Views in Rhodena

From the MacLean Road I drove east to the end of the Centennial Road without finding any photos under the diminishing sunlight, but it looked brighter to the south, so I took the Cèilidh Trail to Port Hastings and the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 105) to Lexington, where I turned on to the General Line Road and drove north to the Creignish Mountain Road. I briefly attempted to drive it towards the east, but quickly gave up and turned around and returned as I had come. In Creignish Rear, I noticed that a windmill was being erected there to the west of the road; a crane was working as I drove by, so I assume that it will have become operational not too long afterwards. Back at the Trans-Canada Highway, I turned left and continued to the Rhodena Road, to which a friend with family roots along that road had introduced me earlier this year–I had known it was there, but it hadn’t then made it off my to-do list. He gave me a fine tour that day and conveyed lots of interesting information about the area I wish I had gotten written down or recorded; at one time, this area was a thriving community with many farms and houses. They are all gone now, except for some foundations, and the farmland has regrown into a forest on which logging is now an activity. Since it wasn’t a great day for photography, I decided to see how much further I could drive north on the Rhodena Road and whether I might come across any views I’d like to revisit on a better day. This summer, we had reached the Creignish Mountain Road from the Rhodena Road; his grandfather lived along there and the eastern part of that road is drivable by car for perhaps a quarter of the way (it needs a truck or a high-slung vehicle for the rest of the way to the General Line Road). As it now runs along a recently logged area, I turned down it in hopes of capturing some views of the adjacent area but soon turned around—it was not a road for my Prius. On the way back, I stopped for the photos on this page. I then continued north along the Rhodena Road a short ways, reaching the quarry, beyond which the road again became unsuitable for my car.

Photo #1 looks a bit north of east through a valley between two mountains on the edge of the Big Ridge towards Glenora and West Bay Road beyond the Trans-Canada Highway in the middle ground and to North Mountain (along the far side of which is the Bras d’Or Lake) in the background. It’s not a view I’ve seen before and its one to which I wish to return for study with Big Bertha (I did take some photos with Big Bertha, but they were ones that got the trees in the foreground and not what I wanted in the distance). Under this light and at this distance, it is hard to tell the state of the fall foliage anywhere but in the foreground. Many of the trees here were either bare or mostly bare; the colours were definitely post peak.

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Photos #2 and #3 are of the ferns which were in the ditch adjacent to the road. The colours are definitely autumnal, with some looking as if they had been touched by frost, but there are also fronds still wearing their summer greens. They are very pretty plants and prosperous denizens of the forests and roadsides in Cape Breton.