Coaticook

The Coaticook Gorge is the kind of natural feature that shouldn’t exist so close to a quiet farm town, and yet there it is: a canyon carved by the Coaticook River, up to fifty meters deep in places, with sheer rock walls and a footbridge across the top that happens to be one of the longest pedestrian suspension bridges in the world. I’d read the “longest suspension bridge” claim before visiting and assumed it was the kind of exaggerated small-town superlative that turns out to mean “longest in a three-county radius.” It isn’t. The bridge is genuinely, vertigo-inducingly long, and it sways just enough underfoot to make you very aware of the 50-meter drop to the river below.

Lia crossed it without hesitation, filming the whole way, while I went at the pace of someone renegotiating his relationship with heights in real time. Once across, the gorge park opens into hiking trails through mixed forest along both rims, plus a network of trails, an aerial forest walk, and in winter an ice circuit lit up for night skating that I’m told turns the whole gorge into something out of a fairy tale, though we visited in September and can only report on the daylight, forested-canyon version, which was plenty impressive on its own.

The town of Coaticook itself sits in dairy country, and this turns out to matter more than I expected. The region has one of the highest concentrations of dairy farms in Quebec, and the local creamery, Laiterie de Coaticook, has been making ice cream since the 1940s using milk from farms within a short drive. We stopped at their retail counter on the way out of town and I had what might genuinely be the best maple ice cream I’ve eaten in this country, which given how much maple ice cream I’ve eaten in this country is a real claim.

There’s a small museum in town, Musée Beaulne, housed in a Victorian mansion, and a covered market worth a wander if you time your visit for a Saturday. But the gorge and the ice cream are, honestly, reason enough on their own.

When to go: September and October for the gorge hiking trails at their most colorful. Winter for the illuminated ice circuit and skating, a genuinely different experience of the same canyon. The creamery is open year-round and worth a stop regardless of season.