Views at the French Mountain webcam

The weather in Cape Breton is very local, so what the weather report says for Sydney is not at all necessarily what is actually happening anywhere else on the Island (indeed, it is much more likely than not to be very different). One of the quickest ways I know of of learning what the weather actually is all over Cape Breton is to visit the Cape Breton web cameras maintained by the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, found here (three of them, Cochrane Hill, Monastery, and Trafalgar are not in Cape Breton, but the rest are). As a result, I visit this web page nearly every day, grabbing the weather conditions at a glance.

To my mind, the most scenic of the views provided by these web cameras (which, of course, have an entirely different purpose) is that at French Mountain, seen in photo #1 from a vantage point lower than that of the webcam, but otherwise showing exactly the same scene. That webcam is somewhat misnamed, as it’s actually well past French Mountain and out on the Cape Breton Highlands Plateau at the crest of a steep hill descending to the valley of the Fishing Cove River before rising again on the other side—that valley, by the way, is an excellent place to see moose, which often frequent the river (more a brook than a river at that point) and feast on the vegetation on the sides of the Cabot Trail. At this point, the Cabot Trail (a newer route replacing an older abandoned one) heads straight almost due northeast/southwest: were intervening parts of the Cape Breton Highlands Plateau not in the way, one would be looking just a bit west of the North Mountain summit on the Cabot Trail in the far distance.

All of the photos on this page exhibit the same shelving phenomenon noted on North Mountain, where the winds blow the snow at the tops of the snow banks out across the road (they’ve been considerably truncated over what we saw at places on North Mountain as a result of recent work by snow ploughs, one of which passed by as I was busy snapping these photos). The snow/slush mixture visible in the road was present at only a few short sections of the Cabot Trail and caused no problem for my Prius, but I was still happy to see the snow plough keeping the road clear of the drifting snow. (It may look perfectly calm in these photos, but there was nonetheless a brisk wind blowing.)

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Photo #2 is of the webcam itself; it provides a fairly good idea of the height of these snow banks, which were well above my head. Photo #3 shows the snow banks here, the second snowiest spot I saw on the Cabot Trail, after North Mountain; only the tops of the nearby full-grown trees are peeping up above the tops of the snow banks, while the others further away are completely hidden!