The Bay of Fundy

Twice a day 14,000,000,000 gallons of water flow into and out of this little Bay–maybe it's 14,000,000,000 m³?–Anyway it's a lot. The experts say that it is more than the flow of all the freshwater rivers in the world combined! 

 It's pretty dramatic. Unfortunately all day Monday it was rain, heavy at times. And today, Wednesday, it is again. But we had a brief first bite on Tuesday and met again I got out to go hike on the Fundy Trail–a provincial park that extends some 20 or so miles up the bay including a wilderness area attached inland. There are a few photos on the blog of our little hike. They speak for themselves it was beautiful, green, and very nice. Distances are misleading as the air is so clear but things are often much further away than they look.

Click on the arrow on the photo below

We did one long hike down, and then back up to a beach. The beaches themselves are composed of well rounded and worn rocks of an incredible variety of colors. They seem to have come from cliffs which consist of sandstone encapsulating many of us more pieces of rock some already well-rounded so it tells me that this land must've formed at least twice once when the original magma emerged in the rocks of various types were formed, then eroding cracking and being released and eroded by the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, and then somehow being encapsulated in sand and crushed and compressed to form new rock with the bits of the original rock still in it. These new sandstone/original rocks were lifted up again by geologic forces into the new clips and it is these that are now eroding and releasing wonderful, but very stony beaches.

Maggie found it very very difficult to walk on the surface as her paws would spread out over the pebbles and her toes were stretched. I didn't press it but we did get close enough to some of the caves to take pictures. When the tide is in these caves are completely submerged and subject to erosion, thus exposing the rock.

One picture does contain a sunbathing girl–look carefully at the captions and when you get to that picture try to enlarge it sufficiently she really is there in the upper left-hand corner on the beach–a very long way away–she helps to give some perspective to the scene.

In another picture the tide is fully out at the St. Martin's harbor. You will see the fishing boats (for scallops) resting on the bottom a few hours later they were floating right up next to the roadway. I don't know why the bridges are covered–they are old in it probably helped back before they had snowplows. In the fourth to the last picture you will see a expanded view of the St. Martins Bay and in the far right-hand edge along the water you will see the campground and our trailer parked by the water. I think it must be three or 4 miles across the bay so you will have to really enlarge the picture that these are the kinds of “big sky” perspectives we enjoy it when it's not raining.

It was 57° out this morning when I woke–I tried hard to remember how Washingtonians are enjoying their hot summer and then gave up and turned on the furnace to warm the place up before I got up. It dried things out and mated cozy. Maggie and I took a long walk through the grasslands before the rain came and we are now busy doing computer stuff.

So, as Walter Cronkite used to say–"and that's the way it is."