Maritime Expedition # 4: The Unique, Spectacular Cabot Trail

For sheer insanity, there aren’t too many things you can do that beat trying to negotiate the entire Cabot Trail from Sydney around and back to Sydney in one day.

Going by the numbers, it’s about 415 kilometres of driving, about 5½  hours of actual driving time, and a good solid 8½ hours total time, end to end.  That’s a lot of work for the poor driver, who also happens to be the captain, first mate, deck hand, and social director of this tour. 

What it works out to in practice is a “hit-and-run” tour, the kind you’d think a cruise company would love, except that this is really too long for a one-day port call in Sydney.  When I last came this way in 2015, I was on a cruise and there was a Cabot Trail tour offered.  That bus ride took the ship’s guests (not me) up the east side of the trail as far as Ingonish, with an extended stop there for shopping (maybe also for lunch), and return.

As you’ll see, they missed three-quarters of the most spectacular scenery, including all of the truly iconic views that we’ve all admired for years in tourist brochures and advertising.

I’ve travelled right around the Cabot Trail six or seven times over the years, but I’ve usually gone clockwise, via Baddeck, Chéticamp, and Ingonish in that order.   On this occasion, I decided on impulse to go the other way, only the second time I’ve ever done that – and the first time was so many years ago that I'm not even sure when it happened. 

Five years ago, I published a two-part blog post giving a detailed rundown on everything you need to know to tour the Cabot Trail.  I'll share the links for that again here.

Driving Canada's Highlands: Part 1

Driving Canada's Highlands: Part 2 

In this post, I'm just going to share photo hits and comments about changes that have happened since the 2016 "daily double" linked above.

First of all, here's some random dude at the lookout on Kelly's Mountain above the Seal Island Bridge.  The bridge spans the wider of the two channels that connect the Bras d'Or Lake to the open Atlantic Ocean.  It's been built high up because some ocean-going ships do enter and leave the Lake.

Coming down from Kelly’s Mountain, it's time to play Choices.  If you take Exit 12, you drive about 6 kilometres along secondary highway 312, to Englishtown, where a cable ferry crosses the narrow neck of water at the entrance to St. Ann’s Bay.  The ferry runs 24/7, on demand, except during stormy weather.  It’s got to be the most expensive ferry in the world for distance travelled since the fare is $7.00 per vehicle for a trip that lasts all of 1 minute on most days.  Just at this time, due to the pandemic, the fares are suspended and the crossing is free, but no one knows how long that will last.  Check that detail online before you decide.

The alternative is to carry on a short distance farther on 105, and then turn onto the proper beginning of the Cabot Trail at the south end of St. Ann’s Bay.  This leads to a lengthy, twisty, hilly road turning every which way as it goes in most of a circle around the bay, ending up meeting 312 a short distance north of the ferry.  It takes far longer to go this way, unless there’s a huge waiting line for the ferry (uncommon).

 IMPORTANT NOTE:  Although you will see on Google and other online mapping services that the Cabot Trail is now numbered as Nova Scotia Trunk Highway 30, you will not see a single Highway 30 marker anywhere, either along the Trail, or at the access points off Highway 105.  There are loads of Cabot Trail signs, but don’t be looking for that number.  The Cabot Trail has never before had a provincial highway number.

What you will see, as you drive around St. Ann’s Bay (I did) is some lovely views of the bay, actually an inlet of the ocean.  You’ll also see a number of road signs with community names like this:

Right at the outset of the road, you passed the Gaelic College at St. Ann’s.  It is the largest institution outside of Scotland devoted to the study of the Scots Gaelic language and the arts and crafts of the Highlanders, and indeed the experts at St. Ann’s played a role in helping with the rebirth of Gaelic in Scotland.  So, as you drive through Cape Breton – and sometimes in other parts of Nova Scotia – you can expect to see signs with combined English and Gaelic names, anywhere that there is a population of Gaelic speakers.  In areas with Mi’kmaw populations, you can expect to see English and Mi’kmaw signs.  And the Acadian French of the northwestern and southeastern sides of the island?  French and English signs, as needed.

Leaving St. Ann's Bay behind, I travelled north through rolling, hilly countryside, but with the mountainous plateau coming closer all the time on my left.  And suddenly, there it was, right in front of me, with the ocean right beside me, and there was no place left to go but up.  Welcome to Smokey.

Sometimes this headland is called “Smoky” or “Cape Smoky/Smokey.”  If you guessed from the name that it’s often fogged in, you’d be absolutely right.  Only twice in all my visits have I ever seen it all in the clear.  This trip was one of them.  That hill going up is almost certainly the steepest grade on the entire Cabot Trail.  Thank goodness it’s been thoroughly upgraded with wider paved lanes, paved shoulders for cyclists, continuous guardrails on both sides, and deep ditches in front of the rock faces to catch stray boulders.  It had absolutely NONE of those features when I first drove up it in 1984, and the moment when the rental car started fishtailing on the loose gravel was one of the most hair-raising experiences of my life up to that date.

BTW, all you’re seeing in that first picture, up to the viewpoint, is less than half of the total climb.  After rounding the point of the bluff, the road keeps zigzagging its way upwards, although not quite as steeply.  At the top there’s a small provincial park.  I wanted to stop there, but it was busy as a watering station for the dozens and dozens of cyclists who were either engaged in a race, or a bike rally, or a mass organized bike tour.  Fortunately, they were all travelling the other direction – south.  Holding the car on the south-side downgrade of Smokey is hard enough without dodging cyclists, even when you know enough to put it in low gear.  Which is an essential safety rule for all the big hills on the Cabot Trail.  Ignore it at your peril.

On the north side, the road follows a small creek valley down from the steep outer edge on the more gradual north slope towards Ingonish.  The condition of the pavement on this long, twisting downhill stretch is, in a word, execrable.  I can think of worse words, but will refrain.  This stretch of road was already rough in 1984, and it looks as if nothing has been done to fix it since then.

Ingonish is a tourist town in multiple parts, and it straggles out for 16 kilometres along the road without any clearly defined centre-of-town.  Interspersed among private homes, summer or year-round, you see inns and B&Bs, restaurants and ice-cream stands, gift shops and craft shops, and… well, you get the idea.  On the flip side, I can only recall seeing one gas station there.  Moral: gas up before you hit the Cabot Trail.

Ingonish also has two relatively new tourist facilities, which I hadn’t seen before: a small ski resort on the same ridge that ends at Smoky, with a scenic gondola ride to the top, and a helipad where flightseeing tours of the Cape Breton Highlands are offered.

This long, twisting chain of a town is cut in two by a narrow section of the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, which extends right down to the seashore here.  As you reach this point on the road, you will find a side lane with a ticket booth where you can buy your park pass.  Of course, if you’re like me and you already have the National Parks Discovery Pass, you just sail on by.  There’s a similar roadside booth at the west side of the Trail, just north of Chéticamp. 

This small enclave of the park includes the slender, rocky peninsula known as Middle Head, which holds the National Park’s golf course and the deluxe Keltic Lodge.

The park also takes in the South Beach and part of the North Beach on the ocean.  I vividly remember that when I parked at the South Beach in 1984, I could see from my car right across the expanse of sand to the dropoff at the edge of the ocean, and that included one of the several lifeguard towers at the top of the drop.  Here's a photo from the Parks Canada website which shows this beach as I remember it.  

 No longer.  Here’s what it looks like now.

Cross that pile of rocks on the walkway, and you are on a much steeper and much closer drop.  And it’s all rocks, until a narrow strip of sand appears just at the water’s edge.  Most of the beach has been sucked out to sea, with the remainder buried under the rock pile.  The regal profile of Smokey continues to dominate the view from the South Beach. 

The Parks Canada website does state that this beach is washed away every fall and re-deposited every spring by the ocean.  Is that still true?  It seems to me that September 12 is very early in the "fall" for the beach to have already done a seasonal disappearing act.  Any readers of this blog who can confirm, please do so in the comments!

A short walking trail from the parking lot will bring you to the Freshwater Lake which plainly was part of the ocean at one point until a barachois completely cut it off (barachois is an Acadian French word describing the spit of sand and/or gravel which forms in the tidal currents along the shore.  They’re a dime a dozen all over Cape Breton Island.)  Maybe I’ll check that beach out next time I come this way.  The water is definitely too cold for me to think of swimming in the ocean at my age.

On the other hand, the North Beach is still broad, spacious, sandy, and has a much more user-friendly water pattern than the rolling open ocean waves on the South Beach. 

A similar fate to that of the South Beach has befallen farther north at Black Brook Cove, a spot where I did go swimming back in the day.  The beach here was never as large as at Ingonish, but it’s just as gone now.

This time, I took the coastal road detour through Neil's Harbour, and caught this view of the coastline away up to Cape North, the northern tip of the island.

North Cape is the village at the corner where the road to the actual North Cape of the island branches off.  Right on the corner is Morrison’s Restaurant, which I have heartily recommended for years and – after lunch on this occasion – still recommend.  It's housed in an old general store which has been thoroughly rebuilt and redecorated inside and out, but the service is still good and the food is still outstanding.  Great place to stop for lunch if you’re doing the one-day hit-and-run tour, as I did -- or during a day of driving and hiking between Ingonish and Chéticamp.  I had left Sydney at 8:40 am and rolled up to Morrison’s about four minutes before they opened at 12 noon.

Strange to say, there’s a lot less to say about the more dramatic scenery of the second half of the trip.  It all looks much the same each time, and there are no such dramatic changes as the road over Smoky or the beach at Ingonish.  The lookout point towards the top of North Mountain now has some interpretive signboards which give a detailed explanation of the Aspy Fault, slicing across most of Cape Breton much as the Great Glen slices through Scotland.  The only thing the Aspy River in this valley doesn’t have is a nice deep lake with a mysterious monster lurking in it.

Over on the west side, there’s the grandstand view from McKenzie Mountain north along the coast, in the area which the Cabot Trail doesn’t cover.  But there is a coastal road extending part of the way up that shoreline which I'm pretty sure didn't go that far back in 1984.  Another thing to check out on my next visit.

There’s the Bog Walk up on the high plateau, a favourite of mine.  

It took me about 20 minutes to go around this boardwalk, walking slowly all the way with my head down in search of low-lying bog flora like the insectivorous pitcher plants.  Some day, maybe I’ll catch a pitcher plant in the act of catching its dinner.  I did see some that were closed up, which indicates that they’re still digesting the last feast.  But there were also other bog plant species that I didn’t remember from previous visits.

And there are the strange, stunted, dwarf trees which (like a Japanese bonsai) can quite easily be a century old or more and still only come up to your knees -- or less.

Now come the truly iconic views of the Cabot Trail – the view south from the lookout on French Mountain....

...and the view north towards French Mountain from the lookout on Cap Rouge.  

As the latter name indicates, all the cliffs on this coast are a notable red/orange/brown colour mixture.  Here's a pic of one of the rock faces plunging towards the ocean, a view which I think I had somehow always missed in my past tours of the Trail.

Finally, the view south from the last major headland towards the town of Chéticamp, with two barachois plain to see in the picture. 

Chéticamp is the largest town of this Acadian coast and provides ample services.  It’s a great spot for an overnight stay if you want to do the more sensible 2-day (or more) visit to the Cape Breton Highlands.  Here there are multiple accommodations and restaurants to consider.  My big recommend in Chéticamp is the Auberge Doucet Inn.  I’ll never forget the time that my husband Massi and I stayed at the Doucet right at the height of the snow crab season and enjoyed a feast at a restaurant in town of fresh snow crab that had just come off the boat an hour or so earlier.

The last big change was to find that, after years and years of neglect, the road south from Margaree Forks towards Highway 105 is finally -- finally -- getting some repair and upgrading work done on it.  In a few more years, perhaps it will be all fixed up.   

My point in all of this – and I do have one – is that the Cabot Trail is one of the truly essential experiences that no traveller should ever miss.  The scenery may not be as hugely dramatic as, say, the Rocky Mountains.  But it’s worthwhile to remember that this Highland region is far, far older – senior citizens compared to the Rockies, which are relative babes-in-arms.

I hope this post, together with my more encyclopedic double from 2016, will help you to figure out where you want to go and what you want to do when you get there yourself.  Also, be sure to check out the National Park's website for information about the wealth of hiking trails and camping opportunities in the Park.

 

Cape Breton Highlands National Park

 

Me?  Just from writing this, I'm thinking that I really want to spend three whole days on the Cabot Trail next time I come, with overnights in both Ingonish and Chéticamp.