In Search of a Trail

Flatwater Park sits in the middle of Baie Verte Peninsula, just before the trunk road branches out. Newfoundland has one main highway, TransCanada Highway 1, shown on road signs as TCH. Routes branch off of that to reach various points on the shoreline. Only occasionally is there a road that loops back to THC, or even to a branch road.

Today we decided to head east off the trunk road 410 to look at the three towns at the end of 413. These three trails were listed. We wanted to find a nice place at town level to look out at Green Bay and hike the Red Cove Falls trail.

So we drove first to Middle Arm.

It was very pretty and had several nice lookouts but the bay of Middle Arm is almost bisected by land between the town and Green Bay, so it was not a good place to watch for icebergs or whales.

We saw a sign for Falls and Swimming Hole, and we found this lovely falls. This was just a couple hundred yards off the road, so no trail.

It did look like a nice place to swim, though.

Next we decided to drive through Burlington to Smith’s Harbour and look for the Limestone Park Trail.

Before we took the trail I suggested we continue past Smith’s Harbour to King Island, which sits not too far from where Green Bay comes off from The Coish, which is supposed to be a great whale hangout. There was no overlook at all, only this view from the turnaround at the end of the road. It was pretty, but it wasn’t near the shore and the only view was back to Baie Verte Peninsula.

We didn’t see any sign of either of the other two trails in the guide, but we had seen a sign for Two Mile Falls Walking Trail, so we went there.

The beginning of the trail was a highly graveled path on boggy land.

Seeing this I realized that part of the path is maintained by hand, with a wheelbarrow and a shovel.

This sign made us hopeful that maybe we would see some salmon. They are supposed to be moving into freshwater in the spring and summer.

We found a place to get out to the river (actually East Brook).

There were some beautiful views…

but no salmon.

I was content just trying to capture the beauty.

We decided to leave this lovely spot and make our way upstream a bit further.

So far the trail had been dog friendly,

but not this section. I didn’t want Matey to try and walk here as he was likely to hurt a leg. And I didn’t want to try and carry him along this as I was likely to hurt a leg. So we turned back.

We made a detour to check out the swimming hole. I realized these lovely archway signs do double duty as ATV barriers.

This was another very inviting swimming hole.

As we drove back to Flatwater Pond I thought that this was a pretty inviting place, too.