Neither a painting by Jackson Pollock on a bad day nor even abstract art, this is an unusual grove of trees that happened to catch my eye at Arches Provincial Park, just north of Gros Morne National Park.  Arches was the first stop of a long drive up the Great Northern Peninsula, along Newfoundland’s west coast.

The namesake for Arches Provincial Park, formed by water erosion from the Gulf of St. Lawrence before this area of land was pushed above sea level by plate tectonics.  The Gros Morne area is remote, but the Great Northern Peninsula is truly out of the way: from here to the northern tip, over two hundred miles away, live perhaps ten thousand people.  The one road between here and there is called the Viking Trail, for reasons that will become evident a little later.

Arches is a great place to wear sturdy boots - not just because of the chilly summer weather, but also because walking on its big round rocks is practically guaranteed to bend ankles in directions they’re not supposed to go.

The Gulf of St. Lawrence, viewed through one of the arches in the park.  A hundred miles straight ahead is the coast of Québec, but despite the short distance, one must go through three time zones to get there: the Newfoundland, the Atlantic, and the Eastern Time Zones.  Oddly, the Newfoundland Time Zone is a half-hour ahead of the Atlantic Time Zone used by the rest of Atlantic Canada.  And the people of Newfoundland don’t want to change that.

Sunset at Point Riche Lighthouse, in Port au Choix, halfway up Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.  A national historic site of burial grounds dating back thousands of years is in this fishing village, but the true reason I stopped here overnight is because my preferred lodging at the top of the peninsula had filled up far in advance of my trip.  As it turned out, splitting the peninsula trip in two was a good decision: it allowed me to take the Western Brook Pond boat tour back in Gros Morne National Park (which had been rained out the day before) first thing in the morning, and it also made for two pleasant drives instead of an overly long one.  And Jeannie’s Sunrise Bed and Breakfast turned out to be an unexpectedly nice place to stay; Jeannie Billard herself is a gracious host, the epitome of hospitality, rightfully proud of her home and community.

Sunrise the following morning in Port au Choix, just across from Jeannie’s Sunrise Bed and Breakfast, justifying her establishment’s name.  Stepping back inside for Jeannie’s excellent breakfast made a perfect start to this day, one of the best of my Atlantic Canada trip.

Large fishing boats in Port au Choix, which bills itself “The Fishing Capital of Western Newfoundland,” just after sunrise.  French (or at least Anglicized French) names are common along the western Newfoundland coast, as the French fished here for centuries, often while fighting the British.  Only a hundred years ago did they give up fishing rights off the shores of the Great Northern Peninsula.

As if Newfoundland wasn’t already enough of a geological Disneyland, there is this, in Flower’s Cove, further up the Great Northern Peninsula.  These round, cracked structures are thrombolites.  Take millions of microbes, put them in the tidal area of a warm salty sea, hit them with sunlight so they photosynthesize, and they’ll create these unusual calcium carbonate formations.  So what?  Well, those microbes are the same as the very first forms of life on earth some 3½ billion years ago - the only form of life until about 650 million years ago.  And “living” thrombolites like these are extremely rare; head to another remote spot on the opposite side of the world, in Western Australia, to find more.  The thrombolites in Flower’s Cove are right out in the open.

The view from the northern edge of Newfoundland: sunset at the end of the Great Northern Peninsula, from the village of L’Anse aux Meadows overlooking Medee Bay.  Reaching this place felt like reaching the edge of the world.  After a two-day trip through remote territory where I didn’t know what would greet me at the end, seeing the best sunset ever is exactly what I wanted.  I saw this standing just outside The Norseman - a shockingly fine restaurant and art gallery immediately behind me as I took this photograph - with wine already served and a fine dinner of fresh seafood on the way.  Dinner was my second visit here this day; lunch earlier was simple and different: a caribou burger that I’m amazed to say was the best burger I’ve ever had.  Beyond the culinary delights, I was sorely tempted to purchase from the art gallery a beautiful but expensive and fragile whale bone carving of a First Nations sea kayaker.  Despite reading good things in advance about The Norseman, I was still surprised by the excellence of the experience.  This sunset, which had patrons racing outside with their cameras, made it even better.

Before reaching L’Anse aux Meadows the village, one reaches L’Anse aux Meadows the historic site, shown here.  If you still believe that Columbus’s voyage in 1492 marked the European discovery of North America, this place is your reality check: about five hundred years earlier, Norse from Iceland who had recently settled in Greenland sailed into the Canadian Arctic and down the coast of Labrador to this place.  That expedition was led by Leifr Eiríksson (that’s the proper spelling); his father, known as Eiríkr rauði (Eiríkr the Red), was leader of the Greenland colony that sent him.  Depending on the time of year, as many as 65 to 90 Norse, including women, were settled here in L’Anse aux Meadows - a far greater number than on any single site in Greenland and Iceland at the time.

The site where the Norse lived was discovered only in 1961, despite references to it in Icelandic sagas and history.  Excavations have taken place over many years since the discovery.  Today, the area where artifacts were found consists of these low ridges of turf outlining the structures that were here a thousand years ago.  Before coming here, I was a bit afraid that this would be the only thing to see once I reached the end of the Great Northern Peninsula.  Not to worry.

Steps away from the original site are reconstructions of a number of its structures.  The large mound beyond the fence is the largest hall on the grounds that has been reconstructed, with four rooms; another hall had seven.  The fence was not part of the original site, but built to keep cows from wandering into the area, and later simply to mark the boundary of the reconstructed site.

A communal sleeping room within that large hall.  So why were all these people living here?  It appears the main activities of the residents were ship repair and long-distance travel to coastal lands south and west of here, which they called Vínland - basically all the coastal areas of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, including this region.  Expeditions to Vínland would bring goods back here to be stored until they could be shipped back to Greenland.

Detail of a hut exterior at the L’Anse aux Meadows site.  The Norse of Iceland built their structures during this time using sod over a frame of wood, with walls anywhere from four to eight feet thick.  Inside this particular hut is an iron smelter, being used this day by a blacksmith in period costume demonstrating the making of iron objects; he created a rather impressive hook you wouldn’t want to try to take onboard an airplane.

Another room in the reconstructed large hall.  After a number of years, the Norse packed up and left L’Anse aux Meadows, probably because their main colony back in Greenland was simply too small to support it.  Greenland was also very far away and not easy to reach with the weather and the navigation tools of the day.  The Norse left little behind, but they did leave enough for archaeologists to find out where they were and what they were doing here a thousand years ago.

Another view of the stunning sunset from the village of L’Anse aux Meadows.  Until the 1980s there was no paved road connecting the village to the rest of Newfoundland’s road system - so it’s far less remote today than it used to be.  Since the discovery of the Norse site and the building of that road, a very modest tourism industry has grown in this area to include the Valhalla Lodge Bed and Breakfast where I stayed, The Norseman restaurant... and Dark Tickle.

The Dark Tickle Company makes products from local wild berries, most of which I’d never heard of before: bakeapple, crowberry, partridgeberry, squashberry.  Partridgeberry, my favorite, is not unlike cranberry, and seems commonly available as preserves on serving tables at bed-and-breakfast places along the Great Northern Peninsula.  When driving along the Viking Trail up the peninsula, it’s not unusual to see vehicles parked on the side of the road, their occupants in the bushes and bogs nearby picking berries.  Dark Tickle is a combination of a store selling wild berry products, a museum explaining the berries, a workshop showing their manufacture into the products sold by the store, and more.  It’s a unique and very enjoyable place; I visited a number of times during my stay in L’Anse aux Meadows.  Above is yet another shot of the Medee Bay at sunset; the seagull stood on that rock the whole half-hour I was photographing.

Sunrise can be pretty spectacular here as well.  This was taken on the west side of Medee Bay back toward the village of L’Anse aux Meadows.  Perhaps I just got lucky with the weather - there’s no shortage of stories about how severe Newfoundland weather can be - but traveling up the Great Northern Peninsula definitely turned out to be the highlight of my trip to Atlantic Canada.