Poking Around

Today we drove out another of the branch highways, 414 heading east. We took it to the end at LaScie. It’s always a bit startling to come from the interior highlands and suddenly see a hill and the ocean in front of you.

Bud stopped as we approached so I could get this photo. We then headed around the harbor and up towards those hills beyond town.

We ended up here and I walked to the edge…

and it was pretty dramatic.

I love the color of the water.

This fishing boat went out just past where it is now, then turned and went back into the harbor.

We weren’t yet at the highest point. See those railings up there?

We went up there. I think this may be the place where Matey stopped. I carried him the rest of the way up.

The view from the top was spectacular. Better than that there was a local man there and he’d just seen a whale. We stayed and watched the whale periodically come to the surface and talked to the man for at least a half hour. He told us it was several hundred feet deep just off this shore, which may be why the whale was spending most of its time under water.

He pointed out where the fish factory used to be and told us what it was like then. There used to be almost 50 big fishing boats in the harbor and they brought in so much cod that it kept 500 people working during the season. He worked for years as a filleter. He showed me a video of himself filleting a cod. He did it with about 6 knife strokes.

He said the valley we see here was his favorite place to hunt moose. He used to hunt seals off the farthest point you can see, walking out on the sea ice. And every little while his stories would be punctuated by one of us pointing down “There it is.” as the whale surfaced again.

When we left to go find something to eat he was still up there enjoying a view he sees every day of his life (though he said he hadn’t been up here in a while, he’d had too much work). Matey was enjoying the smells. We’d seen a red fox run down when we arrived, I think Matey caught his sent.

The local guy told us this ATV trail would take us down so Matey could avoid the steps. (He called it a bike trail, as the folks here refer to even four wheel all train vehicles as bikes).

The restaurant he recommended was closed on Monday so we bought some food at the grocery store and headed about four miles across the peninsula to the tiny little town of Shoe Cove. This is their harbor.

We ate at a little park…

on the freshwater pond in the middle of the town.

The whole place is surrounded by hills. The pond drains into the harbor at the gap in the hills you see here.

And my cousins and my siblings please note, Newfoundlanders still hang out their laundry.

Most of the lines are on pulleys and folks put them where they fit, even in the front yard over the swimming pool.

The information from the Visitor’s Center listed a museum in Tilt Cove, so we headed there next. The sheet didn’t mention that the population of Tilt Cove was now four.

This is another place with a pond on the edge of the ocean.

But here the surrounding hills have all been mined for copper.

We drove around the pond looking for the museum. We didn’t see it, but did see this outhouse, which we decided to use.

I never thought from the outside that it would look like this on the inside, hands down the nicest outhouse I’ve ever been in.

Next door to the outhouse was a little trailer that turned out to be the fishing and hunting camp of a guy who grew up here. Not one of the four official residents, but he was out on his porch and we asked about the museum.

Turns out the museum closed during COVID and they never reopened. Our informant told us Don, who ran the museum could explain better than he could. He then gave us a ton of information about the town and the mine.

The current four residents are:

Don, the mayor, and his wife, and Don’s sister, the treasurer, and her husband, who also happens to be Don’s wife’s brother. Got that?

Anyway, this whole area was a copper mine and that hill is all tailings.

This was a main part of the mine until a cave in. Fortunately the cave in occurred on New Year’s Eve when the company was giving a party and all the miners were at the party, so the mine was empty of people when it collapsed.

Closer inspection shows the collapse left a void…

now filled with water…

that drains out here. The red is not mud, it’s iron. The rocks all around are full of iron.

There is a pond shaft here, though I don’t know what that was for.

And here’s the capped main shaft, 2,952 feet deep. I did not walk out on the concrete cap.

This used to be the structure for the loading dock…

And all this rubble used to be the wharf.

On the way out of town we saw this unusual pile.

This looks like iron slag, but as we’d left our source of information back in town on his “bike” we can’t be sure.

In the little town of Woodstock we saw this little light house out on this pier. We stopped for a picture and a woman across the street called out about something in the lighthouse.

I couldn’t quite hear her but went to look. When I ducked in through this miniature door…

I saw this plaque.

Thanks, Glen Decker, for creating this space.

It’s a nice spot to enjoy the harbor at Woodstock.

Further down the road was this pull-off that gives a view of the harbor entrance and welcomes you to Paquet.

This is another picturesque little town whose harbor is a cove on the west side of the long inlet going to Woodstock. There was another inviting walking trail there, I think it went over those hills for a view of the ocean.

After poking around these beautiful hills and coasts all day I am again convinced that the best thing about Newfoundland is Newfoundlanders.