The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides. Just roll with it.

It happens twice a day, every day, and has for thousands of years. But watching the world’s highest tides arrive and recede in the Bay of Fundy never gets old.

At the head, the tide can rise about as tall as a four-story building. Photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman and I drove to Burntcoat Head Park in Nova Scotia, where visitors can walk onto the ocean floor when the tide is out and return hours later to see it disappear under the 160 billion metric tons of water that flow into and out of the bay each day.

At the Fundy Discovery Site, tourists can witness a tidal bore, or a wave that moves upstream in a river. The times for the day’s bores are listed outside the visitor center, but on this mid-September day, birds began flocking around the banks of the Salmon River, announcing the bore’s arrival. “It’s like the cavalry coming up over the hill,” says Nancy Wood, visiting with her husband, Leonard, from North Carolina.

Within 15 minutes, the bore rolled in, covering the riverbed upon which the birds had been happily perched at low tide. “You don’t see this every day,” says Mr. Wood. 

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