If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’re probably aware that I’ve slowly been working towards section hiking the entirety of the 300km long East Coast Trail. In summer of 2025, I knocked out two new sections of trail that I’ve been wanting to do for a while, one of which was Bear Cove Point Path. 

Bear Cove Point Path is one of the last sections on the southern end of the trail. It runs from the town of Fermeuse to the town of Renews, although we did it in the opposite direction, starting from Renews. The trail is approximately 12km long and has a nice mix of forest walking and coastline. Despite it looking like a relatively flat trail, there is 250m of elevation gain across the length of the trail.

If you begin in Renews, the start of the trail is very scenic. The entire first section is along exposed coastal meadows. You can take in a bit of history looking at the old cannons scattered along the coast as you hike the trail out of Renews, with beautiful views looking towards Cappahayden. We made a short stop along Northern Head to have a snack and enjoy the views, before continuing on along the trail.

The trail is pretty evenly split in two by the Bear Cove Point lighthouse. I thought the southern half of the trail was more scenic, and there are several viewpoints along the way to the lighthouse. We opted to take our lunch break at South Point rather than Bear Cove Point, but I think this was a good choice as there wasn’t really anywhere to sit and enjoy the view at the lighthouse. The lighthouse is really more of a tower with a light than a lighthouse, but it wouldn’t be a bad place to camp if you were doing a thru hike. Just watch out, there was lots of thistle around (which growing up I always called it “stinger-needle”).

The second half of the hike went by a little bit quicker, mostly because it was in the forest. Once you start hiking in towards Fermeuse, large sections of the trail head inland. I didn’t note a lot along the second half of the trail and it ends when you hike into Kingman’s Cove. We parked 1km further along the road at the viewpoint on Kingman’s Cove Road, which is where the ECT instructions say to park, but I don’t think this trail gets a lot of visitors (we went on a Saturday and didn’t see a single person on the hike), so you could definitely get away with parking on the road near the trailhead. It was particularly annoying having to hike uphill on the last kilometre on what was a pretty hot day.

Overall, I really enjoyed this trail. I did it with my sister, Emily, and my friends, Karen and Grant. So we had two cars, which made it a lot easier because we could park a car on either end. I’ve struggled to do the last few trails on the ECT because they’re such a long drive from St. John’s and it’s hard to get two vehicles to do it. I did a lot of the shorter hikes as there and back hikes to avoid the second car. You could do Bear Cove Point with one car, as there is an inland shortcut trail that crosses the headland, but I’m glad we didn’t have to! As of right now, I only have the final path to Cappahayden left to do, so I hope to return against next year to finish it!