Exploring the erosion-sculpted beauty of Five Islands Provincial Park

With a little imagination you can travel around the world within a two-hour drive from Halifax. If you have a hankering to visit Nunavut’s arctic coasts, the stark granite barrens at Peggy’s Cove are a perfect stand-in. If you feel like touring Tuscany’s wine country, save the airfare and visit the Annapolis Valley for rolling vineyards galore. If you want to bask on a Caribbean beach, try Crystal Crescent’s white sands and turquoise waters for a visual equivalent—just don’t go in the water or the illusion will shatter like ice.

There’s no mistaking Nova Scotia for a desert, but you can find a Maritime version of Arizona’s red rock canyon country with unexpected ease. On the outer reaches of a two-hour drive from Halifax, there’s a place with enough erosion-sculpted red sandstone scenery to film a spaghetti western—Five Islands Provincial Park, where the desert southwest meets the misty northeast.

Five Islands Provincial Park is found along highway 2, a part of the Glooscap Trail that follows the Bay of Fundy’s northern shore. The park’s entrance passes through a mixed forest that could be almost anywhere. First impressions, however, are deceiving. Head to the campers’ beach and the forest opens up like a movie curtain. All of a sudden you’re in a widescreen panorama of red rock cliffs, with the added bonus of a beach that varies in width from 2 metres to 1.6 kilometres, depending on the tide.

A carpet of bright green filamentous seaweed covers a sandstone rock formation at low tide at Red Head.

There is plenty to explore on the campers’ beach, but to see the most intricately sculpted sandstone cliffs you will have to earn the view with a three-kilometre hike (six-kilometre return) to Red Head. The hike to Red Head is unique among walking trails. The entire route there is underwater for at least part of the day. You’ll be hiking along the ocean floor, moving through space recently occupied by fish.

As you can imagine, there are some essential safety concerns involved with hiking on the sea floor. For one thing, you should never actually be walking through water. Also, it is imperative to avoid being trapped against unclimbable cliffs by a rapidly rising tide.

Carefully timing your travel to Red Head with the receding tide allows a leisurely stroll of at least six safe hours. It’s more time than you will need for the actual walking, leaving some extra hours to explore and have a picnic. Following out the tide after high water at the campers’ beach is the best way to begin.

The first stage of the hike heads south towards the Old Wife, a landmark sea stack rising up just off the point of a black basalt cliff headland. Undulating red cliffs streaked with sedimentary layers of white gypsum line the way to your left. There is an ever-changing selection of red rock boulders scattered along the cliff’s base. Some of the boulders appear to be recent arrivals, while others have been softened by waves at high tide. Geology occurs in real time here, sometimes frighteningly so. You won’t have to look at the cliffs for very long before seeing pebbles or a fast moving stream of gravel bouncing down the cliff’s face—a warning to keep your distance, or risk becoming a permanent part of the scenery.

Sandstone boulders that have rolled down from eroding cliffs are common on the campers’ beach at Five Islands Provincial Park.

At high tide the Old Wife is offshore, but about an hour after the tide turns a rocky isthmus appears as if by magic and joins the Old Wife to the mainland. You’ll have to wait for the isthmus to appear before you can carry on with the hike and turn east around the headland.

If you’re waiting for the tide to drop at the Old Wife, there is a world of small-scale exploration to occupy your time. A dense growth of rockweed coats the intertidal stone, even in places that are above water for most of the day. The jungle-like growth of rockweed is a mini-metropolis for periwinkles that form squiggly paths in the silt behind them. Look closer and you’ll find other denizens of this wet/dry world, including limpets, crabs, and clams. My daughter is always tempted to pop the rockweed’s built-in air sacks like bubble wrap, before being reminded that this is how its leaves float toward the sun
while underwater.

When the tide allows, you can scramble over the isthmus and walk around the headland turning towards the east. Here you are treated to a view with as much drama as can be contained in unmoving stone. Black basalt cliffs, tinged with orange and yellow, appear to have solidified from molten magma just yesterday. Red sandstone is interspersed with the basalt for a brilliant red and black contrast. It’s a landscape that can be appreciated by geologists and artists alike. In the distance, two kilometres down the shore, is a brilliant red headland that is your ultimate destination, the aptly named
Red Head.

The scenery in present day Five Islands Provincial Park speaks of its origins more than 200 million years ago. Back then the sedimentary red sandstone was a dried up lakebed on the mega-continent of Pangaea. When Pangaea began to split apart, huge cracks formed rift valleys in the sandstone plain. Molten basalt then flowed into the valleys, creating a mixture of basalt and sandstone that remains at Five Islands Provincial Park to this day.

The remaining walk to Red Head occurs on a mix of terrain. With the tide about two hours out you’ll be walking atop randomly sized boulders covered with barnacles that look like mini-volcanoes. It’s a great area for rockhounding, and it is fairly easy to find quartz deposits if you pay attention. Amethyst and fossils are also found here.

As you carry on to Red Head the ebbing tide will reveal an expansive mudflat to the south, and the shoreline becomes surprisingly distant on the horizon. In July the mudflat, then teeming with mud shrimp, becomes a buffet for migratory birds. It is tempting to walk on the mud, as its flat surface looks more inviting for walking than uneven stones. Unfortunately, this is the kind of mud that likes to slurp down shoes with an impressive vacuuming sound. The smoothest walking is found on the border of the boulders and mud, where some nicely sized pebbles make for the easiest passage.

Upon arriving at Red Head you’ll realize that hiking or walking were inadequate words to describe your journey. You’ve been on a pilgrimage to one of nature’s cathedrals. The forces of erosion have formed an amphitheatre of red sandstone that wraps you in a visible sculpture of wind and water currents. Sound is hushed and you are compelled to whisper.

Far away, on Navajo land in northern Arizona, there is a sacred sandstone canyon called Antelope Canyon. It looks like Red Head’s long lost twin. It almost seems like you could find a direct passage between them, between a distant desert and Nova Scotia’s shores.