Eastern Shore

For the purposes of the book, I decided to consider the Halifax Regional Municipality in three distinct districts. I labelled these as Halifax/Dartmouth (although this includes several trails just outside the urban core), Central/South Shore (which includes Bedford/Sackville, everything toward Lunenburg County, Waverley and Grand Lake, and the Musquodoboit River Valley), and Eastern Shore (from Cole Harbour to Guysborough County). None of these areas provided better, or more challenging walking than the Eastern Shore.

Because of the superb beaches along this coastline, the province has created a number of provincial parks. Several of these, such as Clam Harbour, Lawrencetown, Martinique, and Taylor Head, are wonderful walking destinations. Some, particularly Martinique, provide a walk less along a developed trail than over long stretches of sandy beach, but are so scenic that few will be disappointed. Taylor Head, on the other hand, boasts an extensive trail system that should permit a full day's exploration for even the most experienced trekker.

With the creation of several wilderness protected areas among the rugged granite ridges of the eastern shore, and the supportive policies of the Department of Environment, the possibility was created for the development of new, outstanding hiking trail networks. Three of the the trails I selected for this book from this district, Crowbar Lake, Gibralter Hill, and the Admiral Lake Loop, fit this description. All developed by volunteers, these challenging routes are traditional narrow footpaths that work through the rugged, rocky slopes of the Atlantic interior. All three require fitness and determination to complete; all three will be among your favourites, as they are for me.

Two of the trails selected, Salt Marsh and Shearwater Flyer, have been created along the abandoned rail-line that extends from Dartmouth to Middle Musquodoboit. (You also walk portions of this in Lawrencetown, Admiral Lake, and Gibralter Hill). These are wider, level, and far gentler experiences than those in the wilderness protected areas, but no less scenic. Indeed, the Salt Marsh Trail has become an icon of the shoreline scenery of the province, and was the first trail outside the US featured by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in their magazine.

Finally, there is the short backcountry trail at Abrahams Lake, deep in the wooded interior of the Liscomb Game Sanctuary near Sheet Harbour. This is one of the oldest privately managed routes in the province, having been developed by a forest-industry company in the early 1970s. Abrahams Lake is also almost the only managed trail in this corner of the HRM.

These ten locations will all be profiled in the upcoming edition of "Trails of HRM". Most will be featured in their entirety. Others, such as Taylor Head and Crowbar Lake, will only outline a route that remains within the 10-km limit of the book. Taken together, these are an excellent mix of experiences, coastal and interior, easy or challenging. I hope that you are able to try them all.

How Were the Profiled Trails Selected?

There are remarkably few managed trails within the Halifax Regional Municipality. The book will profile 30, but you might wonder how did I decide what to include, and what to leave out?

The first criteria that I used was to decide to include entries from every part of the municipality. That was a challenge, because although it would be fairly simple to profile all 30 trails close to the Halifax-Dartmouth urban core, the HRM is quite a bit more than the urban core and extends into areas, such as the Musqudoboit River Valley, that are a long drive from the "city". To be fair, I thought that an attempt needed to be made to include options everywhere in the municipality, even if the quality of experience for some of the listing might not be the best.

Fortunately, there has been tremendous work done in recent years, most often by volunteer community associations, to develop a network of walking/cycling paths in the HRM. As a result, the municipality actually contains some of the finest examples of wilderness hiking trails in the entire province. Add these to the beach walks available, the provincial parks, usually situated near lakes, and the municipal parks and trail systems, and there is actually a quite exciting range of options available.

To capture that diversity, I divided the municipality into three regions: Halifax-Dartmouth, Eastern Shore, and Central/South. In each of these regions I selected 10 listings, ensuring that there would be a trail found wherever you might live or visit.

Naturally, I was also concerned with what type of experience would be enjoyed by the hiker. I did not want every trail in the book to be the same. Ideally, I would want to have some routes that included climbs while having others that stayed mostly level. Winding forest footpaths are what I enjoy most, but I recognize that beginner hikers and groups of friends might like the wide corridors of rail trails. If possible, I wanted a loop route, but, as we know, many trails are only an "out-and-back" walk. And, of course, if a trail can take you to a lake, a waterfall, a look-off, or a good picnic site, that would ranked high on the list of what I wanted to include.

So essentially, the trails profiled in Trails of HRM were selected first for geographic location, but most importantly for the variety of experiences they provided.

And if you think that was easy, don't forget that in order to evaluate what trails would be included, I would need to walk every one of them, and many others that did not "make the cut". Of course, that hiking could be quite enjoyable as well, as you might discover when you try the trails that made it into the book..

Great New Trails!

Hikers in the HRM should be pleased with the excellent new trails that have been developed in the past few years. There are two, in particular, that deserve special mention.

The Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail is a supurb stacked loop system that delves deeply into the remote interior of the Chebucto peninsula. This provides rugged trekking, a slender footpath winding through the thick vegetation and rocky ridges of the peninsula's fire barrens. Trails of HRM will profile the Pot Lake loop, the first of four loops in the system, but a full 10-km of challenge.

The Crowbar Lake trail system, traversing the raised granite uplands around Porter's Lake, also offers single-track hiking that negotiates its way up and down rocky ridges and past pristine, undisturbed lakes. It has laso been designed as a stacked loop system, although requiring a much longer approach march to the first loop. In Trails of HRM, I will profile the trail as far a Granite Lake, which is a linear 9.5-km grunt.

These two trails systems, added to the excellent Grante Ridge and Admiral Lake loop trails in Musquodoboit Harbour, provide the HRM with some of the finest and most demanding hiking routes available in the entire province.