Girl Meets Canada: Gros Morne National Park

Day 107 — 111 (Tues August 24 — Sat August 28)

I spent four nights camping in and around Gros Morne National Park. It is hands down the beautiful and interesting national park I’ve ever been to in Canada (Arches Park in Utah might compete on an international level mostly because it’s so unique, and also because Angie and I nearly blinded ourselves, twice, while visiting it 10 years ago. But that’s a story for another day…).

I don’t even want to try explaining Gros Morne to you, because it’ll be paragraphs full of unhelpful descriptions including words like “spectacular” and “picturesque” and “breathtaking”, which are all accurate but won’t help you actually visualize what the hell I’m talking about. So instead I’ll share with you my favourite pictures.

Discovery Centre Hike — The discovery centre tells you all about the history of the park, and has a pretty challenging 5km hike up a hill. The view was great, but the best part was that at the top there were bleachers. I’ve never seen that before. Bleachers full of tourists sitting and staring out at the scenery like they’re watching a basketball game or something.

The Tablelands — A geologic anomaly. This part of the park is made up of peridotite, a kind of rock that doesn’t have any of the nutrients needed to sustain plant life. So, as you can see, on one side of the road it’s a plant party, and on the other it’s a barren wasteland. Geology is neat!

Sunset at Green Point Campground. Do you see the evil face? It sort of looked like Tim Curry as the devil in Legend for a while.

Western Brook Pond — A fake fjord carved by glaciers. It’s fake because it’s not filled with salt water. Apparently that’s what makes a fjord a fjord. Not the thousands of years of ice carving intricate designs in the earth’s rocky coating. Oh, no. It’s what it gets filled with afterwards. That hardly seems fair to me. It’s an hour walk into the pond (Newfoundland calls their lakes ponds. How sweet is that?) and then you can take a two hour boat ride down the non-fjord. It was a beautiful sunny day when I did this, which sadly means all my photos are kind of washed out. Need to get me that polarized filter!

Baker Brook Falls — It’s about a 5km walk through a forest and a bog to get to these falls. I started off early enough to get them all to myself. On my way back to the parking lot I passed about 50 people heading off towards them.