Cape Breton offers an incredibly rich selection of hiking trails and hikeable roads. As the lengthy table of trails below attests, they are found all over Cape Breton Island: in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park and some provincial parks, as one would expect; in forested areas where logging roads and fire breaks were constructed; in abandoned or never-settled areas where old roads (often repurposed as snowmobile trails) or cart tracks created by pioneers remain; along the coasts… After sixteen years of trips to Cape Breton, I have not yet hiked every one and, given my advancing age and concomitant slowly reducing vitality, am not likely to do so; I continue to be out and about and explore new trails as I can, even if at a slower pace and with less stamina than in previous years. I have hiked a lot of them, however, and know about more than those I have hiked, if only by reading. At the bottom of this page, you will find a comprehensive list of all of the trails¹ in Cape Breton that I currently know about.

When I started this site, I had hoped to put full descriptions of every hike I have taken in this area of my web site. Its overall organization reflects those hopes, although, to date, I have managed to get proper descriptions for only a few of these hikes posted; I hope to add more going forward, but, as I have discovered to my surprise, I have no more free time in retirement than I had while I was working for a living. I therefore apologize for the sketchiness of the current coverage, but I trust you will nevertheless find information and photos here that are not readily available elsewhere. You may also want to check out the “Discoveries” portion of the annual “News and Discoveries” web pages in this area of my web site; each offers brief descriptions of the hikes that were new to me that year and my reäctions to them. If you have not already checked out my photo essays, have a look as many of them touch on the trails which I hope to eventually describe here in detail. For this purpose, you may find the newly created and still very incomplete essay catalogue very helpful in narrowing your search through the essays to the trails of interest.

I have grouped the trail descriptions by county, as seen in the subtopics links in the navigation bar above: nearly every trail lies within a single county—only the Trans-Canada Trail, in its currently envisaged form in Cape Breton, and the Seawall Trail span multiple counties. You can explore the trail descriptions either by descending to the county level using the links or by browsing the comprehensive list of trails below, which also has links to those trail descriptions now on the site.

¹ I use the word trails here rather loosely; some hikes are, at least for a portion of the hike, along snowmobile trails or gravel roads in the back country, while a few are along unmaintained paths and yet others are at or along beaches and rocky coves.↩

Each of my trail descriptions begins with a Summary table which, I hope, will be mostly self-explanatory. The following should clarify those points that may not be completely obvious:

• “Trail Length” is always the distance from the start to the end of the trail. When “Loop” is “No”, this is normally half the hiking distance, as you will need to return the same way as you came (unless, of course, both ends of the trail are accessible and you put a vehicle at each end). When “Loop” is “Yes”, the trail forms a loop that will bring you back to (or close to) where you started; in this case, “Trail Length” is also the hiking distance.
• “Reference Times” are the times given by a referenced source (which is identified along with the time). I am not sure how these were arrived at, but they often seem overly generous and I am not a speedy hiker (on a flat trail, I average about 4.4 km/h (2¾ mph), not including frequent breaks, but slow substantially when even modest climbing is involved), so I assume they are not just hiking times, but allow time to stop and enjoy the scenery on the way.
• “My Times”, by way of contrast, distinguish between “hiking time”, which is the time I spent moving forward, albeit ever so slowly uphill, and “clock time”, which is the difference between the times when I began the trek and when I ended it, which includes the hiking time plus time spent for pictures, frequent rests to regain my breath when climbing, to enjoy the views, or for refreshments or a bottle of water to slake my thirst.

The “Condition” section and the information in the descriptions were accurate at the time of writing, but, particularly for trails and gravel roads, their conditions may change from one year to the next due both to the action of the weather (the rains and storms of 2008 were particularly damaging to roads, both paved and unpaved) and to that of man (e.g., logging, trail improvement activities). Where I am aware that conditions have changed from the time of the original report, I have added footnotes to the text to convey changed circumstances. I do not revisit each trail each year, so it is possible that what you find will not be what I did; I would appreciate hearing of any such descriptions that time has rendered incorrect.

If the hike being described occurred after Christmas, 2008, GPS information is included using the notation described here; for most of the hikes I have taken since then, I have complete GPS tracks and full field notes, though, in some cases, a lost pencil or GPS loss of power during the hike has resulted in incomplete information. Google Earth allows me to render the GPS tracks in a very helpful way, but, as I understand them, Google’s copyright restrictions preclude me from posting a screenshot of the result on-line. I will, however, be glad to send what I have to you on request (use the contact link in the footer below).

Following the Summary table, you will find an Extended Description section, which attempts to describe in detail the route the trail follows, together with my impressions and reäctions to the hike along with any events that may have occurred. My goal is to give you some of the flavour of this hike and to provide a good idea of what you will encounter on the trail.

Where an interesting extension to a hike occurs along a trail, a “Side Trail” section describes it. Information about a side trail is not included in the Summary table, though I have attempted to provide information on the distance, climbing, and time involved in the side trail description.

The final section consists of photos that I took during the hike. When I have already written a photo essay that covers the hike, the photos I used for it are not given here; in such a case, this section notes that this is the case and gives a direct link to the photo essay, which should be consulted, as the best shots I had at the time of writing the essay are there and those given here are supplemental ones that offer additional views that were not included in the essay for one reason or another. If no photo essay covers the trail, all the relevant photos are given in this section.

As I hike these trails again in future years, it is my intention to update these trail descriptions with additional information and photos as appropriate. I will be very interested in the feedback you have on these trail descriptions; it is my hope that you will find them both helpful and useful.

The long table below lists, in alphabetical order, all of the trails in Cape Breton that I currently know about; those generally known by two names are listed under each. If you are aware of any trail that is not included in this list, please send me an e-mail with a description or a link using the contact address in the footer below.

This table aims to be comprehensive and provides one or more links to web pages with information about the trail or, failing that, a few words documenting what I know of the trail. Trail names in orange designate trails that I have not yet hiked (or, if a parenthesized fraction follows, have hiked only as much of the trail as conveyed by the fraction) and of which I have no personal experience (beyond the amount indicated by the fraction when present). Trails whose names are in green I have completed at least once during the past eighteen years, so I know about them first-hand, though that knowledge may be out of date if I have not recently been on the trail (or even if I have—a winter storm can badly damage a trail).

Please be forewarned that, for whatever reason (e.g., the trail is overgrown and no longer maintained or it has suffered severe infrastructure degradation), some of these trails may no longer be viable hikes. When I am aware that a problem exists with a trail, I so note along with the source of that information. If you encounter a trail that is no longer hikeable or has become unsafe or has changed its character significantly from the description in the links, please so inform me at the address in the footer below and I will add that information to this table.

The Links section contains links to external trail descriptions as well as to other areas of my own web site. All of the links were valid as of 2018 June 3; however, the external links are, alas, frequently ephemeral. Should you encounter a broken link, please let me know at the address in the footer below, as I do not check them frequently. Some links, for web pages that have disappeared from the Internet, are to copies that the “Wayback Machine” archived. Some sites are sometimes not immediately responsive—be patient and they should respond after several seconds. In a few cases, the site does not offer a direct link; when this happens, follow the special instructions in square brackets below the link.

Although they are not Internet links, I have also included references to the relevant pages containing Michael Haynes’ descriptions of trails found in either edition of his Hiking Trails of Cape Breton; these are shown as “H1” for the first edition and as “H2” for the second edition. Unless a trail is included in both editions, be sure to check his preface to the second edition, pp. 7-8, for the reasons he dropped the trail from the second edition; such trails may have had serious problems when he last hiked them.

Eight years ago, the Province of Nova Scotia provided descriptions and maps for a good number of the trails in this list, though they moved from one URL to another with with disconcerting frequency; I am now unable to locate them on any current provincial web site and assume they must have been withdrawn for some reason. Although I do have private copies that I archived on my machine, they were protected by a crown copyright, so I can not post them on this web site. Fortunately, however, they were captured in the archives of the “Wayback Machine”, so I have replaced the provincial web site links with the corresponding links to those archived web pages: in the Links column, they are identified as “Provincial Trail Description” and “Provincial Trail Map”. Please again observe that some of these trail descriptions may now be way out of date, though when they were current, I found them to be very useful resources. It is beyond sad that the province is unable to find the small amount of funds necessary to at least keep both the descriptions and the maps on-line and up to date and to add the numerous trails that were not covered at all in the past–Cape Breton is rich in hiking resources!

Two Facebook groups, Hike Cape Breton and Les Hikers, are very useful resources in learning about Cape Breton trails, a number of which are not otherwise well known. The members of these groups are friendly and willing to answer questions in some detail. Many posts include descriptions of recent hikes, usually accompanied by photos, and are valuable for seeing remote areas, even if you are not a hiker. If you are on Facebook, I strongly suggest you check them out.

To save space in the table, the following abbreviations are used:

CBHNP

Cape Breton Highlands National Park

CMTC

Cape Mabou Trail Club

H1

Michael Haynes’ Hiking Trails of Cape Breton, revised first edition, 2002

H2

Michael Haynes’ Hiking Trails of Cape Breton, second edition, 2012

PCAFWA

Polletts Cove Aspy Fault Wilderness Area (north of Pleasant Bay)

¹ Two spellings are in use: Lacs des Plés Ferrés is preferred locally and Lacs des Plées Ferrées is used on the topographical map and in Barrett’s guide book. The word plé or plée is an Acadian term, defined in various ways (see Barrett’s guide book, p. 78). In this context, it most likely means a barren, so the English version of the place name would likely be Iron Barren Lakes.↩