This morning we went back to the lookouts at Long Point Lighthouse to see if there were any whales around. There weren’t so we decided to walk some trails there. On a rocky trail we saw this view and the gentler trail below. We didn’t see an easy way down, so we decided to drive to a nearby parking lot and walk from there.
There were still some decent lookouts from the lower trail and Matey got to be off leash for part of the walk.
I did put him on the leash when the trail went by this drop-off.
Once we’d stretched our legs we set off looking for another whale watching site. We took a side route towards Too Good Arm (again those names). When we were close to the end of the road there was a turnoff with a sign for an overlook at Pikes Arm so we headed that way and found this trail with steps.
Lots of very nice steps.
This is the top of the first set of steps.
But we were still a long way from the top of the trail.
There were little sheds along the way, I think perhaps for tools or other supplies. Volunteers from Pikes Arm maintain this.
They even had a very nice, clean outhouse near the top.
The view on top was spectacular and the platform, railing and picnic table made it a great place to hang out. We were the only people there.
I didn’t think I could get a panoramic photo to do it justice, so I used my compass and took a picture to the south,
the east,
the north,
and the west. There was water all around.
When we were done soaking up the sun and sights…
we headed back down.
There wasn’t much of a town there, there were no shops selling souvenirs, no restaurants, nobody making any money from this.
We dropped a donation in their box and I signed the guestbook, thanking them for sharing this beauty with us.
I’m writing this at the dinette on a chilly rainy morning in Dildo Run Provincial Park, but don’t feel too sorry for me. I’m warm and dry and this is the view out the window.
Dildo Run is on route 340, which is called “The Road to the Isles” and for good reason. We are now on New World Island, having crossed Chapel Island and several small islands to get here. This view is from the entrance to the park looking over the water to where our campsite is. The little island is the one we see from our windows. This body of water is called The Coish. It runs from the Labrador Sea to the Bay of Exploits. (I love these names.)
Early this morning, before the rain came, we drove just under 20 miles; across South Twillingate Island and to the tip of North Twillingate Island and the end of route 340. It ends at Long Point Lighthouse.
There are some lookouts there and we were looking for whales. Alas there were no whales.
There were however more incredible views of the coast. Newfoundland has 6000 miles of coastline, and all of it that we’ve seen is gorgeous.
There was a fishing boat out there. Dennis, the Canadian Coast Guard person on duty, told us they were fishing for cod. Commercial fisherman can take 3,000 pounds per day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday from inshore waters. Pleasure craft can take 5 cod per person up to 15 cod per boat on the same days. The offshore cod banks are still closed to fishing after 30 years.
The sun was trying to come up, but the rain was coming, too. When it started to sprinkle, we left. Now we are “stuck” for a few hours in this pretty, private campsite.
We came back to the same KOA campground we were in last week, but because they were having a caravan of campers come in the only space they could give us for two nights was this “deluxe” site. It also has a cement patio and a patio table and four chairs. However, if you look closely you can see that we had to put 3 risers under each wheel on the driver’s side to get the trailer level. I would much rather have a level site than the other extras. Oh well, it’s still a nice campground.
Matey and I took a walk this morning. You need to turn your sound up for this one, because although you can hardly see the birds on the pond I’m pretty sure they were loons and they were calling.
And then I took this video, it’s hard to see, but it is fog blowing in the wind. That is something we’ve been seeing here, but we had associated fog with still days, so were surprised.
The day cleared and we took off for one last day to see the sights. We started with a short walk to see Southeastern Brook Falls.
The trail was nice…
with steps where you needed them.
And the brook…
took a pretty spectacular tumble.
Then we decided to see how far up the approach trail to Gros Morne we could get.
It was another well made trail, with rocks where little brooks crossed.
We were following a larger brook.
But as we went along it became apparent…
that we were getting closer to the wrong mountain.
After about a mile and a half we came to a bridge across the stream. We could see that the trail bent back towards Gros Morne at that point, but we decided we should hike back out.
Heading back we saw some nice views that had been at our backs.
I noticed this one piece of cloud left on a mountain.
After lunch we drove to Norris Point; it’s not far from the campground, where yet another Newfoundland road just ends. It sits on Bonne Bay and is a pretty little town.
It had one of the few marinas we’ve seen. I’m not sure what the large boat was doing, but it may well be just sitting there waiting for the right season for whatever fish they are after.
Tomorrow we leave the west coast of Newfoundland. I’ll let you know what we find as we go east.
If you don’t take the ferry to Labrador, the only way back from the north end of the Western Peninsula of Newfoundland is back down the road you came in on. So yesterday we drove back down.
On the way up we’d seen signs for two places that intrigued me. I looked up the information and we decided to stop at both on the return journey.
Our first stop was Flower’s Cove. There a short trail led to a group of thrombolites along the shore. The trail crossed Marjorie bridge. Built by the father and grandfather of Marjorie Myers in the early 1900’s, this bridge was the only way into the community on land. It was used by horses and carts, by dog teams and by Bombardier snowmobiles running up the coast, as well as locals on foot.
The thrombolites were pretty interesting. They are called living rocks, although these are 650 million years old and the bacteria and algae that accumulated the minerals to make these forms are long since dead.
There were a lot of them and they were big. That’s Bud standing among them.
I looked up more information on thrombolites. The sign said there is only one other place in which they grow, a place in Western Australia. That may be true of remnants this size, but I found there are about 13 places where they exist. One place where they are currently alive is Green Lake, east of Syracuse, NY. The information I found has these as much smaller and underwater. I’m not sure you could see them if you visited Green Lake State Park, but the park sounds worth a visit anyway.
The second stop we made was at Arches Provincial Park. This was a small park right along the coast. There was just room in the parking lot to leave the truck and trailer. By now the skies had cleared and the three stone arches waves have carved on the shore stood out against the blue waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The arches are quite large. The information on the park asked that you not climb them, some kids did and gave scale to my photo.
I went down on the stony shore to take a picture through them.
There was a fourth arch, but it collapsed.
Every trip is an adventure. I am grateful we have the time to find some of the wonders that surround us.
We like to take back roads to see places that don’t all look alike. So much of America is strip malls, chain stores, and look alike housing developments.
So far, not Newfoundland.
The land on this western peninsula is pretty much conifer forests, lakes, streams and bogs,
or rock. The land and the harsh climate shape the communities.
Life obviously centers around the sea. Even the fishing boats look different to us. They are short compared to the superstructure, and ones we’ve seen up on land have very deep keels. The whole boat is as tall as it is long. I call them bobber boats and I’m guessing that they may not be real comfortable in heavy seas, but they are probably very safe in all kinds of weather.
There is so little dirt that signs and even utility poles are sometimes planted in rock filled cairns.
That may be why so many of the houses are a story and a half. They probably have only partially dug in basements. The homes mostly boast simple straight lines. Any large window areas are divided into smaller panes. There are no extras for curb appeal; these houses are built to provide shelter in cold weather and strong winds.
Styles differ, but straight lines, dark colors and bold bright trims predominate.
These neighborhoods have their own curb appeal.
Another thing we noticed is that the roads are lined with stacks of cordwood. I met a women who grew up around here and she told me that’s wood being dried for winter; and no, as far as she knows, no one ever takes wood that isn’t theirs, even though it’s often right along the right-of-way. Later it will be moved to woodsheds.
Perhaps strangest of all to us are these little garden plots we see here and there along the road. They are fenced and most are planted to potatoes. My local source said if folks don’t have soil at their house and want a bit of garden they look for a likely place along the road to make one. Mostly they grow potatoes or maybe some cabbage. And no, no one steals from someone else’s right-of-way garden.
The western peninsula of Newfoundland is definitely somewhere else, and that’s what we’re out here to see.
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…
On the Roam Again 