Hiking the Admiral Lake Loop
After a long pandemic and life-related hiatus from hiking I thought it was about time to get back on the trail. After not having been out on a trail for so long I had to choose carefully: something challenging but not too challenging. After a quick look around I landed on the Admiral Lake Loop, part of the very good Musqudoboit Trailways Association. I’ve done a couple of their longer, more challenging trails, the South Granite Ridge and North Granite Ridge trails but knew I couldn’t handle either of them at the moment.
Desperate for a relatively local hiking challenge this year, I decided to finally hike the 
As I had a couple of extra days off for this year’s Labour Day long weekend I decided at almost the last moment to spend a few days in one of my favourite places: Kejimkujik National Park. One of the few remaining parts of the park I hadn’t hiked or paddled through was the Channel Lake Loop, an almost 27-kilometre loop in the middle of the park.
It’s been about three years or so since the Wil-Bo-Wil cabin was built in 
It’s been another fairly quiet summer when it comes to hiking. I haven’t been completely lazy though as I’ve been helping a friend build a rustic cabin on some family property. While building a cabin is fun and difficult work it’s not quite like getting out on the trail and exploring. So with that, this past weekend a friend and I decided to head back out to the 
I hiked this trail almost six years ago when I first moved to Nova Scotia. I was looking for a good, lengthy, challenging trail and I found it. It’s been a few weeks since getting back from Tanzania and it was time to get back on the trails here at home. The weather so far this spring hasn’t been great for hiking — unless you like hiking in the pouring rain — and this past weekend I found myself with both the time and weather to get out for a good long hike.
I don’t know what happened this summer, but I didn’t get out hiking as much as I wanted to. The weather was perfect this year, so the opportunities were there. I think it was poor planning on my part and not prioritizing properly.
For the third year in a row, a few friends and I headed into the backcountry of