm’s length, continues to gather momentum. New glampgrounds are popping up helter-skelter like mushrooms after a wet spell, frequently clustered near the nation’s most iconic natural resources, with ever larger footprints and ever more tricked-up amenities—all while promising that “campers” don’t have to suffer the discomforts that come with actually immersing themselves in the natural world.
One such budding enterprise, dubbed Clear Sky Acadia, is lurching after acceptance in the Maine town of Lamoine. First mentioned in this blog in January as a potential competitor for KOA’s Terramor Resort in Bar Harbor, the Clear Sky proposal survived several regulatory meetings and reviews before finally getting planning board clearance May 1. But it still has to be approved by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, and more immediately, the proposal faces a public hearing June 5 that may not go well.
There is, for one thing, a growing local resistance to the increased commercialization of coastal Maine. Although a long-favored vacation destination, the area around Acadia National Park has become so overrun with tourists that local residents are being gentrified right out of their homes. Bar Harbor recently capped the number of short-term rentals to preserve as much housing as possible, but that simply pushed investors into other, nearby towns that haven’t yet followed suit. The nearby town of Tremont, meanwhile, last year overwhelmingly approved an extensive revision of its land use ordinance to impose the strictest campground regulations on Mount Desert Island, including a minimum RV site size of 5,000 square feet—or nearly double the size of the most generous RV sites at most campgrounds.
Then there’s the Clear Sky proposal itself, which is as intrusive an addition to the natural terrain as a subdivision in a cornfield. The company’s signature accommodations are geodesic domes, which have a nice eco-friendly aura about them and which feature clear plastic windows through which guests can gaze at the awesomeness of the great outdoors. But these are not modest structures: for guest quarters, Clear Sky Acadia would have 38 domes that are 23 feet in diameter, 50 with a 26-foot diameter, and two at 33 feet across and 16 feet high, each with more square footage than two park models. That’s huge—but not as massive as a proposed “wedding dome” of 1,900 square feet; a main activity dome and a spa dome, each at 3,400 square feet; and a restaurant/check-in dome of 6,500 square feet. There also would be various “accessory activity” domes, as well as domes for housing 36 employees, all of it adding up to 105 boils and pimples on the Maine landscape.
It’s worth noting that this would be only the third Clear Sky facility built and operated by Hal Feinberg, an Arizona-based real estate agent who decided—as described in an undated magazine interview—to create a resort providing guests with an “authentic backpacking adventure inside a very personal dome that puts them in touch with nature.” The Lemoine project would be significantly larger than either of those first two ventures, both opened just two years ago, including a 16-dome facility about 16 miles outside of Glacier National Park and a 45-dome resort about 20 minutes south of Grand Canyon National Park. The Glacier Clear Sky Resort, which racked up a litany of shabby reviews complaining about mold, crappy service, duct-taped tears in the windows and inadequate heating for such a northern location, is no longer accepting reservations.
Despite an emphasis on providing guests “an unforgettable experience” with “uniquely styled and themed Sky Domes surrounded by unspoiled nature,” the Clear Sky Resort in Arizona clearly doesn’t believe that nature is enough of a draw. Not when you’re charging upwards of $400 a night and nature can be had for free by anyone who actually seeks out an “authentic backpacking adventure.” So those “uniquely styled and themed” domes, a mash-up of Las Vegas and Disneyland, include an “’80s Video Games” dome, a “Pink” themed dome and a “British Secret Agent” dome, which includes Goldfinger-inspired chairs and a London phone booth. The top of the heap is the “Space Galaxy” dome, which sleeps seven and can run as high as $610 for the night, but the real winner has to be the “Stairway to the Stars” dome: it only sleeps two. In a round, queen-sized bed. Suspended from the ceiling. Accessed by a spiral staircase.
Glampers opting for the Stairway to the Stars are cautioned that the bed “will sway slightly” as its occupants move about.
Thus far, there’s little indication whether the Lamoine property would continue the “uniquely styled and themed” approach, nor whether Feinberg has learned from his missteps in Montana how better to combat moisture buildup in his domes—not to mention the challenge of heating and cooling such large interior volumes. (A sphere has the largest volume-to-surface-area ratio of any geometric form, and a dome is roughly half a sphere.) One could argue that such concerns are his problem, and that’s true in the short term. But the American countryside is littered with disintegrating former motels and shopping malls, and these days even office buildings in large urban cores are sitting vacant and facing an uncertain future, and all required considerably more capital investment per square foot than goes into a glampground.
All of which is another way of saying that it’s far easier to walk away from a glampground, and if such projects go bust, they become a community problem—and eventually a blight on the community.
None of this is likely to come up at next week’s public hearing, which is in any case a curiously ambivalent exercise. The planning board already has said it won’t be taking any action June 5, seeking only to determine if it needs additional information about the proposal before taking final action June 19. Feinberg’s representatives, meanwhile, have indicated they believe they’ve already threaded the needle and plan on making only the briefest of public presentations. It remains to be seen if anyone questions the applicant’s expertise or depth of financial reserves, or the physical challenges that domes have to overcome in northern states. These are not issues that planning boards tend to examine—may not even have the authority to consider—but perhaps they should.
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