Author Archives: Jill and Bud

In 1960 Helge Ingsted came to the village of L’ance aux Meadows and asked if anyone knew of any unusual mounds or turf walls nearby. Community elder George Decker took him to the place the locals knew as the “old Indian camp”. Helge and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingsted, confirmed that this site was a Viking encampment. Something Helge had been searching for for years.

Today this is a Canadian National Historic Site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the only known location of Viking inhabitation in North America and the oldest evidence of Europeans in America. The site is dated to sometime between 910 and 1030 CE.

We entered the site through this striking Welcome Center.

The boardwalk led through this sculpture, “The Meeting of Two Worlds”. The plaque was missing, I thought it was some homage to the sea.

And I liked the dragon.

There is not much to look at at the archeological site. The major excavation was done from 1960 to 1968, but work in the area continues today. It may not look like much, but a lot of evidence was uncovered here.

Using the archeological finds as a guide, four of the buildings have been reconstructed near the original site.

This encampment is open to visitors.

The buildings were constructed of sod, which here was mostly peat. There was very little wood used. In fact, wood was the main thing the Vikings were looking for.

The buildings were quite cozy inside. Everything but the metal was found locally.

The buildings combined working…

and sleeping quarters.

Here’s the story I got from the docents and the Welcome Center.

Eric the Red was expelled from Iceland for multiple murders. He took a band of people with him where they established a settlement in Greenland. It was not the most hospitable land, it had no trees.

Bjarni Herjolfsson was a Viking trader who was blown off course by a storm. When he was able to return he told the people in Greenland about land to the west with trees, Labrador.

Leif Eriksson then led expeditions to the west. His groups set up this encampment where they would stay for months, overwintering, making ship repairs, and harvesting trees.

It’s known that some groups brought animals with them. Goats and sheep and according to lore at least one pair of cattle.

The site was used for decades but was never a permanent home.

There were locals out in the boggy areas around the site. Bud had the binoculars and saw they were picking something. A docent told him they were picking these berries, Bakeapples.

We drove over to L’ance aux Meadows and saw a sign for Emily’s Jams and Crafts. We stopped and I bought a jar of Bakeapple jam. So now we’ve eaten something the Vikings might have had.

After lunch and our taste of Bakeapple jam we drove out to a very different, but also unique place, Burnt Cape Ecological Reserve. This may look like barren rock,

but it has more than 300 species of plants, 30 of which are very rare.

We drove very slowly out the two miles of gravel road.

The cliffs were beautiful.

You could look across the Straight of Belle Isle and see Labrador.

But what captivated me were the plants.

What looked like patches of moss…

on closer inspection turned out to be tiny flowering plants.

Some I recognized, they were miniature versions of plants I knew, like these spruce trees. It’s like the whole landscape was bonsai’d.

I even saw some very slender 6 inch Equisetum (horsetails or scouring rushes) in a little patch of bog.

I did recognize golden root from our visit to Port au Choix, though even these were smaller here.

The adaptations to this harsh landscape were extreme. This plant raised itself from the rocky soil less than two inches, yet it is a woody shrub. From what I can find, I think it is a species of willow!

This is a crow berry, and its fruit is the biggest thing about it.

Most of the plants were past their flowering, so very difficult to identify. The resident app on my phone had no chance with these. It kept coming up with natives to Australia and New Zealand!

Whether I could identify them or not, I loved spotting them. Like another site on line I will call these orange lichens.

Things often grew together in clumps like this lichen and flowering plant, no doubt sharing scare resources.

There were some “showy” flowers,

if you were willing to get close enough!

Showy or not,

I was captivated by them all;

even Bud started spotting the little beauties.

He most enjoyed the gorgeous setting, but for me that was just icing on the cake.

There are signs that this is a harsh place in the winter, like these posts with reflectors that are put along the highways in places to show the snowplows where the road is. The fact that they are about 10 feet tall is stark warning.

There are plenty of gray skies now. We woke up to cold mist. Bud said the weather report he found said the clouds might be breaking up later in the day so we did some chores in the morning.

Come late morning when it was still cool and gray we decided to go out anyway because we have only a few days in each place and we want to see it. I used my All Trails App again and found a trail quite close that looked inviting. You parked in a wide place on a back road. This sign made it very clear that it was okay to go up someone’s driveway to reach the trail. The people here are as welcoming as we’d been told.

It was a nice path through the hills and trees. The weeds and bushes were heavy with mist and Bud and I were wet to our thighs. Matey was just plain soaked!

When we popped out at the first overlook we knew it was worth it.

We got to the top of the first camel’s hump and the clouds were starting to break up to the north. This was getting pretty.

It was clear from the state of the path that most people turned back there, but the trail went on and so did we.

We were glad we did.

The views were amazing in every direction.

I love the color of the ocean as it breaks against the rocks.

By time we got back to the truck it was getting downright sunny so we decided to do another trail.

We drove about 15 miles to the town of St. Anthony and out past their cemetery to Fisherman’s Point Municipal Park.

We walked their nicely groomed trails.

They had benches here and there so you could sit and watch for whales and icebergs.

Or just sit and look.

There was a great cliff to the south side.

We did not take the trail to the right which led to the 746 steps that took you to the top;

but some folks did.

Instead we continued the loop around the park.

There is harsh weather here,

and an inhospitable shoreline,

and beauty all around.

Even though we saw no whales or icebergs it was a rewarding day.

I am learning that the weather here is very changeable, both in short amounts of time and over short distances. We started a trip north along the west coast of Newfoundland in a drizzle. Soon the sun began to make an appearance.

As we drove up along this sparsely populated coast we weren’t sure what the day would bring.

Things brightened up and we decided to stop at Port au Choix. There is a Parks Canada Historical Site…

just past the little town.

There was nothing to see archeologically except some depressions in the ground left where the houses of some Dorset people lived about 2000 years ago. But it was a lovely cape,

complete with the (faded) red Parks Canada Adirondack chairs.

There was more to see if we would have walked a couple of miles, but with our limited time we were happy just to walk the rocks at the beach.

They were full of fossils, including this one, which I think is an ammonite.

This was growing at the site and when I looked it up I was excited to find it is Golden Root, Rhodiola rosea, and is an Arctic perennial.

But the best thing was, we saw a caribou! You are supposed to keep your distance from them, but this one wasn’t keeping its distance from us.

We continued north and the day got darker.

There were openings in the clouds, but we never reached them.

By the time we got to the campground the sky was solid gray, which went pretty much for the campground, too.

But there were spots of color.

And the most important thing is that blue dot is us, way, way up north.

Several other campers we talked to told us we must take the boat tour while at Gros Morne National Park. The tour is of Western Brook Pond. With a name like that you might expect a rowboat in a pond set in a pasture.

You might be wrong. Western Brook Pond is an inland fjord, 11 miles long and up to 300 feet deep. From 25,000 to 10,000 years ago glaciers advanced and retreated in this area, cutting river valleys into deep glacier valleys.

This all happened along a fault in the earth. To the west the pond has low lands.

But look east and you will see the edge of the Long Range Mountains, which run the length of Newfoundland’s western peninsula. These mountains are the northern end of the Appalachians and at one time were taller than the Himalayans.

When the glaciers first started to melt this was a true fjord, connected to the sea. But as the glaciers retreated the land has slowly rebounded, lifting the shore above the sea. We parked not far from the coast and had to hike two miles inland to the shore of the pond.

As our tour boat approached the cliffs we got a feeling of just how high they were.

This is a zoom shot of the sister tour boat going back along the opposite shore.

This is the same shot without zoom. Can you find the boat? Those walls are towering up to 2200 feet above the boat.

The other boat is now across from us. It looks tiny but held about 50 people.

This is one of several falls we passed.

If you could get close these would be roaring. Those tiny sticks at the bottom are trees!

This one, Pissing Mare Falls, is the highest falls in North America.

Here’s another one I spotted on the way back out.

I found this fault line fascinating. Our guide said faults like this are filled with lava that was forced up into them and then hardened.

The cracking of the walls can leave strange formations. Can you see the face on the wall? The guide said they call this the Tin Man. Looks more sinister than the Tin Man to me.

The people on a tour in 1994 got more than they bargained for. This huge landslide came down while they were approaching within the walls. It made an enormous and scary roar.

We went to the head of the lake and turned around. The dock you see on the right is used to drop hikers off. Experienced hikers who get a permit and take a safety course can get left here and hike up the valley and out to Gros Morne Mountain. There are no marked trails and it’s over 20 miles, so you can see why there are restrictions. There were no takers in our group.

I took this just because the sun was shining on a spot on that cliff.

As we were coming back out to the lowlands you could see the sunshine was where we left it. It would have been nice to see this on a sunny day but the clouds on the cliffs did add an appropriate atmosphere.

First, I should show you, this is Gros Morne. The translation given by Parks Canada is big lonely mountain. This view is from our campground. The mountain is the second highest peak in Newfoundland and its flat top is a piece of arctic tundra. A 10+ mile strenuous hike will take you to the peak and back. We passed.

We are staying at a KOA, and if at first it looks like a typical KOA you just have to look a little further.

At the end of our row, just past the playground is Spirity Pond. Moose Trail takes you around the pond. We haven’t walked it yet.

If you’ve got a tent or smaller rig there are plenty of other sites.

And these offer a lot more privacy.

Besides cabins (or Kabins as they are called at KOA) they have a couple of these little domes.

And like pretty much everywhere in Newfoundland, they have beautiful views.

Gros Morne National Park is quite large and there are 11 small communities that are surrounded by or adjacent to the park. Yesterday we went to Trout River, a small fishing village at the southwest corner of the park.

It has a nice harbor where the Trout River enters the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

They have an active fishing fleet. We talked to a fisherman who said he and those he was fishing with just got back from two weeks up near Labrador fishing for turbot.

It’s very isolated, 84 miles from the nearest town large enough to have a Walmart.

Today we took a hike in another small section of the park. The hike started in Lomond, which had been a company logging town and is now a campground.

We went away from the water through the woods and

up and over a saddle in the hills.

This is looking back down the way we came.

We came down the other side to Stanleyville, which was once a fishing village. Now it has a set of the famous Parks Canada red Adirondack chairs. These are placed strategically at view points in all the Canadian National Parks.

There’s a gravelly beach here and

what looked like it might have been a cave, but we didn’t investigate. After we rested and had a snack…

we took the path back…

to Lomond.

So much to explore, so much beauty!

We are now at Gros Morne National Park and we took a hike on the tablelands today. From a distance it’s a stunning landscape.

Up close it is almost entirely one kind of rock. It turns out that this is not your garden variety rock. This is peridotite, rock that makes up much of the earth’s upper mantle. The rock and soil that we normally walk on, dig in, even mine is all from the earth’s crust. We never see the mantle because it’s miles below the surface.

500 million years ago two tectonic plates of the earth’s crust pushed together here and the mantle rock, which is more dense than the crust, did not get pushed under like normal but ended up on the top of the crust. Eons of movement and erosion have left this bit of mantle exposed on the surface. And if you’re a geologist that’s a very big deal. It is such a big deal that this area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This is peridotite, it has high levels of iron, magnesium, nickel, copper and chromium. If not exposed to the oxygen in the air the rock is very dark green, almost black. The orangey color is rust.

With pressure underground water can be forced into cracks in the peridotite and react chemically to make serpentinite. There were rocks like this scattered around.

Sometimes the serpentinite was an inclusion in the peridotite.

What adds to the strangeness of the landscape is that most plants can’t grow on peridotite. This is the Trout River Gulch. The land on the right is crustal rock and soil and supports a forest. The land on the left is peridotite; even though it has had the same timespan to erode and gets the same sun and rain, it is almost barren.

I learned that the strip of land the trail is on is the old roadbed. The growth along that is on the gravel brought in to build the road.

There are two other things to notice in this picture. The U shape of this valley is from glaciation, also very prevalent in the park.

If you can enlarge the picture and look closely at the farthest slope of peridotite, you can make out a line where the slope changes from brown mantle rock to the gray gabbro of the lower crust. If it had been a sunny day that might show up better. That is called the Mohorovicic Discontinuity. I didn’t even know I had captured that until I started looking for more information and came across a guided tour that I wish I had downloaded before the hike!

The information said even most lichen won’t grow on these rocks, but I found some that did.

I also found Moss Campion, which unfortunately was not in bloom.

Carnivorous plants also grow here. They don’t need to rely on the rocks for nutrients, they get minerals and nitrogen from insects they trap. There were pitcher plants all around.

I also found common butterwort, but not in bloom. They have sticky leaves that tiny insects get trapped on.

None of the park information mentions sundew, maybe because they are so small, but I found some. I love these tiny plants. Can you see the red spikes with sticky drops on the ends?

I also found white bog orchid, sometimes called boreal bog orchid.

There was so much to see, close and far. This is a view of Bonne Bay. It is a true fjord, a valley carved by glaciers and filled by the sea.

The trail ended at Winter House Brook canyon.

The brook came tumbling through the rocks there.

We also saw some travertine here. Calcium in the spring water that comes from the serpentization of peridotite is precipitating out as calcium carbonate, forming small patches of travertine. (Travertine is the fragile rock that forms the huge Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. Same thing here, but on a much smaller scale with no geothermal activity to accelerate the process.) Signs pointed out that the travertine is forming now, brand new rock, on rocks that are 500 million years old!

This wasn’t a very long hike, but it was full of wonders.

Happily it was only 30 minutes from the ferry to our first campground in Newfoundland, since neither of us had slept more than a few minutes at a time on the ferry trip over.

I was not the least bit sleepy on that short ride. We were in Newfoundland!

Grand Codroy RV/Tent Camping Park was spacious…

and very well made. I was not surprised that it had been a small provincial park. In 1966 Jean and Bert Downey donated 10 acres of land to the provincial government for $1. The province developed the campground. In 1997 Newfoundland decided to privatize a number of parks and gave the family first refusal on reacquiring the land. Alice Downey Keeping and her husband Dennis bought back the campground and they continue to operate it. Their pride shows.

After a late breakfast (made later because Newfoundland is on its own time, a half hour ahead of Atlantic Time, so an hour and a half ahead of Eastern Time) Matey and I took a long amble. I let him stop and smell as much as he wanted. After that ferry ride he deserved it.

The park sits along the Grand Codroy River.

Off to the southeast you can see some pretty dramatic cliffs. After our walk I joined Bud in a nap.

Once we were a bit rested we took a short circle tour recommended by Dennis at the RV park; he even provided a map. We headed west on route 407 which crossed the mouth of the Grand Codroy River on this long, wooden, one lane bridge.

We went past Holy Trinity Anglican Church…

and its cemetery which is right on the coast.

We stopped and took a walk at Cape Anguille, the westernmost point in Newfoundland.

We admired the lighthouse…

and the nearby inn. I wondered if that had been the keeper’s house; it didn’t look open.

There was no worry about the fog horn sounding on this day.

We walked a short way along the coast admiring the views.

This looked like a huge winch and it was situated so that it appeared to be a way to winch boats up onto the shore.

Driving on about another quarter mile we came to the end of the highway. Beyond this was just driveways and ATV trails.

We drove back along route 406 on the other side of the river.

Bud stopped at a little grocery store to replenish our ice cream. We hadn’t trusted ice cream to the 8 or 9 hours with our freezer shut off. I looked out at the view from the parking lot and wondered if you stopped seeing the beauty all around you if you lived here.

When we decided to come to the Maritimes we decided we would include Newfoundland (officially Newfoundland Labrador, one province). Just getting here is an adventure.

We had to take a really long ferry ride on a really big ferry. We were booked on the S/V Blue Puttees. She had 7 decks on 10 levels. Decks 1, 3, and 5 were double decks for vehicles. Decks 7, 8, and 9 were for passengers and deck 10 was the open sun deck.

The only option for a truck pulling a trailer from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland departed at 11:15 at night. It is a seven hour trip. You’re required to arrive 2 hours before departure. We got there more than an hour before that and there was already a long line waiting at the gate. I took this picture because three ATV’s pulled up next to us. In the distance you can see a ferry, but that’s not ours. That one is going to a port towards the eastern end of Newfoundland, a 16 hour trip.

Here we are through the gate and in line for the ferry. I had plenty of time to take this picture, we sat in line for over an hour and a half. When the other lines around us started moving, Bud and I got out and shut off our propane, as required, and put the little tags on to show the valves were off. That shut off our refrigerator and freezer until we could turn the gas back on once we were unloaded.

Finally we started loading. Here we are approaching the ramp. We’re loading through the bow. You can see the huge, white ship’s bridge above.

For as big as the ship was, the loading ramp was narrow. I was glad I didn’t have to line the truck and trailer up to fit through. This is the middle ramp, going onto deck 3. There must have been ramps above and below us, although we couldn’t see them.

Inside things opened up. Eventually all these lanes were lined with vehicles. When we left the truck we had to take everything we needed for the seven hour trip. For us that included Matey and his crate. Even though I made the reservation months ago, I couldn’t get a dog friendly cabin so Matey had to travel in his new crate in the kennel area. We could have left him in the truck, but you couldn’t return to the vehicle until the voyage was over. I didn’t like to leave him alone for eight hours or more.

Before we left the truck I took this picture of our map screen, just to show our blue arrow sitting in the water on the ferry.

We went inside and up to deck seven where we were directed to a little metal shed built outside the main cabin. That was the kennel area where we had to leave Matey. They did have a sizable chunk of Astro turf where he could pee just outside the kennel. Matey wasn’t interested, though. From where Matey was you could look down on deck 5 where there was uncovered parking in the stern.

We went back in the main part of the ship and up these stairs two more levels to our reserved seats on deck 9.

This was our seating area. Those in the know brought blankets and pillows. Bud and I dressed warmly, but we were both cold all night. My seat didn’t have the footstool, the leg rest wasn’t really long or high enough so if I tried to recline my seat I just slid off it. So I spent a long uncomfortable night sitting up and cold.

Other people slept well past dawn.

Since I only dozed fitfully, at dawn I was out on deck. I visited Matey, who was happy to see me but not happy that he wasn’t getting off the boat.

I went up on the sun deck as we entered the harbor. It wasn’t much colder than the cabin and was way more interesting.

Channel-Port aux Basques isn’t a metropolis…

but it is certainly picturesque.

That ship had all kinds of thrusters. It came into the port area quickly, then slowed and made a 180 degree turn in a very small space. Then slid right into this berth. We had loaded through the bow, but we were now stern to.

In short order we drove off the stern ramp and on to Newfoundland.

Yesterday we visited the reconstructed Fortress of Louisbourg (pronounced Lou ee boor with just the suggestion of a “g” at the end). We almost didn’t go because it was a fairly long drive towards the north end of Cape Breton Island and this is a holiday weekend in Canada, so we were afraid of crowds. We are learning…Canada has less than one eighth the people of the U.S. so a Canadian crowd outside Toronto or Vancouver is not a thing to worry about. Besides, the place is huge, it is the largest historical reconstruction in North America.

We took a shuttle over a mile to the entrance. Our shuttle group got a brief introduction inside this building which was the only of the buildings outside the gates to be reconstructed. Notice the sod roof.

We were greeted at the gate by a man in a 1744 French uniform. I later asked another docent about the uniform colors, since I expected red to be British. But in the French army at the time the red uniform was for the commander of the gun. He would have had a blue coat to go over this. I may have the terminology wrong (the docents were all extremely knowledgeable and gave us a ton of information) but it was about like a sergeant.

We entered across an actual moat and through the Dauphin Gate, the main land gate.

Bud is standing on the far side of the lift bridge across the moat. In the foreground you can see the counterweights and one of the two chains with handles that allowed them to pull up the bridge.

Once inside the gate you got to see part of the fortifications.

The main visage of this fortified town faced the sea. The French came here in 1713 after loosing Acadia (mainland Nova Scotia) and Newfoundland to the British. They still held Quebec, Isle Sainte-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and this island, Cape Breton Island which they called Isle Royale. They were looking for a site to protect the entrance to the St. Lawrence River and to protect their cod fisheries.

There were better sites for defense, as low lying hills overlooked the fortress with only marshy lands to act as a deterrent to attack. But there were no better sites for cod fishing. The harbor was lined with beaches, a scarcity along this coast, and needed to dry the fish. And it was close enough to the cod banks to allow the fishermen to make 3 or 4 trips a day. According to the docent, the fishermen were backed by the King who wanted lots of cod to feed the people in France, and they overrode the military.

Despite the good defenses on the seaward side, the British did take this place, twice. The first time was in the spring of 1745 when they recruited 4,000 New Englanders with promises of wealth. The men were dropped off in the marshes and hauled cannon on sledges through the wetlands to a position on the hills. They began to bombard the fort. Meanwhile, the British Navy blockaded the port so no supplies could get in. In 46 days the French surrendered. The British required the New Englanders to stay to keep the French from coming back. They were crowded and poorly provisioned and a quarter of them died. Three years later the fortress was returned to France in exchange for some land in Europe. One docent said that was the real start of the American revolution.

Then in 1758 the British attacked again, this time with 13,100 troops and 150 ships with 14,000 crew. The fortress held out for 7 weeks.

Looking around it is almost impossible to comprehend that after the second surrender the British razed the fortress to keep it from ever being used by the French again.

The walls and fortifications were blown up and the buildings were dismantled and carted off to provide much needed materials for buildings elsewhere. When the fortress was made an official historic site in the 1920’s there was nothing left but foundations.

But there were people who thought it should be reconstructed. In the 1950’s the project began. They requested any information that the Government of France could provide and got 17,000 documents on microfiche.

These included detailed street plans…

and architectural details of all the government buildings.

When anyone of property died there was an inventory made of their possessions and these were included in the documents.

Teams of archaeologists, architects, builders and craftspeople worked together. In 1961 construction began. Much of the labor, skilled and unskilled, came from the now unemployed coal miners in the area.

Several years and 26 million dollars later they created a place of living history.

A place where you can see the craftsmanship of the people of the time, in this case the Mi’kmaq First Nation.

Their surroundings are recreated with accuracy…

and you can get up close and personal.

And there were people demonstrating the old crafts. This wasn’t just a display of tatting. A woman was actually making this lace. Unfortunately she was on break when we were there.

We spent four hours enthralled with it all and would have stayed longer but our feet gave out!

We are now at Battery Provincial Park just outside St. Peter’s, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. This is the view from our campsite.

The whole campground is well spaced with great views.

This lovely mown trail leads down from the campsite…

to this view of St. Peter’s Bay off the Atlantic.

There are a number of trails with a scattering of benches…

and views…

and some ruins. The French had a gun battery here and later the English had a small fort.

We drove down next to the park to the St. Peter’s Canal. It joins Bras d’Or Lake to the Atlantic. As a friendly native explained, the “lake” is actually an inland sea.

Boats going from one side to the other go through a lock. This lock is unusual because the high side is determined by the tides. We visited at a very high tide, and you can see that the water level on the ocean side…

is higher than the “lake” side. At low tide this would be reversed.

We watched as a couple of sailboats locked through…

from Bras d’Or Lake to St. Peter’s Bay.

We took a short walk along a shoreline trail…

just far enough to see the lighthouse that guides boats to the canal. The lighthouse sits at the entrance to the campground, we are camped up on the hill beside it.

We might have walked further, but we’d spent an hour or more talking to a couple of Maritimers, Paul and Cathy. He grew up on Prince Edward Island, she in Nova Scotia. They spent 25 years in Kitchener, Ontario and the last five years full time in their motor home. People here are so friendly, it reminded me of the people we would meet sailing.

Beautiful scenery and wonderful people, what more could you ask.