Fundy National Park, New Brunswick, Canada

Fundy National Park is located on the East Coast along the Bay of Fundy, just a bit north of Maine. The bay is famous for having the World's highest tides. A typical tide change is a couple feet take Myrtle Beach, SC for instance, they have tide changes of about 2ft, but in the Bay of Fundy it's 9-16m (that's 50ft) in height! I'll explain this a bit better in my "Hopewell Rocks" post, but for now just know that while this bay is full of water twice a day, it's also empty for just about as far as you can see twice a day! It's crazy! Fisherman know they only have about a two hour window at high tide to access the dock. If they're late coming back, they'll have to wait until the next high tide 12 hours later! Boats in this area are equipped with wooden box contraptions that hold the boat off the dry ground at low tide. It was so strange to see these boats tied to docks while completely out of water.

And the tide moves fast! On Alma beach, it crawls up the beach about an inch per minute. We spent a couple days exploring the mudflats here. The little town of Alma is just a short walk, including 107 stairs, from our campsite at Headquarters campground.

View of Alma Beach from our campground

The rocks were gorgeous. The kids had fun collecting them and pretending they had a store for us to purchase these amazing jewels. Of course we left them where we found them, this is a national park.

This is a reversing river. It looks like this during low tide and flows from the back of the photo to the front, into the bay. During high tide it flows towards the trees and will fill the entire foreground of the photo.

We attended a ranger led program where she explained the tides and how they are caused by the sun,

 moon and earth before turning us loose on the beach to collect anything and everything we could.

After about half an hour we gathered around to see all the findings and have her tell us about each one. We found Green Crabs, Seaweed pods, sideswimmers (little critters that draw the birds here to fees on), snails, slipper chiton, hermit crabs and more.

But my favorite part of Fundy was Dickson Falls. (see next post)