Irving Nature Park occupies a peninsula at the southern tip of Saint John, a gift to the city from the Irving family that covers 243 hectares of coastal forest, cliffs, and shoreline on the Bay of Fundy. It is one of the best easily accessible pieces of wild coastline in the Maritimes, and it is free to visit.
The park has around fifteen kilometres of trails that loop through spruce forest, along clifftop edges, and down to cobble beaches. The Fundy shore here is dramatic — the tidal range is enormous, and the cliffs and sea stacks give a sense of the geological scale of the bay. Shorebird migration in late summer brings tens of thousands of sandpipers to the tidal flats. Bald eagles are resident. Seals haul out on the rocks visible from the cliff trail. Come with good walking shoes and a tide table; the low-tide foreshore reveals a second landscape of kelp, tidal pools, and exposed rock entirely invisible at high water.