Taken 2010 June 23 from the Oban Road 5 km (3.1 mi) east of its end in St Peter’s
GPS 45°41.630'N 60°54.007'W
As recounted here, last year I discovered the Sporting Mountain area west of St Peter’s (one of the very few Cape Breton place names officially spelt with an apostrophe, by the way). The weather on Wednesday was off-and-on promising and I wished to spend some time on the East Coast of Cape Breton Island, with which I had long ago fallen in love, so off I set in the morning. When I reached the Highway 104 turn-off for Sporting Mountain, the weather was much more off than on, at least for photography, but I nevertheless turned up the road and began to explore it some more.
I was hopeful that I could descend off the mountain in the direction of Roberta on the Bras d’Or Lake, as The Nova Scotia Atlas showed a road connecting Oban to Roberta. The views from the mountain were hazy and the sky mostly cloudy, so I took no photos, but I did drive 3.2 km (2.0 mi) beyond the junction of Morrison Road and Oban Road in Oban in hopes of continuing on to Roberta. During this stretch of the road, I saw one view of the Bras d’Or Lake to which I wish to return on a better day — there was no point in even wasting the camera’s storage on it this day. Although my old GPS (Griselda) agreed with the atlas, my Prius’ GPS did not and my eyes had to agree that the driveway leading to a mobile home (likely a summer residence) in which the road apparently ended had no viable continuation off the mountain. I therefore made a U-turn, headed back to Oban, and started down the Oban Road towards St Peter’s.
As I was descending the Oban Road, 3.2 km (2.0 mi) from its north end in Oban, my eyes caught a brief glance of a lake I hadn’t noticed the last time I drove this road, so I stopped and backed up. A short road led to the side of the lake seen in the photo above where markings in the ground adjacent to the lake made it clear that the road was often used as a boat ramp. A look at the atlas identified it as Cook Lake, a strangely shaped crescent bent around a peninsula whose western end is the point at the right of the photo. By this time, the sun was in and out of the clouds, so I snapped several photos, of which this one is the best of the lot. I have no idea whether this is a natural lake or a man-made one, but, judging by the tire tracks, quite a few folks think it has fish (or just want to explore it). As one can see, it’s rather grassy by this shore, though that didn’t appear to be the case with the peninsula’s shore nor the far shore. In any case, a pretty spot and one totally deserted this day.