Rockcut Trail: French Beach

April 18, 2026March 19, 2026 / Maria / Leave a comment

I’ve slowly been working my way through all the sections of the Rockcut Trail in Twillingate. My Nan lives in Bayview, so it’s been a fun project to work on from summer to summer when I visit her. Summer of 2025 was particularly special because we had a family reunion over a weekend in July and many of my family members from all over the country came home to visit.

Our time was mostly spent celebrating my Nan’s 90th birthday, but I also wanted to find time to go for a hike while I was there. Some other family members got wind of my plan and before I knew it, a group of 10 of us had wound up at the trailhead to French Head. This wasn’t my first time hiking French Head, I had done the trail with Seth and my parents way back in 2015, but I couldn’t remember it well enough to blog about it, so I was happy to revisit.

The trail starts at the end of Main Street, where there’s a small parking lot for French Beach. You can hike into the beach along the trail or via a short road – both end up at the same place. 10 people is definitely too many for a group hike, so we quickly split into a couple of groups. We had some pace setters up at the front, the nature gawkers at the back, and a middle bridge group, which is where I mostly hung out trying to keep the everyone together (an impossible feat).

French Beach is only a few minutes from the trailhead and is a gorgeous beach looking out on the harbour. From there, you hike up and around French Head. It’s an incredibly scenic trail and most of it is exposed, so you get views the whole way. I think this is one of the more popular sections of the Rockcut Trail (aside perhaps from the Top of Twillingate section), and it was surprisingly busy. From French Head, the trail continues up towards Spiller’s Point, which is a special place for us because it’s my Uncle Trevor’s favourite fishing ground, so we’ve spent a lot of time there in boat through the years.

Once you hike around the point, the trail continues south towards Spiller’s Cove. At this point, our group really got separated. The slow paced nature group was really lagging and my GPS showed a shortcut through the bog, so that part of the group opted to take that exit and slowly make their way back towards the car. The shortcut is not marked and it is a muddy, wet section of trail with lots of brush scraping your ankles, so maybe not recommended if you’re visiting. Emily and Seth didn’t care about taking this route, but my mom was pretty cranky about getting wet feet.

I didn’t take this route. Me and my cousin, Matt, opted to fastpack along the rest of the trail to try and catch the front group. The trail continues to be very scenic and we could just see the rest of our group hiking along the rock in the distance, but we had no hope of catching up with them. Eventually we made it down towards the end of the trail before it cuts out to go to Slade Lane, but it’s a little bit confusing in this section, with multiple trails branching off from one another. We thought we were following the rest of the group, but we ended up on an unmarked trail. The trail clearly existed, it was very developed, but it wasn’t marked on my GPS.

We determined we had not taken the same trail as the rest of the family, but we thought we could find a shortcut back to the road. We ended up doing a bit of light bushwacking and ended up exiting the trail through a family’s backyard (whoops!), but we did end up back on the road just as the fast group was on their way back to the car. At the same moment, the slow group arrived on the road in the car and we had a good laugh about how we took 3 separate routes and managed to all end the trail at the same time!

I wouldn’t recommend our strategy though. If you’re visiting, I recommend just planning to do the full 6km route marked on the Rockcut Trail website. This route follows the trail of our fastpacking group and ends at Slade Lane, where you can follow the road back to your car. Alternatively, you can park a second car on Dump Road where there is a second parking lot. Either way, enjoy this beautiful trail, definitely one of my favourites on the island!

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!