Rockcut Trail: Codjacks Cove

February 27, 2025February 27, 2025 / Maria / Leave a comment

In addition to my series on the East Coast Trail, I’ve also been writing about the Rockcut Trail, both located in Newfoundland. For those new to my blog, I grew up in Newfoundland and spent the first 23 years of my life there. I’ve explored most of the 300km long East Coast Trail by section hiking (I just have 3 left) from St. John’s, where my parents live. My Nan lives in Twillingate, which is a beautiful island on the central north part of the (big) island. It’s accessible by causeway and is popular among tourists for whale watching and iceberg hunting. They recently re-branded all the trails on Twillingate Island as the Rockcut Trail and have been improving them, so I’ve been trying to hike them all. See my other posts on Little Harbour and Top of Twillingate.

In Summer 2024, I visited with my sister, Emily, and my friend Brandon, who came all the way from BC to explore Newfoundland! Our biggest priority was to go fishing (which we were able to do twice) and visit with Nan, but we managed to find a bit of time to hike Codjacks Cove. This trail is located on the northeast side of the South Island and leaves out of Durrell. Drive down Horwood Lane to find a small parking lot. The road continues on from there, so if you take the left branch (the right branch goes to the dump), you can drive a bit further, but it was a nice day, so we just walked it.

Once you hit the coast, there’s a wooden staircase that heads down to Codjacks Cove and you can hang out on the beach. There is a single tent pad at the back of the beach that is newly installed if you feel like camping out! The trail is an out-and-back, so we skipped the beach on the way in and continued along the trail. The trail goes through the woods and along the rocky coastline of Gunning Head, with beautiful ocean views wherever you look! The trail supposedly continues all the way on the Little Harbour, as they’ve been working to connect all the trails into one longer thru-hike, but we just hiked for ~3km before turning around and heading back, since we only had one car.

We had a beautiful day for it, though it was windy of course! We stopped into the beach on the way back and I went for a little skinny dip by myself because Emily and Brandon were too chicken to participate! Well, Brandon was too chicken, Emily just didn’t want to. Like every trail on the island, it’s very beautiful. They’re all pretty similar, so you really can’t choose wrong. You can read more about the other sections of the Rockcut Trail on their website. I only have one section of trail left to explore in Purcell’s Harbour, but it’s been many years since I’ve done some of the other sections, so I plan to re-do them before writing about them. Twillingate is really special to my entire family and I feel lucky to call a little slice of this island home.

Rockcut Trail: Top of Twillingate

March 20, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 2 Comments

As the name suggests, the Top of Twillingate Trail hikes up to the highest point on Twillingate Island. It’s not very tall, at only 110 metres in elevation, but it’s my favourite trail on the island. It’s located just up the road from where my family lives, so I’ve done it too many times to count over the years. You can even see my Nan’s house in Bayview from the top!

The Top of Twillingate is a loop trail that is ~4km in length. It starts off flat and you come to a branch for a little additional loop around the pond, which I recommend doing because the trail is so short anyways. The entire section around the pond is boardwalk, so it makes for a quick and easy walk. After the pond, you come to another branch to start the loop up to the top. It doesn’t really matter which way you go, but if you want to do the lookouts in order, take the right branch.

In total, there are 4 lookouts plus the tower at the top of the hill. The top of the hill is forested, so they’ve built a tall tower to get up over the trees to see the surrounding island. The tower is neat, but I think it’s lookout #2 that is my personal favourite, because that’s the one that looks down to my Nan’s house and out to Manuel’s Cove.

There is of course, some uphill on this trail since it goes to the highest point on the island, but it’s not a challenging trail. It’s only about an hour in total to do the entire hike, so make sure to do all the lookouts and enjoy the views! There’s no coastal hiking on this trail, so it’s quite different than a lot of the other hikes on the island, but there are views of the whole island, so I definitely recommend doing this trail for something a little bit different. A personal favourite for me!

Rockcut Trail: Little Harbour

March 13, 2024July 11, 2024 / Maria / 1 Comment

In addition to the East Coast Trail, I’ve done a fair bit of hiking on Twillingate Island. My mom grew up in Twillingate and my Nan has a beautiful property in Bayview, so I spent a lot of time there growing up. I’ve done several of the trails over the years, but in recent years, the trails have been re-branded as the “Rockcut Trail” and I’ve been impressed to see a lot of work being put into expanding and maintaining the trails. Twillingate is a bit of a tourist metropolis in the summer time, so it’s nice to see some care being put into the trails. You can learn more about the full trail system on their website – in total there are 13 trails identified on the Island, 5 of which have been branded as a part of the continuous “Rockcut Trail”.

I’ve done both the French Beach and Spiller’s Cove Trails in the past, but not recently enough to write about them. So this past summer (2023), I hiked a new section of the trail, which is known as the Lower Little Harbour Trail. It can be done as a round trip hike out of Little Harbour, or as a longer hike through to Purcell’s Harbour. I was visiting for a few days with Emily, Karen, and Grant, and it was super hot out, so we opted to just do the Little Harbour loop, which totals 5km.

We thought it was going to be an easy hike (which it might have been in cooler conditions), but it was actually a fair bit more challenging than we anticipated. You start by walking down an old access road to Little Harbour, and then you spend most of the hike navigating around the headland to Jones Cove, before returning back to where you started. The majority of the hike is exposed on barren rock, so it’s incredibly scenic, but could be very windy in the right conditions. It was not windy when we visited (rare) and we had the sun beating down on us (also rare).

There’s a few viewpoints you can hike up to and during our visit, the bay was filled with icebergs! The trail gets a little technical and goes into the trees before Jones Cove, but the beach at the cove is gorgeous and they’ve recently constructed some brand new tent pads at the back of the beach! We stopped for a break and me and Emily went for a quick swim in the ocean. It was absolutely freezing, but refreshing on such a hot day.

After Jones Cove, the trail crosses back over the headland and you return the way you came, but I’d definitely be keen to return on a future visit and continue on to Purcell’s Harbour. I have a strong connection to Twillingate Island, so I look forward to completing all the trails in the future and this is hopefully the first entry in a new series!