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Hiking enthusiasts are quite sanctified when it comes to exploring a park. Its 26 trails operation from peaceful 20-minute walks in a woods to severe treks that prerogative a audacious with unconditional vistas of seacoasts, canyons and a highlands. Some of a routes are suitable for bicycles.
Overnighting is a large partial of a park’s interest and there are 8 campgrounds accessible from May to October, with additional accommodation charity in a surrounding villages including Pleasant Bay, Ingonish and Neil’s Harbour.
For a quirky take on tradition, however, cruise an oTENTik. Described as partial tent and partial cabin, a hybrid digs are charity during a Chéticamp, Ingonish Beach and Broad Cove campgrounds. “You’ll suffer all a fad of camping outdoors, though this time with a soothing bed and a cosy roof over your head,” says Cape Breton Island Tourism.
Roughing it is all good and good, though as Atlantic Canada’s oldest inhabitant park, a Highlands deserves a grand hotel in a cover of Banff Springs in a Alberta Rockies, site of a initial sovereign park in a system.
Enter a Keltic Lodge, located only mins divided in Ingonish, on a northeastern seashore of a island. Built as a summer home for an American rubber magnate, it was after bought by a provincial supervision as a Depression-era plan to strut a region’s burgeoning tourism industry.
More than 80 years after a review and sauna still proudly epitomizes Cape Breton’s Celtic heritage, a 18-hole Highlands Links golf march profitable loyalty to engineer Stanley Thompson’s Scottish roots with severe holes such as a Heich O’ Fash (heap of trouble), a Killiecrankie and a Canny Slap. Golf Magazine has rated it one of a tip 100 courses in a world. Battered by a pandemic, a board has announced it will now be charity winter accommodations in and with a opening of a gondola lift and snow-making machines during a circuitously Cape Smokey ski hill. It’s partial of an island-wide expostulate to attract visitors.
“The direct is really there for winter in Cape Breton,” says Terry Smith, a arch executive of Destination Cape Breton, vocalization with a CBC.
The Highlands highway it is, then.
— Andre Ramshaw