Hopewell Rocks

Beaches & CovesNew Brunswick,Canada

Tree-topped sea stacks on Canada's Bay of Fundy, where the world's highest tides let you walk the sea floor, then kayak over it by evening.

September·Peaking now

Sep

The park runs on eight-to-six hours through the equinox — long enough to watch both extremes of the same tide in one visit.

Year-round The stacks stand and the tide turns twice a day, year-round; the stairs to the sea floor open only mid-May to late October.

Hopewell Rocks lets you walk on ground that will lie under 14 metres of seawater by nightfall. The Bay of Fundy carries the highest tides on Earth, and at low water you take a staircase down and walk out across red, rippled mud among a line of sea stacks 12 to 21 metres tall. They are pinched at the waist and still carry soil, spruce and birch on their heads, which is why they are called the flowerpot rocks. Six hours later that floor is gone. The stacks have turned into tree-topped islets, and kayakers glide over the exact spot where you stood. The point is to come twice. The rock they are cut from is a Carboniferous conglomerate, coarse natural concrete of pebbles and boulders shed from mountains some 350 million years ago. The tides here are a matter of rhythm rather than size. The bay's water rocks from end to end on a natural beat of about 12.5 hours, almost exactly the interval at which the Atlantic tide returns to push again. Every push lands in time with the last, like a child pumping a swing. Later upheavals tilted the rock beds to 30 or 40 degrees and split them with vertical cracks. The tide has prised those cracks open ever since, with ice taking its turn each winter, eating the base faster than the crown. In late July and August the flats between the rocks fill with tens of thousands of sandpipers fattening on mud shrimp. Nothing here is fixed: on 14 March 2016 the most photographed stack of all, Elephant Rock, dropped 100 to 200 tonnes of itself in a single fall. The park opens in mid-May and closes in late October.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come within about three hours either side of low tide — that is the window when the staircase is open and the sea floor can be walked; staff clear the beach as the water returns.
One ticket covers two consecutive days, so use it deliberately: catch the sea floor on one tide and the flooded stacks on the next, and you see two entirely different shores.
You cannot launch your own boat here — paddling among the flowerpots at high tide is done on a guided kayak tour, which books out in midsummer.
The mud is slick and the water climbs over a metre an hour — wear shoes you are happy to rinse, and get off the sea floor the moment staff call it.
The park runs mid-May to late October — outside those dates there are no stairs, no staff and no services, and the shore belongs to the ice.

Things to do

1
Walk out on a sea floor that will be gone by evening
Stairs drop from the clifftop onto red, rippled mud that the tide uncovers twice a day. You can walk the whole line of flowerpots along the base of the cliff, tipping your head back to find the spruce and birch growing on top of them.
2
Paddle among the flowerpots at high tide
When the bay comes back it turns the stacks into little tree-topped islands, and a guided kayak carries you over the exact patch of mud you walked earlier. Sitting at the waterline, you look up at trees you were looking up at from the sea floor — the same place, six hours and a whole world apart.
3
Stand under an arch the tide is still cutting
Where the sea has driven clean through the base of a stack, you can walk under the rock and out the other side. Up close the stone is stacked beds of pebbles and sand, tipped 30 or 40 degrees long after they were laid down. Those tilted seams are the lines the tide has been exploiting ever since.
4
Watch the sandpiper flocks turn over the mudflats
From mid-July to mid-August the flats fill with tens of thousands of semipalmated sandpipers, packed shoulder to shoulder and stabbing at mud shrimp. When something spooks them the whole flock lifts as one sheet, flashing dark and then white as it banks, before settling back onto the mud to eat again.