Fundy Trail Provincial Park

Verdant rocky outcroppings, decorated with lacy wisps of fog, march northeast along the coast as far as my eye can see. In the foreground, pine trees poke into the vista where blue-gray sea meets blue sky.

These Canadian headlands formed over millennia, as the Bay of Fundy’s vast tides—the world’s highest—repeatedly attack the coast, washing away softer soil and leaving behind sheer, hard rock. I’m standing at Champlain Lookout, a perfect showcase for this powerful feat of nature. The lookout is one of 21 car-accessible vantage points in what was then the Fundy Trail Parkway, a 19-mile-long park encompassing 6,323 acres along an otherwise undeveloped stretch of New Brunswick coastline.

The attraction reopened in 2024 as Fundy Trail Provincial Park. A through road and its surrounding coastal area, it cuts through one of the last remaining coastal wilderness areas between Labrador and Florida. It feels like my family’s little secret. Our quartet enjoys a snack at a solo picnic table, suspended on the edge of a cliff, and we don’t see another car the whole time, despite it being a spectacularly sunny July day.

Heavy weather

Perhaps the provincial park, which cost roughly $74 million to develop over 25 years, flies under the radar because its final stretch opened in summer 2020, when the pandemic brought travel to a standstill.

Since then, it has averaged about 75,000 visitors a year. Contrast that with the 4 million annual visitors to Acadia National Park a couple hundred miles southeast in Maine, and it’s easy to understand how you could find yourself virtually alone, gazing upon one of the world’s most impressive coastlines.

We stumbled upon this park accidentally in the summer of 2022. When Americans were finally allowed back in Canada, we resumed what had been an annual trek to Fundy National Park and noticed a sign on the way pointing to a road we’d never seen before.

Without fully comprehending where we were headed, we turned and found ourselves traveling a scenic parkway in decidedly foggy weather. We hopped out of the car at each lookout, jokingly “oohing” and “aaahing” as if we could see anything at all.

Tufts Point is among the unbeatable Bay of Fundy views along the twisty drive in Fundy Trail Provincial Park. Photo by Gary Corbett/Alamy Stock Photo

“This is what the falls would look like if the weather was clear,” a staffer told us cheerfully at our first stop, Walton Glen Reception Centre, pointing to a poster displaying a gorgeous view of a deep ravine cutting through forested hills. She said we could follow the trail to the nearby observation deck but that we wouldn’t see much.

We couldn’t even watch the educational movie—the whole visitors center is solar-powered, she explained, and without the sun, there was no way to show the film. Oh, and there would be no lights in the bathrooms.

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That’s more like It

A steep cable ladder leads to the Walton Glen Gorge observation deck. Photo by iStockphoto/Getty Images

A year later, the same woman greeted us. The day was warm and dry, so we followed the trail from behind the visitors center to the Walton Glen Gorge observation deck, a 15-minute walk. We meandered through a stand of young, tightly packed pine trees reminiscent of the Shire in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies before tackling a steep cable-ladder descent.

A cable ladder is essentially a series of railroad ties set into the side of a hill, secured together by thick cables, with another set of cables for handrails. In this case, it was more like steep, awkward stairs than a ladder.

For people with more time—or who seek a less arduous route—an alternate 45-minute walk skirts the cable ladder. Both paths lead to a platform with all-encompassing views of the gorge—carved by a glacier 650 million years ago—and the surrounding protected lands.

Person looking out from the Walton Glen Gorge observation deck.

The Walton Glen Gorge observation deck offers panoramic views on clear days. Photo by Leigh McAdam

The Walton Glen Gorge observation deck is just one of the trail’s thoughtfully situated attractions. The whole park maximizes views for a wide variety of physical abilities. Many of the most spectacular pullouts are by the road and about half are wheelchair accessible.

Most of the Fundy Trail Parkway Road travels atop the cliffs, meaning beach access requires hikes ranging from moderate to strenuous. But the highway plunges down to sea level at Long Beach, one of the coast’s sandier strips. Here, at each of the 2 daily low tides, the beach extends a third of a mile into the bay, meaning you are walking on the ocean’s bottom to reach the water’s edge.

With each matching high tide, the water rises 1 foot every 5 minutes, adding up to roughly the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls every 21 months. Savvy visitors wear water shoes.

Trio of people walking the path leading to the Big Salmon River suspension bridge.

Visitors stroll along a path that leads to a suspension bridge, which crosses the Big Salmon River. Photo by Nicolas Vincent/stock.adobe.com

At the Big Salmon River Interpretive Centre, we enjoyed displays explaining the area’s flora and fauna, and infographics about the tides. The tiny cottage lends out plastic chairs and beach toys, and offers free sunscreen, insect repellent, and stuff for removing parking-lot tar from your shoes.

A little basket holds skipping stones to toss into the waves, and a whiteboard invites you to share your dreams. After throwing a few stones, we sat in borrowed beach chairs to watch the water’s edge retreat as if someone had pulled a bathtub’s cork. From low tide to high tide, the bay’s tidal range is about 50 feet, whereas the average tidal range worldwide is only about 3 feet.

Time for lunch

Grab a bite at Fundy Trail Provincial Park's restaurant, the Cookhouse. Photo by Leigh McAdam

The Cookhouse evokes the community buildings where late-1800s lumberjacks might have gathered. During our visit to the park’s sole restaurant, we explored the remnants of a sawmill and interpretive displays about the lumber industry. We enjoyed freshly baked molasses cookies and strawberry shortcake, but those may not be available now that it’s under a new operator.

On the other side of the Cookhouse’s parking lot, the interpretive center houses a small museum with more artifacts from those lumbering days. Just past that, my kids enjoyed bouncing on a suspension footbridge across the river. The Suspension Footbridge Trail is one of more than a dozen hiking paths within the park, ranging from easy quarter-mile strolls to strenuous technical climbs.

The park also serves as an endpoint for the Fundy Footpath, a rugged backcountry hiking trail of nearly 40 miles.

Fuller Falls is one of the park's 4 waterfalls, and can be accessed by a 72-step cable ladder. Photo by Rejean/stock.adobe.com

We made our next stop Fuller Falls, one of the park’s 4 waterfalls. Its top is visible just a few steps from the parking lot, but our adventurous group happily braved the 72-step cable ladder to enjoy the mossy glen up close.

The summer sun sets late this far north, so with two-thirds of the trail behind us, we planned to visit one more lookout—Flowerpot Rock at Fownes Head. New Brunswick is famous for these freestanding geological oddities, so named because trees growing atop many of the tall, narrow rock formations make them resemble flowerpots. The most famous are the Hopewell Rocks 66 miles to the east.

Flowerpot Rock at Fownes Head was a freestanding rock formation with a tree growing on top that made it look like a flowerpot. This rock formation was destroyed in a winter 2022 storm. Photo by Rejean/stock.adobe.com

But our plan had 2 problems. Our cloudless day had suddenly become socked in with fog, rendering that last vantage point a gray nothing. But the far bigger difficulty was that I didn’t know that the rock had tumbled into the sea during a 2022 winter storm, the victim of rough weather combined with enough rushing water to fill the Grand Canyon twice with every tide change.

So this time, the fog hadn’t concealed a thing. We saw it all, no imagination required.

New England native Jeanne O’Brien Coffey delights in sharing stories about her corner of the world. Her work has also appeared in Boston and Naturally, Danny Seo magazines.

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