We talk about finding wilderness trails not far from the city, yet we don’t mention the Crowbar Hiking Trail system, just next to Porters Lake, barely a 20 min drive from downtown Halifax.
This was a 6k out & back along the Porters Lake & Spriggs Brook trail until the bridge to cross the stream.
The plan was to make it to the West Lake trail junction. One of the things you’ll note when entering these trails is that it is pure wilderness. The terrain, doesn’t appear to be tough, but as you add the kms, the terrain slowly beats you down.
We opted to come here in the fall as the bugs are mostly gone and it was pretty dry summer, so many of the wet spots were dry as a bone. This made things easy going.
The biggest attraction along this trail is the granite landscape and the barrens forest peeking. Only a few sights can be had along the trail. You will reach a lookout point after 2k and the trail slowly gets better and wider the closer to the Spriggs Brook bridge.
After 90min to reach the bridge, we opted to turn back. 3 hours for 6k is quite the trek, The most deceiving part is that there are a lot of elevation. It seems you are going up hill both ways.
The parking lot can place a dozen cars and cell phone reception is very spotty along the trail.
More info here:
https://www.halifax.ca/trails/documents/CrowbarLakeHikingTrail_June17th.pdf
http://www.trails.gov.ns.ca/shareduse/hx122.html