The Rock – The First 3 Days – June 3 – Ken

Newfoundland. Canada at the edge, or should I say the other edge. Although we have spent all sorts of time in British Columbia, the western edge of Canada, this is our first time on The Rock.

My initial impression is that Newfoundland is an amalgam of many things we have seen before; small town Canada, friendly people, and amazing landscape with constantly changing weather.

The flight from Toronto was OK. Our friends at Air Canada put us in the center seats of two rows. However, on boarding, we found another couple who were also split up into the same two rows, so with a quick switch we were able to sit together. Unfortunately, that didn’t change that my knees hit the seat in front of me. Thankfully the fellow in that seat agreed not to put his seat back so, while it wasn’t that comfortable, it could have been much worse.

Time Zones

For most of your life you have likely heard the CBC say its programming is “…half an hour later in Newfoundland”. When you are in the rest of Canada, that doesn’t really resonate. Yeah, OK, it is a half hour different, but who really cares. When you get here that sentiment changes. It is confusing to find things like the major hourly news casts occurring at the bottom of the hour and not at the top.

You are not just an hour from the center of the known universe (Toronto), but an hour and a half. And, three and a half hours from Calgary. That has made it more of a challenge to communicate with most of you. Dinner time in Alberta is almost bed time here. It made it interesting to follow the Alberta election results as almost nothing was decided by the time we were ready to sleep.

The Western Coast

We landed in Deer Lake on the western most part of Newfoundland. Our intent was to tour some smaller centers and hike in Gros Morne National Park.

Our first stop was Corner Brook on a cool and windy day. Corner Brook is the largest centre on the west coast. It was both more spread out and hillier than I expected. The pulp mill in the heart of town seems to still be the major employer, but there seems to be a lot of other activities in the area.

Our next stop was along the St. Georges Bay at Stephenville. Phyllis has a friend and former colleague from Stephenville, so we stopped and took a picture of Phyllis at the entrance sign so that she could send it off to a group of people she worked with at the hospitals.

The local diner had a great pan-fried cod lunch. The locally caught cod, done up in flour with salt and pepper, was probably the best fish meal I have had in quite some time.

Because the day was cold and windy our only major stop was at Cape St. George. High cliffs overlooking a rocky beach with gulls screaming into the wind will be my memory of thus stunning landscape. The tip is called Boutte de Cap and is reminiscent of the cliffs in Iceland.

Rounding the cape took us through a number of small communities. Although they are now connected by a good road, you could picture what it might have been like when each of them was their own outport.

Gros Morne – Visitor’s Centre

Visitor centres are always a good first stop. We were able to get information about the various hikes in the park and there are a series of dioramas and wall displays that detailed look at what makes Gros Morne unique. My favorite thing in the visitor’s centre were the 8 statues of various types of scientists active in the park including geologists, wildlife biologists, archeologists, marine biologists and botanists.

Gros Morne – The Tablelands

The national park is, unsurprisingly, the highlight of the area. As my friend Brenda has always told me “Everything starts with the rocks”, and at Gros Morne you can see why; it is a geologist’s paradise.

The tablelands are orange and barren. They are a slab of the earth’s mantle turned upside down and they dominate the skyline over the town of Woody Point.

A relatively easy 4 km out and back hike takes you to the heart of a circ in the highlands where you can see the peridotite and serpentinite rocks up close. Composed of olivine, a green colored mineral, the rocks rust to the orange found in the landscape. The crystalline structure of the serpentinite rocks we found along the trail reminded me of dragon scales.

Gros Morne – Bakers Brook Falls

After poking around in the tablelands, we took a hike to Bakers Brook Falls. The first few kilometers of the trail go through peat bogs so the trail consists of a wooden walkway. Easy hiking. That was until we got to about half a kilometre from the falls. On more solid ground, the well-worn path started to undulate along with the terrain. With recent rain, the holes had turned to mud puddles and the slopes to slides. To top it off, it started to rain. Being intrepid hikers, we made it to the falls, took our pictures then started back. Setting a good pace so that we were not caught out in a rainstorm, we made it back to the car in less time than it took to get to the falls.

As the trail head is only a few kilometers from the town of Rocky Harbour, we stopped for a very nice dinner of lobster rolls and fresh muscles with a great view of the beach before heading back to our hotel.

Gros Morne – Western Brook Pond

It seems that most of the advertising for Gros Morne, or even for Newfoundland, features images of Western Brook Pond, a fresh water fjord. Our tour of the pond didn’t disappoint.

The day started with a cool wind, but with the sun out.

A 3 km hike along a high-quality gravel road leads to the pond (in Newfoundland everything is a pond, no matter how big the body of fresh water is) where you then board a boat for a two-hour cruise. The cliffs rising out of the peaty mash plain, just kilometers from the coast, is quite dramatic. The cliffs around the pond are among some of the oldest exposed rocks on earth – approximately a billion-years-old.

Geologic upthrusts and waterfalls dominate in the fjord. Our boat crew had stories of historical hunting and trapping in the area, caribou migrations across the fjord and had us look for various types of human faces in the cliffs to keep us entertained along the way. We also had a nice discussion with a fellow passenger, a young Colombian man who had emigrated to Canada as a child.

Gros Morne – Green Point

Our last stop of the day was Green Point. Perhaps the geologists among you knew this, but I didn’t, it is the place where “the global stratotype for the boundary between the Cambrian and Ordovician systems was designated by the International Commission on Stratigraphy” in the year 2000. According to the plaque at the site “It is located within a bed of shale and limestone (bed 23) exposed in the southwest facing cliff ad shore platform.”

I find it quite cool that you can find the boundary between such ancient rocks along the shore line of Newfoundland!

The science nerd in me has been fascinated by Gros Morne.