Following the Viking Trail from Gros Morne to the northern tip of Newfoundland

During our time in Newfoundland this past week, we spent two full days in Gros Morne National Park along the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The park is a geological wonder, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On Wednesday we joined a boat cruise up Western Brook Pond, a 10-mile-long, 500-foot-deep freshwater lake with 2,000-foot cliffs on either side. It’s like a fjord, but it was cut off from the Gulf of St. Lawrence when the glaciers from the last ice age retreated and the ground rose when the weight of all that ice was removed. The boat tour guide said that explains why they found whale bones on a cliff far above the edge of the lake. We saw four waterfalls coming down the cliffs into the lake.

On Thursday we joined a guide-led walk along the Tablelands, one of the rare places in the world where the earth’s mantle is exposed. The mantle normally lies several miles beneath the crust, but geologists theorize that this mantle was thrust up by a collision of continents millions of years ago. The mantle is made of different minerals than the crust and is generally toxic to plants. That and the orange color of oxidized iron gives it its bare, alien appearance. Because normal plant nutrients are scarce, we saw three different kinds of carnivorous plants. We looked down a valley carved by the glaciers, and climbed up to a small waterfall fed by a spring. If you visit Gros Morne, we recommend both of those excursions. If we had more time in the park, I might have tried climbing the park’s namesake mountain and taking the Green Garden hike. (See more photos from the park here on FB.)

On Friday, we left the RV at the campground and headed up the Great Northern Peninsula along the Viking Trail. The trail is a 230-mile highway that hugs the Gulf of St. Lawrence and leads to the remains of a Viking settlement at the top of the island. Along the way on Friday we stopped at the Lobster Cove Head Lighthouse just outside Rocky Harbour near our RV park. The lighthouse offered a lovely view of the harbor, views made more poignant by the Canadian flag fluttering at half mast in mourning for the queen. Elizabeth especially enjoyed the exhibits at the lighthouse keepers quarters. We next stopped at Cow Head, where Elizabeth visited two knitting shops! At Arches Provincial Park we walked underneath the rock formations by the sea; a young Chinese national working in Canada snapped the photo of us together under the main arch. Further up the coast, at Flower’s Cove, we took a short path to the shore to see very rare evidence of thrombolites. The roundish stone mounds were left behind by tiny life forms that biologist believe are some of the oldest on earth. The only other place where such evidence of thrombolites exist is on the other side of the world, in Sharks Bay, Western Australia. I’d seen photos of these strange bun-like rock forms in books, but it was a highlight to actually walk among them.

The Viking Trail (Highway 430) was a beautiful drive, with the sparking waters of the gulf on one side and the green, rounded tops of the Long Range Mountains in the distance. And everywhere, in the small fishing villages as well as alongside the road, we saw stacks and stacks of firewood. So much wood stored for the long winter! In a memoir I saw in one of the shops in Cow Head on growing up on the Great Northern Peninsula, the dust cover blurb said that here, “A man was judged by the size of his woodpile in the spring. It was a symbol of his ability to provide every necessity for his family.” By that measure, I can attest that the men in this region remain responsible and conscientious!

On Saturday morning, we joined a Northland Discovery boat excursion from the harbor in St. Anthony, the largest town at the north end of the peninsula. It was too late in the season to spot icebergs, but we were hoping to see whales. Paul, the captain and guide on the 2-hour excursion, said they had spotted humpback whales earlier in the week. The weather the day we went out was blustery and the sea was swelling, which probably explains why we didn’t see any whales. We did see a lone harp seal, an ocean sunfish, aka a mola mola, and a large leatherback turtle, which the captain said was a rare sighting. The captain also took us by what he said was the largest sea cave on the island, which was 100-by-100-feet at its opening and 200 feet deep. He told us the story of a fisherman who in 1955 was stranded in the cave for six days before being rescued. The captain said that the icebergs that come down from Greenland in the summer often carry seals into the St. Anthony area and sometimes even polar bears! One of the bear visitors is now mounted in the town’s municipal building, and another starred in this YouTube video after it wandered onto the roof of a house in town earlier this year. We could see the house from our boat.

After the boat tour, we spent an hour touring an exhibit in St. Anthony on Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, a medical missionary to Newfoundland and Labrador. Dr. Grenfell was born in northern England in 1865, studied medicine at the London Hospital, and dedicated his life to Christian service after hearing an address by D.L. Moody. He founded hospitals and established charitable programs to serve the thousands of underserved fishermen in the region. While seeing hundreds of patients a month, he also delivered gospel messages, wrote 33 books, and lectured widely. He’s one of a number of remarkable men and women we’ve learned about on our travels.

That afternoon we visited another World Heritage site, the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. The site was uncovered by archeologists in the 1960s and is the only definite proof that the Vikings reached the North American continent. We walked by the small mounds of dirt that outlined the sod buildings the small party had built in about 1,000 A.D. The highlight was entering one of the large recreated huts nearby and listening to the Viking-clad park employees tell us about life at the encampment. It impressed me that they were able to forge nails for their boats from iron ore found in the nearby bogs. They stayed about 10 years before burning the camp and heading back to Greenland. We also walked the 1.5-mile coastal trail, which allowed me to plant my foot on the small tip of the island considered “subarctic tundra.” Down the road from the site is a 10-foot bronze statue of Leif Ericson. (See my photos from the Viking Trail at FB.)

Tomorrow we’ll roll the RV onto the ferry at Port aux Basque for the six-hour, 96-mile trip across the Cabot Strait back to Nova Scotia.