The first time we walked onto the Tablelands, we assumed something had gone wrong with the landscape. The mountain in front of us was the colour of rust, bare from top to bottom, with barely a shrub on it, while the ridge across the valley was the ordinary green of any hill in Newfoundland. Nothing had gone wrong. We were standing on a piece of the Earth’s mantle, rock that formed far below the ocean floor and was shoved up onto the continent when two ancient landmasses collided almost half a billion years ago. Gros Morne National Park, on the west coast of Newfoundland, is one of the few places on the planet where you can do that in running shoes.
The park covers about 1,805 square kilometres of the Long Range Mountains, the northernmost reach of the Appalachians, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 for exactly this geology. But the science is only part of it. Gros Morne is also fjords, sea stacks, bog, tuckamore forest, a mountain worth a full day, and more moose than we have seen anywhere else in Canada.
Getting there: ferries and flights
Newfoundland is an island, and the logistics are part of the journey. The car ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques takes about seven hours, and from the dock it is roughly 270 km of Trans-Canada Highway north to Deer Lake, then another 70 km on Route 430 to Rocky Harbour, the main village inside the park. A second, much longer ferry runs seasonally from North Sydney to Argentia on the Avalon Peninsula, about 16 hours, which makes sense only if you are planning a full island loop. Vehicle reservations for July and August should be made months ahead.
Flying is simpler. Deer Lake has a regional airport with connections from Halifax, Montreal and Toronto, and rental cars are available at the terminal. From there the park boundary is under an hour away. Either way, the park charges a daily entry fee, and an annual national parks pass pays for itself in about a week of visits.
The Tablelands
The rock is peridotite, and it is toxic to most plant life: rich in magnesium, iron and heavy metals, poor in the nutrients that ordinary soils provide. That is why the Tablelands stay bare while everything around them is forest. The peridotite is also full of iron that oxidizes on exposure, which gives the slopes their orange-brown tint; break a stone open and the fresh surface is a dark, greenish grey. A few tough specialists survive here, including pitcher plants that get their nitrogen from insects rather than the soil.
The Tablelands Trail, off Route 431 near Woody Point, is about 4 km return on a gravel path that follows an old road into a valley between the peridotite and the neighbouring green ridge. It is easy, exposed and windy, and the interpretive panels are excellent. The Discovery Centre in Woody Point, a few minutes down the road, explains the plate tectonics with models that finally made the collision make sense to us. Give the whole thing half a day, and try to be there in late afternoon when the low sun turns the slopes copper.
Western Brook Pond
North of Rocky Harbour, the coastal plain is a wide bog broken by long lakes that reach back into the mountains. Western Brook Pond is the most spectacular of them: a fjord about 16 km long, carved by glaciers, walled by cliffs that rise 600 m or more straight from the water, and cut off from the sea when the land rebounded after the ice melted. The water is now fresh, extremely pure and very cold.
Reaching it means walking about 3 km from the parking area on a flat trail across the bog, with boardwalks over the wettest sections and moose tracks in the mud. At the far end, a dock serves the boat tours that run into the fjord from late spring to early fall; the round trip on the water takes about two hours and passes waterfalls that fall hundreds of metres in stages, sometimes dispersing into mist before they reach the lake. Tours sell out on fine days in summer, and the boats do not run in high winds. Book, and keep a spare morning in reserve.
Gros Morne Mountain
The park’s namesake is a flat-topped, 806 m mountain of hard quartzite standing alone above Bonne Bay, the second-highest peak on the island. The James Callaghan Trail to the summit is about 16 km return and takes most people seven to eight hours. The first 4 km are a steady forest climb to the base of the gully; the gully itself is a scramble up loose rock that gains roughly 500 m in one push. On top, the plateau is Arctic tundra, with rock ptarmigan, Arctic hare and, on a clear day, views to the Long Range, Ten Mile Pond and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The summit section is closed each year from early May until late June to protect the animals that breed there, and it closes again in bad weather; the plateau is no place to be in fog. Start early, carry more water than you think you need, and come down by the marked loop rather than the gully.
Moose, weather and season
Moose are not native to Newfoundland. Four animals were released near Howley in 1904, and their descendants now number well over 100,000, one of the densest populations in the world. In Gros Morne they browse the roadsides at dawn and dusk and stand in the middle of Route 430 at night, and collisions are a real hazard; drive slowly after dark and scan the ditches. You will also see them on the Western Brook Pond trail and, sometimes, on the beach at Green Gardens.
- The park is open all year, but the visitor centres, boat tours and most campgrounds operate from mid-May to mid-October.
- July and August are warmest and driest; September brings fewer people, cooler air and the first colour in the birches.
- Coastal fog is common in June; the mountain is best attempted from July onward.
- Campgrounds at Berry Hill, Green Point, Lomond, Shallow Bay and Trout River can be reserved through the national system.
- Bakeapples, the golden cloudberries of the bogs, ripen in August and appear in jars at every village shop.
We keep coming back to Gros Morne because it is a place where the ground itself tells a story, and where the story is legible without a degree. Stand on the rust-coloured rock, look across at the green ridge, and you can see the seam where two continents met. There are few better reasons to take a ferry.