Here we are on the famous Cabot Trail in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, feeling the Scottish sense of things that Nova Scotian Premier Angus L. MacDonald wanted to impart on these lands nearly 100 years ago for tourism purposes. That was some great insight from a politician during an age when murmurs of World War II were first being sounded, and industrial manufacturing and natural resource exploitation were in full effect. We made our first encounter with the Cabot Trail last night when we arrived at Margaree Harbour for sunset, and our hotel in Chéticamp, 15 miles farther north, put us in a perfect location to enter the national park first thing this morning.

I’m not certain if the gray skies were a curse or blessing, but without sharp points of light on this pond and the bleached grasses and trees reflected in its still waters, I can only wonder if this scene would have been as intriguing as it was. Stepping from the car to capture the image, I startled a beaver into returning to the water from where it was tending beaver business on dry land. What it was doing remains a mystery, as only its quick motion alerted me to its presence. In the tangle of monochromatic reflections to the right of this image, you might be able to spot its lodge.

While the beaver that ran back to the pond disappeared, another one closer to me apparently didn’t notice me admiring it and swam by as though Caroline and I were invisible.

Our first “look-off” of the day, which is the Canadian term for pull-out or scenic overlook. Well, seeing how much we enjoy taking in tilted strata, we don’t mind taking advantage of today’s first look-off and imagining the continental shifting and uplift that has to occur to create such a phenomenon. While not shown, the coast up here is a rocky one, not a bit of sand for sun worshippers looking to improve their tans, not that the weather is cooperating on that front either.

Hopefully, not ever look-off demands we do so, but this overview of the area to the south that we have traveled up so far couldn’t be ignored. Below and to the left is the cove we had just stood in, we are atop that cliffside.

Reflecting on reflections where thoughts cannot always adequately mirror feelings that this is the domain of poetry and music.

Angled, gnarled, and storm-and-wind-worn surfaces are like the faces of people who have lived hard lives with deep lines and creases etched into their character. Nature is showing you her old face, but can we recognize her?

The wish for clear skies may yet be granted, but the heavy gray and billowy white clouds looming over the highlands have their own appeal in shaping a dramatic landscape.

The Cabot Trail was named after the explorer John Cabot, who landed in the Maritimes of Canada in 1497. It was a nice gesture of remembrance, except he apparently landed on Newfoundland, not Cape Breton Island. No matter, since the branding is simply great, and exacting historical details are better left to the pedants.

Our first hike of the day was on the 4.1 miles (6.6km) long Corney Brook Trail (these are not those falls).

These are the falls to which this trail leads. Should you wonder about the forest trail that brought us out here, we started hiking in the shadows of the overcast sky, but reaching the halfway point back to our car, the sky cleared and opened in a glorious blue, changing the appearance of things. Considering how many other photos we wanted to share from the rest of the day, those from most of our hike needed to be pared.

Be quiet, walk with a soft step, leave your dog behind, and be patient, and you, too, might encounter a ruffed grouse on your trails.

Approaching the end of the Corney Brook Trail, we encountered the glorious blue ocean, following the peeling away of the heavy clouds that had threatened our day with a slight pallor of gray.

The brilliance of slicing such narrow bands of roads at the edges of the sea cannot be overstated. We are forever grateful to those laborers who toiled under the conditions of rain, mud, and blistering sun to carve these pathways through dense forests on steep slopes next to precarious cliffsides.

I don’t know if Canada ever clearcut this forest in the national park. I’d like to believe that it wasn’t and that this diversity of tree types, heights, and colors represents the same diversity of flora that has lived on the north end of this island for many thousands of years.

Had you asked us prior to our visit to the Bog Trail where we’d rank such a path, it would probably be at the bottom of our choices, but after arriving here, there’s some likelihood that we spent as much time exploring these wetlands on a 0.5km/0.3m boardwalk as it took us to hike the 4 miles of Corney Brook.

While sharing some visual characteristics of tundra, this boreal bog is not that, but it is nice to be experiencing glimpses of that type of ecosystem. This blossom is from the purple pitcher plant, a carnivorous specimen also known as the side-saddle flower or, my favorite, turtle socks.

I could easily be mistaken because, regarding the effectiveness of my memory, I forget a lot of things, but I believe this was our first encounter with sphagnum moss during all of our travels. Should I be wrong, Caroline will leave a note pointing out the dozens of other locations we’ve fallen into the visions of fractal recursiveness that grows out of place we’ll never identify. How do I know that? I reached in to not only touch the moss itself, but I was wondering how thick and soft the bed of mosses was before sending fingers probing for the ground but pulled back after thinking better of the idea, wondering if there might be another type of carnivorous plant in the depths just laying in wait to snack on fat man fingers. [I tried to remember when and where we might have seen this moss before but couldn’t come up with a location either, so it certainly was our first deep encounter with sphagnum moss. By the way, we also learned that technically, this bog isn’t a bog at all but a slope fen because there is a steady source of water, and the surface area lies on a mountain slope. Caroline]

The infamous finger-eating pitcher plant makes an appearance after lurching out of the moss, hungry for what I fortunately denied.

Green frogs were talking with each other around this pond. By our count, there were three of them. We lingered a while longer, hoping that in our stillness, they’d get squawking again; sadly, our patience was for naught as they fell to silence. That’s relative, though. Here we were on a slow crawl over the bog trail, taking an inventory of everything our eyes and ears could take in. We’d be the first to admit that the very idea of visiting a bog doesn’t at first blush sound all that exciting, but now that we know, we’ll never second guess the potential held in this type of wetlands. With only a single day to explore the park and one more trail we knew we wanted to hike, our departure from the bog was bittersweet.

Farther down the park road, we were soon at Benjie’s Lake Trail.

Hints of the fast-approaching autumn are showing up here and there, such as the ferns next to our trail that are turning orange.

While the park’s elevation isn’t all that high, there is something top-of-the-world feeling out here. [I had that feeling too, and I believe that was because of the stunted trees. They are kept short by the poor soil conditions and harsh winters. Caroline]

Reaching the lake, we caught up with a couple of German guys who’d raced past us and ended up talking with them for a good 20 or 30 minutes until a couple joined the small viewing area, and we decided to leave them to a moment of solitude.

The trail out and back is easy peasy and easily negotiated by almost every skill level of hiker, the same was true for the bog trail.

Emotions swoon at the vista with a perfect blue ocean punctuating the scene, motivating me to bring the car to a quick stop. We both leap out of the car, proclaiming this as the best view ever, even when we already know with absolute certainty that the previous look-off was, without a doubt, the best ever.

But then we see clouds reflected on the ocean’s surface, and now we have to admit that we are being gobsmacked by Mother Nature’s relentless onslaught of all that is beyond terrific.

Down the hill in Pleasant Bay, the devil found in the signs announcing soft serve and ice cream takes a commanding spot on our shoulders and, speaking louder than any angel, tells us “No.” It forces us to pull over for yet more indulgences, reassuring us that vacations were created just for this reason. Caroline finally found tiger ice cream, a typical Canadian treat of orange-flavored ice cream with dark streaks of black licorice (or, in this case, chocolate), and I opted for maple walnut. I got the better deal, and when she was finished with hers, we returned for a scoop of the yummier stuff for her. By now, I’m trying to reassure her that all the soft serve and ice cream are not making her fatter, just a little fluffier. Sitting here in front of the small shop, windchimes sang to us in the gentle breeze that, like the name of the town, was pleasant at 61 delightful degrees. Crickets chimed in, celebrating with us that we were still in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, with the glow of summer carrying forward for a little longer.

And that’s it for our visit to the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, but we still have some driving left today on the Cabot Trail.

Was that a national park sign we passed? Nope, it showed a turn-off from the Cabot Trail that leads visitors to the Beulach Ban Falls outside the park. Caroline’s quick search-fu abilities told her to insist on us turning around, which I promptly did because what else do I have on my agenda besides nothing other than making my travel companion, best friend, wife, and Love-ah from the prestigious Welshley Arms Hotel happier than she was seconds ago?

Do you see them? No, it’s not pareidolia this time. There are no faces, well maybe there are, but I’m more interested in the many capons gracing the length of the waterfall. Have I just discovered caponidolia? It’s as though the white streaks of water are the fat dripping from my love-ahs fingers. Reading the tea leaves of the future, first when Caroline edits this and then subsequently years from now after returning to it again, she’ll groan, wishing I hadn’t gone to that Saturday Night Live skit that’s been haunting us for decades. She’ll wonder, has this knucklehead run out of oomph on what to write next, or does he really feel this way regarding such a beautiful place?

This is awkward. I don’t know how to follow up on that moment of idiocy without continuing the nonsense, but even I grow tired of my half-hearted attempts at well-worn grandpa humor that doesn’t always hit its mark. I suppose I can point out the obvious: this photo contains dark red and brown soils, lit with mottled light from the sun that manages to find a way through the canopy, combined with the moss, roots, dark shadows, and abundance of green has all the elements of a perfect spot on the trail that even had there not been an exquisite whispy waterfall at its terminus, would have nevertheless been spectacular.

Two guys from Toronto were sitting at this look-off. They had it all to themselves until we came along to share the viewpoint with them. As I chatted with them, Caroline busied herself among the nearby plants. What could she have been doing over there?

She and this red admiral butterfly were communing, and somehow, it kept hanging around long enough for her to pull me over to see if I could get a photo of this guy, too. Maybe it was high on milkweed, or there’s an herb that acts to hypnotize it, but it wasn’t budging from its perch. I had brought my walking-around lens, my telephoto lens, and my super-wide lens along on this trip, but somehow, the macro was a lens too much; it’s back home in Phoenix doing absolutely nothing for me. Come to think about it, that macro would have come in handy at the bog.

This is Dingwall Harbour; it is not Meat Cove. It is also the farthest north we’ll travel on Cape Breton here in Nova Scotia. Meat Cove would have been even farther at the absolute northern end of the island, but as you can see from the low position of the sun and lengthening shadows, we couldn’t afford the extra couple of hours that would have been spent going to and fro. With 42 trails still to hike in Cape Breton, 14 more in Kejimkujik, more than a dozen provincial parks, and at least two wildlife refuges of note, it would be easy to spend a solid ten days on Nova Scotia familiarizing ourselves with an abundance of beauty that I feel exceeds what our expectations might have been before coming to the Maritimes.

There’s still 1.4 degrees of sunlight slicing across a thin layer of the earth’s surface above sea level; if we hoof it, we can capture a new level of astonishment, joy, and delight, the wife says with excitement that I cannot deny.

While she’s out finding her happy place here on Green Cove Overlook, I found mine with this cairn.

Caroline found her happy spot here with a slightly different angle, attributing it to the intrusions of the pink pegmatite dikes sandwiched in the granite with that awesome cairn too distant to play a significant role. The truth is that she took a better photo but with a caveat. Using my cell phone, which she now calls the clown camera, Samsung’s automatic HDR function can create emphasis in colors where my DSLR fails. [However, in some situations, the colors look ridiculously fake, which is where the “clown” thing comes in – Caroline].  The problem with the “clown photos” is their poor resolution. They are not low res, but they were created to look awesome on a small hi-res phone screen, not on other devices or large screens. Unable to choose which photo was better, we decided we could both be happy by posting both, even if the pink bands are not as luxuriantly saturated as they are on my phone. Speaking about luxuriant saturation, that’s where we are here on vacation.