Views from the South Haven Pull-Off

310 m (0.2 mi) north of Exit 11 on the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 105) in South Haven, on the southbound side, is a vantage point I’ve been eyeing for some years now: fast-moving traffic and the nearby exit both mean that one has to keep one’s wits on the driving and not on the scenery, so I had never over the years figured out exactly how to access it. This Sunday morning, as I was returning from the closing concert in Sydney on Saturday night, when I stayed overnight on Boularderie Island, the traffic was very light and I was able to dawdle and gawp to my heart’s content. As I approached the area of interest, I spotted as small pull-off on the side of the road and pulled in and parked. A short path leads down the bank to an earthen pier girded by boulders from which the views of South Gut St Anns were as stunning as I had hoped they might be. This page presents a few of the many photos I took there that morning.

Photo #1 looks obliquely to the right from the South Haven pull-off across South Gut St Anns (the southernmost arm of St Anns Harbour) to the Cape Breton Highlands dominating the scene. So far as I am aware, this particular prominence is unnamed. The land in the foreground is a fairly narrow peninsula, lined with white rocks I assume are gypsum, that runs out to Upper MacLeods Point, around which North Gut St Anns runs inland parallel to South Gut St Anns on the far side of the peninsula; a small provincial park is at the head of North Gut St Anns, a short distance past the Gaelic College on the Cabot Trail, and usually offers very fine fall foliage, though I didn’t get to visit it this year. The Highlands seen across the photo are to the west of North Gut St Anns. Magnification shows that most of the trees on these distant highlands are bare. The trees lining South Gut St Anns, however, are still pre-peak; it helps that the sun shining on them brings out their colours.

Photo #2 is a telephoto view of the shore immediately across from the pull-off; it is the left portion of photo #1 that better shows the state of the foliage on the peninsula and the bare trees on the hillside across North Gut St Anns. The white colours of the rocks at the shore line have caught my eye many times and I’ve photographed them from other angles, but never directly across nor this close.

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Photos #3 and #4 form a connected panorama. Photo #2 looks to the right at Upper MacLeods Point at the far left; North Gut St Anns is on the far side of that point. MacLeods Point is about a third of the way in from the left; Seal Cove lies between it and Munro Point at the centre of the photo, which can be identified as it’s the location where the white shore line ends, although it is a bit hard to see since it merges with the side of Murray Mountain across the outflow of the North River. Murray Mountain’s tremendous bulk runs across most of this photo.

Photo #4 has only a small amount of overlap with photo #3. It shows the remainder of Murray Mountain at the left; beyond, the Cape Breton Highlands line the shore of St Anns Bay to Cape Smokey, which can be barely made out through the haze about a third of the way in from the right of the photo. The long line of evergreens at the centre right of the photo marks the spit over which Highway 312 reaches the ferry landing at Jersey Cove; the leftmost white dot is a building on that spit. At the far right is Englishtown, where the rightmost white dot is the ferry’s superstructure, concealed by a low point of land extending out into the harbour; a thin brown line, very hard to make out in this compressed version, extending past that low point marks the docks at Englishtown, the departure point for a fine tour to the Bird Islands, described here.

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Photo #5 looks left to the head of South Gut St Anns, where some vibrant fall foliage is getting some bright sun, though numerous bare trees are visible as well. As elsewhere, the trees on the highlands are mainly without foliage too. The Cabot Trail is the road which runs on a causeway across the head of the gut, a shallow boggy area that receives run-off from the highlands behind. Exit 11 is to the left and outside the scope of this photo.

Photo #6 looks across South Gut St Anns to the hill at the start of the peninsula and the buildings of the Gaelic College, a major centre for the diffusion of the Gaelic language and culture, the site of the Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Association concerts, and of the Celtic Colours Festival Club sessions. It appears that recent logging has cleared much of the hillside behind the Gaelic College, a spot that, if accessible, might offer some nice views of its own.