You can reach every loop without camping
Although The Bluff Trail is designed as a stacked loop trail, it is possible to reach even the remote loops without staying overnight. All loops are accessible by canoe and can be explored in a day trip.
Paddling in cuts a six-hour walk to the fourth loop down to under an hour. There are three put-ins, one for each of the outer loops, and getting there has the directions and the portages.
What the law says
The Bluff Trail is inside a protected wilderness area and is governed by the Wilderness Areas Protection Act. Except in certain circumstances, the Act and the Order on Camping and Lighting of Fires in Designated Wilderness Areas prohibit — among other things — the development of campsites, the cutting of trees, damaging or removing plants, and the burning of campfires.
The only camping permitted on The Bluff Trail is Leave No Trace camping, at the designated sites. Because of the increasing harmful human impacts visible on the trail, WRWEO and Nova Scotia Environment's Protected Areas Branch have already limited camping to the approved sites and are considering prohibiting it altogether.
The four approved sites
On 21 August 2016, with the approval of Nova Scotia Environment, WRWEO designated three sites on The Bluff Trail as NSE Approved Leave No Trace Educational Camping Sites and posted signs at each. A fourth was added subsequently. Two are on the north leg of the Mi'kmaw Hill Loop, not far from Frederick Lake and the intersection with the Bluff Loop; the third is on the cross-section of the Bluff Loop.
Why they are called “educational” sites
They cannot be held up as examples of ideal Leave No Trace camping. By placing signs to notify hikers of the designation, we have already left a trace and undermined the very principle we are promoting. Ideal LNT campsites would not sit directly on an established hiking trail, and all four of these do. And each of them was already marked with evidence of harmful human impacts before it was selected.
All four are on flat rock, which is an excellent durable surface for a tent. But the lichen and mosses have already been crushed, killed or scraped off those rocks. A number of spots bear the signs of campfires, and some of the nearby trees have been limbed or cut for boughs to sleep on or fuel to burn. These are all examples of how not to camp, which is exactly what makes them useful for teaching.
They are not even the worst-damaged places on the trail. There are at least two sites on the Mi'kmaw Hill Loop with considerably more damage from campers and campfires: more than twenty trees cut down at each, trees limbed and hacked, soil layers damaged by poorly placed and far too large campfires, and fire damage to the tree canopy above.
