Today was going to be a big day! We were starting at Inverness on the Cabot Trail, had plans to hike the Skyline Trail, and then we had about a 4 1/2 hour drive across Nova Scotia and into New Brunswick to end up at our cool geodesic dome on the Bay of Fundy. As usual, we were trying to cram in way too much. This post is likely to be a monster, with so many bird photos to come…and lots of great scenery.
We knew that we had a huge day ahead of us and so we had set the alarm for 6 o’clock to be up early and get out of our place to make the hour drive back to the Skyline trailhead. We had really wanted to try and get out ahead of the crowds, as we have heard that this is the most famous trail in the park, and expected it to be busy. And we really wanted to Not have to deal with a ton of people. Our morning plans actually went off quite well, and we were out of the place by about 6:30 a.m. It was about an hour back to the trailhead and we made a quick stop in Cheticamp to get gas and buy some water for the hike. The drive up to the trailhead in the early morning light was even more beautiful than it had been last night as we came down. Once again, in a hope to see moose, we stopped at the French Lake Lookout. And once again there were great birds (mostly yellow-rumped warblers), but no moose.
It was a short, 5 minute drive back to the Skyline Trailhead, and and much to our surprise we were actually the first car in the parking lot for the Skyline Trail when we got there at about 7:45 a.m. Another car did pull in as we were about to start the hike and a single man ended up being the only person that we saw for the first 6 or 7 km of our 8 km hike. So we did really well. And we only saw him twice, once when he passed us, and once coming back up the boardwalk down to the viewpoints on the trail. So that was pretty amazing. We ended up with the whole hike basically to ourselves, but it didn’t help with finding moose. We still didn’t end up seeing any.
The start of the Skyline Trail. It’s a very well-maintained, easy trail to walk. I’d even say the whole thing is completely accessible, which is pretty amazing. Wide and mostly flat, except for the stairs on the incredible overlook.
The Skyline Trail is the signature hike in the park. And boy is it beautiful. It’s not a hard hike. It’s actually a very well-maintained trail, that’s mostly crushed gravel and a series of boardwalks and could easily be done by anyone. It’s about 8 km in total almost completely flat unless you do the boardwalks that descend down over the headlines. But of course we weren’t going very fast because we kept getting distracted by birds. There were a ton of birds around the park and we managed to find a few new warblers that we had never seen before. So that was quite exciting.
The map of our hike. We did it counter clockwise, which worked out well. It left the amazing boardwalk until the end.
We quickly added a new bird to the life list - a White-throated Sparrow! I love that I caught this guy eating ants. Pretty cool.
They ended up being quite common, and have this lovely, almost mournful call that we enjoyed throughout the hike.
The first part of the trail meanders along through a combination of boreal type forest and open grassland (which we later learned is mostly because there are too many moose). It was a real mixture of forest types, changing all the time and again we were hoping for moose, but didn’t see any. There weren’t a lot of views in the early part of the hike. They basically meandered through the woods, but every once in a while, there was a lookout where you had different views. The first few were of the surrounding forests and valleys, but eventually the trail took a turn and started working its way along the coastline. Those views were spectacular.
Our next sparrow - the Lincoln’s Sparrow.
Even though we’d seen one before, it was still great to be able to ID something different.
A Common Yellowthroat singing his little heart out.
Another White-throated Sparrow.
Another new one - a Black-and-white Warbler! The photo is pretty bad, but it was the only one I got.
A Hermit Thrush
For the non-bird people, this will be a bit of a painful post. But I promise, some great landscape photos are coming! The highlight of the first part of the trail was seeing a Mourning Warbler. We had been hearing them, not frequently but often enough that we knew they were around. This was another life list addition, and Justine spotted this one in a place where we could see it and get a few photos. They certainly earn the name with their call!
A bunny, for a bit of a break from birds.
An inqisitive Yellow-rumped Warbler. He was right near the boardwalk, and obviously not to stressed by people.
A Yelloww-rumped with a caterpillar.
At this point we came to the view out over the ocean, and it was spectacular!
The start of the boardwalk.
Eventually, the trail came down to the headlands overlooking the ocean, and this is where the Skyline Trail really earns its name.
In one particularly environmentally sensitive area of the park, they’ve built this huge boardwalk that goes onto the promontory, to prevent people from walking on the ground and crushing the fragile ecosystem.
It’s an amazing set of boardwalks that goes out and then down over the cliff faces, providing spectacular views of the ocean, the headlands and the road snaking its way along the coast to the south.
And we had the whole thing to ourselves. There was no way we ever expected that! We did the walk all the way down to the bottom of the boardwalks, which had this great viewing platform looking out over the ocean.
There were a series of platforms along the way as well, each providing their own unique perspective on the surrounding landscapes.
As we sat there, we had lots of songbirds (mainly White-throated Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers), but more impressively we were able to look down to the ocean and we got to see some marine life in action.
From the bottom viewing platform, we were still a long way up from the ocean’s surface. But with the binoculars, we could see a number of gannets dive bombing into the water doing their fishing display. You really could only see it with the binoculars, but it was so very cool to see. Justine also managed to see whales a few times! Again, only with the binoculars, and so hard to tell what type of whales they were, but still that was pretty amazing.
We made the climb back up the boardwalk and made our way back to the trailhead. It was only in these last couple of kilometres that we started to see a lot of people eventually we got back to the parking lot and had wrapped up our hike by about 10 a.m., which put us in good shape to make the drive across the two Maritime provinces towards the Bay of Fundy.
Before wrapping up the Cabot Trail, we made one more short stop at another pullout, to walk on the beach and take some pictures of the amazing scenery.
The rest of the day was spent driving. It started off with the beautiful drive off of Cape Breton Island. Justine had done a lot of research for this trip, and one of the things that she found that we were both excited about was the Glenora Distillery. Me for the scotch, Justine because they advertised live music in their pub. It was even shown as happening on the day that we were going to be driving by! So that seemed like a perfect stop, and we had timed it to align. The place was beautiful, but when we pulled up it was looking a little quiet. We went in, but they had changed their schedule between when we left and now. It was very disappointing.
We were pretty annoyed, especially when the person in the shop basically told us that we should have checked the web site more often to see if ther schedule had changed. So rather than buying anything, we left and decided to find someplace else to stop for lunch.
We ended up stopping in Mabou, at the Red Shoe Pub. This is the Rankin Sisters’ cozy spot in the hamlet of Mabou, on the west coast of Cape Breton. It offers a menu of Nova Scotia home cooking. Features include a treasured seafood chowder and a variety of pub fare. It ended up being very good, and we had a fun chat with the waiter who was local.
We had a lovely last meal on Cape Breton Island.
As we headed off of Cape Breton Island, we did have one bad section of traffic where they had one lane of the road closed for construction, which held us up for about half an hour. That was way better than the traffic that was going the other way. They were going to be there for a very long time, as the backed up traffic went on for miles.
After leaving Cape Breton Island, we made our way across Nova Scotia backtracking for a reasonable amount of the drive that we had done a couple of days earlier. At Truro, our journey started a new path and we started heading slightly northwest towards Moncton. The drive across Nova Scotia was uneventful, finally passing through the town of Amherst before crossing the border into New Brunswick. From there, we drove through Sackville heading north up into Moncton before crossing over the top of the inlet and starting to head back down south towards our final destination just outside of Hillsborough.
The map of our second day on the Cabot Trail, and then off to New Brunswick.
It was about 7 o’clock by the time we got to Hillsborough, but as always, we wanted to cram one more thing in and we wanted to see the Bay of Fundy at high tide, which was at about 7:30 p.m. So we drove down to Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park, and even though it was closed, we walked down to the viewpoint over the Bay of Fundy. Yes that’s right, we did a break and enter on a provincial park. It was a little bit hard to tell what we were looking at as we were just looking out over the bay.
And once again, the bugs are crazy and we had left it way too late and so we needed to head back to our rental for the evening. We made a quick stop in Hillsborough to buy a few things to make dinner and then we finally got to our home for the night. This amazing geodesic dome sitting out in the forest.
Justine’s collage of our hideaway in the forest. I’d love to go back!
This place was definitely the highlight of the trip as it related to accommodations. It was this beautiful little camp-like set-up, that we had all to ourselves. In addition to having a geodesic dome to sleep in, there was a screened in sunroom, a hot tub, and a wood-fired sauna all available to us as part of the accommodations. It was pretty amazing, but again sadly, the bugs were also insane and drove us inside right away. But the whole setting was just so beautiful we made ourselves a little bit of dinner, even though it was quite late, and sat outside in the screened in sunroom. Only to discover that it wasn’t all that well sealed up. The mosquitoes kept getting in and eventually drove us back inside the dome. But that was OK because we were pretty tired at that point and really did need to call it a night. Tomorrow was going to be spent exploring the bay of Fundy.
