Like he has most summers since the mid-1960s, John Newton is getting ready to come to Cape Breton. Just a few minutes after sharing his story and as soon as the new tires get put on his motorcycle, he’ll hit the road and drive from his Massachusetts home across New Brunswick to join his wife, Janice, at their cabin on Aspy Bay in northern Cape Breton. “She has already been there a week,” explains John, “and we’ll be there for several more weeks. Then we’ll come back again later in the fall and close up everything. We look forward to that, the different seasons and the travel back and forth.”

After a long process, John has just completed the donation of most of his family’s land on Wilkie Sugarloaf. It’s land that his family first encountered in 1961 or ’62. They were used to traveling all summer; together they camped all over North America, primarily in some of the Canadian provinces that were just starting to develop provincial parks. That year, they went to Newfoundland having heard that the highway had just been paved; unfortunately, it hadn’t, and ten days of steady rain finally prompted them to head back to the mainland.

They looked in a campground guidebook and found Johnny Wilkie’s Sugarloaf campground. It was warm and dry, and they ended up coming back to camp there several summers in a row. Eventually, John’s father, Jack Newton, heard that a piece of the property might be for sale and ended up buying it.

The land was an original grant from the queen, minus a small five-acre parcel that had been sold the year before. It held a small cottage that turned out to be a very nice timber peg frame, so they gutted it and added a tiny addition on each end and turned it into the family’s summer place. “My folks retired up there until my mother got sick,” John says. “At some point I decided I wanted to take it over with my sister, so we fixed it up and got it back to the way it should be.”

John and Janice continued to come to the cabin several times every year for three to four weeks at a time. “We’ve loved it.” Janice, a novelist, even set her most recent novel Meat Cove in the area, where it’s being heartily enjoyed by local book clubs.

John continues, “We don’t have any kids. Nobody in our family has any interest in it because they never were there.” At the same time, he wanted for the local community to continue to be able to enjoy the property, as they always had. “It seemed like a wonderful thing to do to make sure that most of the property would stay the way it always was. So rather than trying to sell it, it made a lot of sense to preserve it in perpetuity.”

John learned about the Nature Trust and the possibility of partnership with American Friends of Canadian Conservation, and was able to go through the process with support from the Nature Trust team. “We had some special issues related to the deed” that made the process take longer than expected, explains John, “but they were all doable and got done, and it’s all a done deal now.”

While the protected property includes Nova Scotia’s highest free-standing peak, John and Janice kept the small piece of land where their cabin sits. He shares that this portion, including the cabin, “will be donated to the local hospital when we can no longer use it, and they will sell it and use the money to improve their facilities.” In the meantime, John and Janice are treated to a front-row seat to much of the wildlife whose habitat is now protected, just up the mountain. “In front of the house we might see moose, foxes, blue herons. We have a lot of birds, and the ocean is full of wildlife – what we mostly see from our window are seals, and I’m sure the sharks are out there chasing the seals.”

When John arrives at the cabin on his motorcycle, he’ll be able to look across the road and know that he has a made a difference for the future of Nova Scotia’s nature.

We are so grateful to John for this generous gift, ensuring that Wilkie Sugarloaf will remain in our nature forever. Learn more about the spectacular wild places we’re working to save next.