Kouchibouquac - Canada Day Weekend

For Canada Day weekend, Erika and I headed to Kouchibouguac National Park on the coast of New Brunswick. I took the afternoon off work, and headed to Moncton to get Erika, from there we drove for roughly an hour and a half to the park. We had to take it a little slower them some other people as we had two bikes strapped to the back of the car. In any case, we got there with plenty of sunlight left to setup our camp. It's always nice being able to setup a tent when it's still light out; we are getting pretty good at setting them up in the dark, too.

Kouchi has a pretty big camp setup, and the wooded sites are huge. We could have easily fit three or four tents on our site. As it was just the two of us, we had plenty of room to ourselves.

Once we had the camp all setup, we hopped on the bikes and went to explore the area. There is a great deal of crusher dust bike trails, a reasonable mountain bike trail, accessible walking trails, and some wooded hiking trails. Erika and I mapped out what we wanted to cover, and then setup a fire to relax by for the night.

The next morning, we hopped on our bikes again, and headed for the big sandbar. It was about a 12 km ride from our camp to the boardwalk. We locked up the bikes at the boardwalk, and went over to the sandbar. The sandbar was full of dunes and was a huge nesting area for piping plover. We walked along the sandbar for a few kilometers looking for shells and sand dollars, but still never made it to the end of the sandbar. It started to rain a bit, so instead of getting soaked, we turned and headed back for the bikes.

The weather was really weird, cause it would rain for about 20 minutes at the start of each day, but then it would clear for the most part. There would be a few showers, but they were really isolated. You could come across parts that looked like they hadn't been touched by water in days. This being said, our first little shower ended by the time we got to the camp, so we decided to keep exploring. That afternoon we covered pretty much every small trail in the park, adding up to about another seven or eight kilometers. These trails were more of nature walks then hiking trails, but we got to see some interesting stuff in any case. There were interpretive panels setup explaining how the land was originally used and the how the land has changed. There was a tipi at the start of one of the trails, but it wasn't exactly made of traditional materials (I don't think they had much extruded aluminum bars back then).

When we got back to our camp for supper, there was a little bunny (Buddy the Bunny) hopping around our camp. I ran into this bunny a number of times while we were at Kouchi, but it was scared of me, so never got close to it. The chipmunks and squirrels though, would come right up to you.

For the evening, we went for a bike ride and got some ice cream from down by the beach, and watched some raccoons trying to raid the garbage cans down there. We then went back to the camp, made a fire and planned out what we were going to cover for the next day.

Again, it rained for a bit in the morning, but once we had some breakfast in us, we headed for the Osprey Trail. This was the best hiking trail that we found in the park. The trail followed the water around a point, and brought you through wooded areas filled with lady slippers. I had never seen so many lady slippers in one spot. This single trail had probably around 150 lady slippers, and the trail was only 5.5 km.

There were also a lot of woodpeckers on this trail. We could hear a pileated woodpecker calling while we were walking, but never saw one until we stumbled across one sitting in some ferns. We heard it calling, and were looking in the trees, so it scared the crap out of me when it flew up out of the ferns in front of us. I'm not one of them quick draw Gunn's, so I didn't get my camera out in time. However, there were a bunch downy woodpeckers throughout the trail and I was able to snap a shots of some of them.

With Osprey Trail covered, we stopped for some lunch, and headed for Claire Fontaine trail. This was a pretty good trail as well, and you had lots of evidence that deer loved the trail too. Unfortunately we didn't see any deer, just lots of their poop. Erika powered through the first portion of the trail, barely stopping for any views. She was on a mission to conquer all the trails in the entire park, I think. She eventually decided to slow down a bit, so I took the lead and Erika took the camera. After a brief break under a tree down by the river, hiding from the rain, we started off again. With me walking at a closer to normal pace and avoiding the piles of deer poop, we finished up the four kilometer trail.

For a quick trail before supper, we head to Bog trail. This trail is mostly board walk, but it really interesting. The area started off as a small marsh, but due to the clay ground in the area, the water couldn't drain. As a result, the marsh took over the area, spreading and taking over more land. The entire area is really mossy, filled with lady slippers, pitcher plants and some other really different plants that I hadn't seen before. This area is supposed to be really good for spotting moose and other animals, but we weren't there at the right time to see any. It was still a really interesting area.

As it was starting to rain a bit again, we packed it in and headed back to camp. By this point we had covered all but two trails in the park. One tiny, short 700-meter boardwalk, and the long 11 km one-way trail. If it wasn't raining the next morning, we may have covered the long trail, but instead we just packed up in the rain and headed back to Moncton for the afternoon.

All in all, Kouchibouguac is a nice park, that seems to be very under used. There were very few people out on the trails, and a lot of the camp sites were empty. It made for a quiet getaway for us, so I won't complain too much.