Introduction
This essay presents from places both reasonably well known and more often (sometimes very far) off the beaten track a varied selection of scenes, from sunsets, skies, beaches, shore lines, rivers, brooks, valleys, highlands, and forests to five different waterfalls, a number of bridges, and even several photos of wildflowers: it has as its subject the memorable days I spent in the late spring and summer of 2013 in Cape Breton, shown through selected photos from the many that I took during the two trips I made during that period, described much more fully through my Facebook posts at the time here and here. Although the essay’s title is “Summer 2013”, it includes photos from the last week of spring as well as from the summer months I was in Cape Breton. The photos are generally organized in chronological order.
The early part of the first trip made real for me an inscription on an interpretive panel I noted along the Louisbourg Lighthouse Trail, which read:
On a sunny day the scenery here is spectacular, but equally so is the rough, blowing weather, with thick fog, that inspired the Mi’kmaw name for Cape Breton, Unama’ki, “land of fog.”
I have long been familiar with Louisbourg’s often cloudy, rainy, and foggy weather (though on a bright summer day it is among the most beautiful places in Cape Breton), but I discovered to my surprise that it is not just Louisbourg that can experience thick fog day after day, but that it can and does occur all over the Island, at least some years. While I’d certainly encountered foggy days on previous trips, this was my first experience of it in late June nearly everywhere I travelled on the Island and you will therefore see it in several of the photos presented here from those early days as well as in some later ones.
2013, in spite of its foggy start, was a great year for photography (as was 2014). This essay was started in the winter of 2013–2014, but was only partially complete by the time I headed for Cape Breton in June of 2014. I had hoped to have it finished by then, but that did not happen, so I resumed work on it in the winter of 2014-2015 after having completed the previous essay, “Fall Colours–2014 Edition”. I am now well into June of 2015 and still have 2,500 more photos to work through, many of places seen in earlier essays. Rather than delay it any further, I have decided to release it in its current state, regretfully omitting many photos equally worth including. My apologies for its extraördinary lateness, but its photos are still relevant and I hope you will enjoy them.
Victor Maurice Faubert
2015 June 20
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Note 1: If you are unfamiliar with the place names mentioned in this essay, a list of map resources is given here. Of these, the best computer-readable map of Cape Breton Island that I currently know about is the Cape Breton Travel Map, produced by Destination Cape Breton and, thanks to their express written permission, available as a PDF file here; I strongly urge you to download it. This map scales nicely, allowing you to zoom in on an area of interest, has a very helpful place name index, and provides a level of detail, both of back roads and streams, that is quite good.
Note 2: See the description here for the notation I use for GPS (Global Positioning System) coördinates, which are those the camera recorded when I took the photos. In some cases, the camera failed to capture the GPS coördinates when I took certain of the photos; the coördinates of those photos were determined from Grimelda, the GPS track logger I now use on my daily excursions.
Feedback on the photos and the accompanying commentary, including corrections, is always welcome; send it to the address in the footer below. All of the essays in this series are archived here.