Wilkie Sugarloaf Sweetly Rewarding

Another blithe weekend day, another lifer mountain for ourselves and my constantly companionable cousins. With Lynn and Louise we gradually work our way through the remaining new-to-us mountain hikes inventoried in Michael Haynes’ 2^nd edition, Hiking Trails of Cape Breton. Saturday it was Wilkie Sugarloaf’s turn to shine in the sunny spotlight. Wilkie demands a steep 400 m ascent with nary a switchback to ease a pounding heart but rewards those who persevere with terrific vistas in every direction.

Along the way birds generously provided a regular pretext for pausing and deploying the binoculars, including one or two out of the ordinary: a boreal chickadee here, palm warbler there.

"Some say that on a very clear day you can even see Newfoundland," Haynes laments, "I have never been so lucky." On Saturday, as we approached the summit, our quartet was that lucky and we have the pictures to prove it. The rocky outcrop at the mountain top is too small a vantage point to accommodate a large assembly but sufficient to gratify a foursome hell-bent on appreciating all the visuals: south to Aspy Bay and North Harbour Beach, west to the North Mountain Range wilderness, north to Bay St Lawrence.

Three weekends in a row we have been treated to outdoor gems with L & L. All have been terrific, but I’m hard-pressed not to put the latest at the top of the heap. After descending the mountain we jettisoned footwear and took a barefoot meander along the long sandbar at North Harbour Beach. This is the place where John Cabot is imagined to have moored the Matthew in 1497 and gone for a beach walk of his own. A bust of the explorer marks the historic spot.

Our focus was less on old explorers than it was on shorebirds: we saw sanderling, least sandpiper, both of the semi-palmated species – plover and sandpiper – and most gratifying, two golden plovers on their way to the far reaches of South America, one already in winter dress, the other still molting out of breeding plumage.

One final highlight capped the day. I don’t know what provoked it, but suddenly there was a challenge: one twin threw down the gauntlet and before you can say Usain Bolt they are in a barefoot dash a hundred metres down the beach. To avoid getting myself in doo-doo I won’t disclose who won and who lost but you can take a look at my footage of the event. At the end, the one slamming her shoes into the sand is not Louise:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigadore/9709330517/