Kouchibouguac National Park

The Kouichibouguac National Park was designated in 1969 to preserve and protect a unique piece of New Brunswick’s Coastal Plain Ecosystem. The park has barrier islands that change with the tide and the wind, short sand dunes that are equally dynamic, lagoons, estuaries, salt marshes and tidal rivers that host aquatic and sea bird populations, ancient bogs and fields, and forests regenerating from past timber harvests. Its name is hard to spell, and pronouncing it is difficult enough that we needed coaching – fortunately, this was available from the helpful park staff.

For summer visitors to Kouchibouguac (pronounced koo-she-boo-gwock) there is plenty to do – fishing, birdwatching, geocaching, clam digging, and beaches – and it’s most well known for it’s 60 km/38 miles of gravel bike trails (which are called nordic ski trails in the winter). We’ve not used our bikes much this summer, so here was a good opportunity to fix that. We took them off the rack, tuned them up, then spent a good bit of time exploring these bike trails.

Our campsite was awesome! In a large campground (>200 sites) over Labor Day Weekend, we had a generous and private site nearly surrounded by trees. The back of our site opened to a large field, and there was a playground just across the road – so yes, about a million kids were biking, running and having fun in or on the way to the playground, yet the commensurate noise, especially during this last hurrah of the summer, was reassuring and not unpleasant, for this was the sound of wondrous, wholesome outdoor fun. Less than 1 km/0.6 miles away in any direction, all was peace and quiet and simply pleasant. There were no early drives to trailheads at the break of dawn to make sure we got an RV-size parking spot from which to stage an epic hike on a possibly busy trail. There were just gravel trails that took us wherever we wished to go.

And the weather was perfect for 4 days in a row! Temps were in the mid-teens C/low 60’s F at night and low 20’s C/low 70’s F during the day, with light winds. The sky was windex blue the whole time.

With Doug’s fresh tune on our gravel bikes, we headed over to Kelly’s beach via a trail that followed the Kouchibouguac River. From the bike parking, we walked 1.2 km/0.75 miles across layers of shoreline leading out to the water – the estuary, sand bar, lagoon, sand dune and finally the beach looking out over the Northumberland Strait in the Gulf of St Lawrence. We were chatting with some folks we met who were from Cape Cod (yes, the place in Massachusetts) and noticed these little black bumps sticking out of the water, a ways off shore. Seals! They looked to be having fun.

The park is open year-round (nordic ski trails, right?), however the interpretive programs end on Labor Day weekend. We were fortunate to catch the final show of their presentation entitled ‘Water.’ A group of park staff members with Mi’kmaq, Acadian and Ontarian roots did a round of how many words can be used to describe water (hundreds), play-acted a long tall tale of a legendary Celtic creature called a Selkie, sang us sea shantys, and did demos to creatively show properties of water and features of aquatic ecology. It was well done and fun! We congratulate them on wrapping up another season.

Another day, we decided to follow the main trail in the other direction along the Kouchibouguac River (none of the trails have names) and down the other side of the river to check out the Loggiecroft, the commercial lobster dock within the park boundaries. We watched as a lobster boat came into the harbor at a good clip, curved around the dock, drifted a turn, then backed into a parking spot all while the crew were running around preparing the dock lines for tying up and containers for unloading. Impressive! On the way back to camp, we were struck again with how delightful the bike trails were – just a quiet and simply pleasant bike ride through the forest.

We biked to the Welcome Center on our final day. The center featured exhibits on the flora and fauna in the park through all seasons, and there was also a section to honor the approimately 1200 people expropriated from their land when the national park was formed.

Since we never had to move during our stay, we had a bit of extra time to get caught up on reading, photos and trip planning, and we managed to spend some delightful time each afternoon playing music. This simply pleasant stay was different from many of our national park visits. We loved it!

For anyone who’s interested, more beach, river ride and welcome center ride pix…