Where travellers can walk on the ocean floor

Swept twice daily by the world's highest tides, the Bay of Fundy is home to a host of only-here experiences for adventurous travellers willing to venture off the beaten path.

Racing tides and time, I left before dawn. In order to reach Ministers Island, a tidal island at the southern tip of New Brunswick, I planned to walk across a slender strip of seafloor that's exposed only at low tide – an ephemeral path, passable for just a few hours each day. When the North Atlantic sweeps back, which it does with surprising force in Canada's Bay of Fundy, that trail disappears beneath 6m of frigid seawater.

Driving along the coast, I passed through dense forests and still-sleeping towns. Ministers Island was my first stop on a three-day journey through a dramatic landscape shaped by the world's highest tides; it was still early, but I kept a close eye on the clock.

Before I spotted the sea, I smelled its saline tang, then I saw my path: fresh from the ocean, flanked by waves, salt water puddled amid its barnacled rocks. A woman in knee-high rubber boots dug in the sand for soft-shelled clams. I waved hello and began to walk the 1km-long sand-and-gravel strip, my shoes squelching faintly on the seafloor.

Jen Rose Smith

If getting to Ministers Island is a journey worth travelling for, it's also a destination in its own right. The 200-hectare island was the summer retreat of self-made railway magnate Sir William Van Horne who helped drive the Canadian Pacific Railway across the continent in 1885, physically unifying the new nation and opening up its vast wilderness to tourism.

Hints of that history linger like easter eggs amid the estate's elegant cottage, bathhouse and barn. Van Horne buried a train car to serve as a water tank for cottage residents and guests that included royalty and dignitaries. The acetylene gas lighting that once illuminated the house was the same used on Canadian Pacific railcars – cutting-edge technology in the late 19th Century.

"I think the whole cottage looks a bit like a train," said Susan Goertzen, the island's longtime tour manager, tilting her head as we gazed at the building from its elm-dotted lawn. I could see it, sort of. Yet the Van Horne family used the island, above all, to escape the bustle of their Montreal home – savouring a tranquillity that still reigns on the island's 20km of walking trails. The ocean served to buffer the family from the outside world.

"When the tides came in, it was total privacy," said Goertzen. "Around here, we still live by the tides."

Jen Rose Smith

That's life at the edge of the Bay of Fundy, which boasts the highest tidal range on Earth and is considered one of North America's natural wonders alongside places like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park. Twice a day every day, roughly 160 billion tonnes of water – more than all of the world's freshwater rivers combined – rush into this inlet dividing the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. This torrent causes the tides to raise and lower as much as 12m (the global average is about 1m), setting the pace of daily life for locals, providing rich feeding grounds for wildlife and creating a series of only-here experiences for adventurous travellers.

I'd planned my road trip to see this show firsthand: chasing the low tide from Ministers Island to a series of sites transformed by the sea. It meant early mornings and long, leisurely afternoons spent waiting for the tide to go out. After walking back across the ocean floor to the mainland, I watched the sea rush back towards the coast. A few hours later, catching its crest, I boarded a Zodiac boat trip from the town of St Andrews with Fundy Tide Runners to search for whales and other marine wildlife that feed on the buffet of nutrients swept in with each tidal cycle.

"Whale! Whale!" Two sharp-eyed women in the bow quickly became our de facto wildlife spotters. Following their pointing fingers, I saw the indigo fin of a minke whale slice through the chilly water. A dozen whale species use the bay as a feeding ground and nursery, our captain explained, from the resident minke and fin whales to visiting North Atlantic right whales. Skirting the coast, we passed near the Old Sow whirlpool, the second largest whirlpool on the planet – formed as the rising tide ricochets into the western end of the Bay of Fundy.

Back on shore and following that tidal trajectory along the bay, I drove towards Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park. There, 20 sea stacks rise from the seafloor, their tops sprigged with trees. At high tide, they're islands in a sloshing bay; when the tide goes out, they're oceanic high-rises amid glistening hanks of kelp.

Jen Rose Smith

When I descended a path down the nearby cliff to the base of the stacks, they loomed above me and disappeared into the sky. Their cranial bulges and slender waists suggested human figures. In one story recounted by the Mi'kmaw and Passamaquoddy First Nations who have inhabited this landscape for more 11,000 years, the Hopewell Rocks are people turned to stone by fierce whales.

"These legends have been around for a long time," said George Paul, a Mi'kmaw Elder from Metepenagiag, New Brunswick. Many such stories revolve around the demigod Glooscap and his kin, who "created the world around them", Paul said. Then he spun another: once, when Glooscap won a duel against his evil twin, the wolf Malsum, he spared his life only to imprison him in solid rock.

"He turned him to stone to face the punishment of the ocean for thousands of years," Paul said. "Hopewell Rocks are Glooscap's punishment for Malsum until he comes back – until he returns."

According to some stories, Glooscap sailed his magical canoe away to the east, beyond the sea. Since I was piloting a rust-spotted Prius, I instead set an overland course to Nova Scotia and Joggins Fossil Cliffs, where rocks enshrine a history deeper than the oldest human stories – one that predates mammals, birds and flowering plants.

These coastal cliffs, a little-visited Unesco World Heritage Site, are dubbed the "coal age Galápagos" for their fossils of plants and animals from some of the first creatures to walk on land more than 300 million years ago.

Jen Rose Smith

"Almost every rock you pick up has fossils that are 75 million years older than the dinosaurs," said tour guide Brian Hebert, owner of Fundy Treasures, which offers guided fossil-spotting tours of the cliffs and beach, timed to the low-tide window when the fossilised forest is most accessible. Hebert spent his childhood scouring the beach for finds and has been guiding tourists along these cliffs since he was just 12. In 2023, his contributions to science earned him the world's most prestigious award for amateur palaeontologists. In the nearby museum, I'd spotted a fossilised scorpion – the only one ever discovered at Joggins. The tag read "B Hebert, collector".

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I met Hebert by the fire station in the map-dot town of Joggins and followed him to a deserted beach where 30m-tall cliffs crash into the Bay of Fundy. The cliffs' tilting bands of red, grey and black stretched out of sight in both directions. Below, the beach was strewn with stone rubble, which the cliffs extrude as they erode.

"It was a completely different world than we're used to," said Hebert, pointing to vertical stone columns frozen into the cliffs – the trunks of 40m trees that once shared swampy, ancient forests with reptiles and giant flying insects. Once I learned the fossils' telltale outlines, I began to spot them everywhere. At my feet, a rock imprinted with a tree's diamond-patterned bark. Nearby was a fossilised fern, its delicate symmetry instantly recognisable.

Without the Bay of Fundy and its tides, this historic trove would be hidden, Hebert explained, locked below ground along with the rest of our world's ancient secrets. It was the sea that gashed open the cliffs, throwing open a rare window into deep history.

Jen Rose Smith

"If we didn't have the Bay of Fundy, no one would know about it. And there are more fossils being exposed all the time," Hebert said. A light rain began to spatter; a section of cliff slumped towards the beach. Stones rolled seaward, leaving in their place a freshly exfoliated cliff face, its pebbled surface pocked with never-before-seen fossils.

We stood quietly, watching the rocks catch the afternoon light, resplendent after 300 million years in the dark.

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