After wrapping up the Maritimes portion of my trip, it was back to Halifax to turn in the rental car and fly even further east, to Newfoundland.  As with the Maritimes, figuring out the logistics of getting to and around Newfoundland proved difficult; eventually I decided to fly into Deer Lake near the west coast and rent a car, then later fly to St. John’s on the east coast and rent another car.  In the end I was very happy with that decision: not only did it give me more time to visit places, but also it gave me aerial views like none I’d ever seen; the mountain and water scenery on the approach into Deer Lake was unforgettable.  This is Rocky Harbor, where I stayed while visiting Gros Morne National Park.

Lobster Cove Head Lighthouse, near Rocky Harbor, sits high on a cliff overlooking Bonne Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  The decision to visit Newfoundland was a tough one; the place is quite remote, I knew I could easily fill the time visiting more places back in the Maritimes, and I simply wasn’t sure what I would find once I got here.  By the time I left, I realized it would have been insane to skip Newfoundland; it’s an absolutely wonderful place that gave me one of my most memorable trips ever.

Gros Morne National Park is named after its tallest mountain, shown in the distance here.  The name can be interpretted two ways, either as “big isolated hill” or as “big gloomy”; either way, at half a mile in elevation, it’s definitely big.

The rocky Gulf of St. Lawrence coastline of Gros Morne National Park.  Newfoundland is also known as The Rock, and the landscape is indeed extremely rugged.  It’s also a geologist’s dream.  One section of the park well south of here, known as the Tablelands, is actually a chunk of the earth’s mantle forced miles up to the surface long ago.  I visited it on a very stormy day - an expansive field of rust-colored rocks where plants cannot grow - but it was just too rainy to photograph.  As I discovered throughout this part of the trip, Newfoundland weather changes rapidly and drastically.

Western Brook, in Gros Morne National Park, looking upstream to the Long Range Mountains.  Those mountains were actually once part of the Appalachian mountain range before plate tectonics started moving everything around.

This area is a highlight of Gros Morne National Park.  A trail near Western Brook leads inland to Western Brook Pond, where one can take a rather dramatic boat tour.  This photograph was taken along the trail, looking back toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  Like much of Newfoundland, this is a boggy area.

On the trail to the Western Brook Pond.  Along this trail were three moose in the distance munching on vegetation; the park has thousands of them, and the whole of Newfoundland has tens of thousands.  Earlier near the lighthouse was a red fox running along the roadside carrying a large beefy drumstick in its mouth.  With so few people here, the wildlife is quite abundant and easily found.

A lot of unusual plant life can be found in the park and along the Great Northern Peninsula as well.  At the northern tip of the peninsula is Burnt Cape Ecological Reserve, which has varieties of plant life found nowhere else in the world.  This part of Newfoundland also has some unique berries, but I’ll get to that on the next page.  This photograph was taken along the same trail to the pond.

Western Brook Pond in Gros Morne National Park.  In Newfoundland, a stretch of water ten miles long banked by cliffs over 2000 feet high is, well, just a pond.  This is a landlocked fjord; Newfoundland was under a sheet of ice thousands of years ago, and the resulting fjords and ponds can be found all over the island.

As it rained heavily the previous day, the waterfalls at Western Brook Pond were more active than usual.  The boat tours were not the only ones visiting the falls; twice, black bear cubs could be seen near them.  The water here is some of the purest in the world.

The northern bank of Western Brook Pond.

The boat tour into Western Brook Pond launches two boats, and I’m glad it does, because including the other boat in photographs gives one a sense of scale of this awesome place.  Even when the weather is not perfect, this tour is a must.  Dress warmly, though; even on this mid-August day, four layers of clothing were barely enough.

The southern bank of Western Brook Pond.  Think these cliffs are tall?  Ten thousand years ago, a glacier covered all this - and it was as much as five times taller, up to two miles thick.

At the eastern end of Western Brook Pond is this nearly half-mile waterfall.  Usually much of its water mists away before ever reaching the pond, but again the previous day’s rain added heavily to its flow.  Near this waterfall, a group of hikers disembarked with a huge amount of equipment to make a multi-day hike to the mountain of Gros Morne.

Cliffs of the Long Range Mountains alongside Western Brook Pond in Gros Morne National Park.  It is truly difficult to believe that this is part of the same rolling mountain range on which lies the Blue Ridge Parkway, some two thousand miles away; here, there are no roads.  The boat tour through the pond lasts well over two hours and is all by itself a great reason to visit western Newfoundland.

Bonne Bay, the waterway that splits Gros Morne National Park nearly in two.  South of here are the Tablelands and the road back to the airport at Deer Lake; north of here is a long, long drive along the remote coastline of a peninsula to what seems to be the very end of the world.