Ingonish Beach to Baddeck Part 1

Today started out much earlier than the rest of days on the Cabot Trail. We went down to the hotel restaurant for their breakfast buffet and there were lobster fishing boats out checking all the traps right outside the window. Very cool!!! Breakfast hit the spot and allowed us to load up on some calories for our biggest day of the trip.

We start out shortly after 9 and our first stop was a convenience store as we didn’t have any nutrition for the day. The snacks we picked up had little nutritional value but we just needed carbs as we had almost 100 km of riding ahead. The day was going to be our longest at 96 km and the second most elevation with over 1150 m. The first little climb of the day, 1.1 km with 49 m of elevation (4.4% grade), came quickly but was just a warm up for the big one, Cape Smokey which started within 10 km of our starting point. The climb started out slowly, picked up in the middle and then settled back down. It was a total of 259 m of elevation over 6.6 km (3.9% grade). Compared to the previous two days, this was tame, however, the decent on the other side was STEEP. The two warning signs in the way down said 10% and 12%. I would have taken pics but I couldn’t slow down enough with out some seriously hard breaking. I even missed the lookout too. It was fast and steep. The Strava segment ‘Smokey Steep Decent’ lists it as 2.24 km with -204 m, that’s an average gradient of -9.1%. My average speed was 49.6 km/h, which felt amazing and super fun. We had some amazing views along the trail and spotted a cafe sign 17 km ahead which would be a perfect time for a pastry and coffee. The next great view we had was after a short climb and it was timed perfect. As we pulled in a car load from Maine pulled in to snap some pics and were more than happy to take a few for us. After that it was about 5 km to our snack stop.Read more