Nova Scotia commits $6.4M for rugged hiking trail in northern Cape Breton

The Nova Scotia government is putting $6.4 million into a wilderness trail in northern Cape Breton that has been in the planning stages for 15 years.

The proposed Seawall Trail covers nearly 50 kilometres of rugged terrain, travelling through sensitive ecological areas looking out over the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Cabot Strait.

The funding will go toward designing and marking the trail, building several huts along the way for hikers to use overnight and parking areas and a shuttle service from Meat Cove to the trailhead near Pleasant Bay.

The Seawall Trail Society took community consultation seriously, including local residents who hunt moose in the area and the Mi'kmaq, who hunted in the area for thousands of years, said society chair Ray Fraser.

"For anything to be successful in life, the residents of an area, the user of a product, are the ones that need to be consulted and that's the local residents," he said. "But the Mi'kmaq were here first and it's their land and their expertise and they have a voice that was silenced and not listened to, so we have to listen to that voice."

The society has Mi'kmaw representatives on its board, who recently named the trail Jajiktek (pronounced jaw-jick-deck), which means a difficult path or trail along the water.

At a funding announcement in Meat Cove on Monday afternoon, elder Ernest Johnson said it was not easy to come up with a name, but that the trails in the area have long been used by the Mi'kmaq and by the animals of the forest.

"[The name] means that it follows the roads of the ones that [were] there before us," he said.

No tenting

Officially opening the trail to hikers will allow the land to be shared and provide educational opportunities, Johnson said.

Tenting will not be allowed, but the huts will allow hikers to stay overnight, while reducing their impact on plants and animals.

"You would fit more people in small huts than you can in tents scattered all over the place and our goal is to protect the environment as much as possible," Fraser said.

"It is a wilderness area. It's a sacred place and we've got to respect that area."

Inverness MLA and deputy premier Allan MacMaster said the government believes the project will bring more tourists into northern Cape Breton.

"It's been here for a long time, but it's going to take shape into something more formal now and it's going to be here forever," he said.

Design work will start this year and the trail is expected to be ready for visitors in three years.

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