Too Much to Wait

We will be spending one more day here at Glooscap Campground in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. I was going to wait and make a single post about our explorations but I’ve already got almost too many photos for one post.

First the tides. This was taken from the bank in front of our camper at low tide.

This was taken about an hour before high tide. The tides right now have been about 34 feet here. The record tide is 54.7 feet recorded at Burntcoat Head, just over twenty miles from here as the crow flies. The amount of water that flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy with every tidal cycle (about 12.5 hours) is more than flows over Niagara Falls in a year and eight months!

Just after I took that second picture, late morning yesterday, we headed over to Partridge Island for a hike. The island is on the other end of this sand spit. Since this was pretty much high tide I think this is only an island during rare storms.

As we walked out I saw this adorable house off to the side.

It sits pretty much by itself but is only a couple of miles from Parrsboro. I love it.

At the end of the sand spit a green and leafy trail went up the island.

We climbed until we could see back down the way we’d come…

and then far out along the bay.

We spotted the shore where our camp is…

yep, that’s us.

After lunch we visited the Fundy Geological Museum in town. Turns out there are rocks from every geological age at the surface in Nova Scotia, and examples of them are all here along the cliffs near Parrsboro. The erosion from the high tides is constantly revealing new rocks and new fossils. My favorite exhibit was this replication of ancient tracks found that they mounted under glass in the floor. At the end of the tracks is a model of the creature that made them. The two red tracks on top of the glass are just their guides through the museum.

Late in the afternoon when the tide was still falling we walked along our beach to the cliffs at the end. These are sandstone cliffs along the way.

Near the point the sand was piled in waves from the action of the tides.

Matey was excited to get to run on sand, but even where the sand waves were less pronounced they gave him trouble.

The cliffs got bigger…

until at the point they were huge monoliths.

We didn’t find any fossils…

but we enjoyed the strange shapes.

Today we drove towards the end of the peninsula that splits the head of the bay. The whole tip is Cape Chignecto Provincial Park. There’s a day use area where the red pin is. We wanted to take a hike there. Unfortunately a bridge is out on the normal entrance road.

So we had to take the Eatonville Road, which started like this…

but soon enough became a single track through the woods…

with bridges barely wider than the truck. Which is why my map program says the 43 mile trip would take an hour and 29 minutes. That was probably a bit of an underestimate.

At the end of the drive was this huge building, at this time totally empty. It looks like they’re working on the entrance drive, we had to walk in a couple of hundred feet. The whole time we were there we were the only ones.

The view from the platform gave a taste of what was to come.

We took the Three Sisters Trail. Most of the trail was like this.

It had a number of nice picnic areas.

The last little bit was a cut through the woman at the park office told me about. It made the trail a loop and cut off probably almost a mile of backtracking. As it was we walked 1.8 miles. But along the way were lookouts.