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The photography blog of Victoria Bennett Beyer, featuring travel photographs from road trips across America and botanical photography of plants, flowers and leaves.
Filtering by Tag: gros morne
It felt a little strange to be walking right through this colorful collection of houses at Green Point, on our way back to the parking lot. Some are clearly still used, though perhaps just for the summer season.
Another stop in Gros Morne National Park was Green Point. After just a short walk from the parking lot and down some stairs, we came to what is a very geologically significant area, adjacent to the ocean.
As you can see, the layers of rock stand vertically, but originally they formed flat as sediment settled to the ocean floor. Later, tectonic forces pushed them upright, so now, the oldest layers appear to the right and the younger layers to the left.
After her talk, the park ranger encouraged us to clamber up on the rocks and look for fossils of ocean creatures. Even Lyle was allowed, and he scrambled right up like a mountain goat, much to my surprise.
And we even found some remains of organisms that lived in the ocean hundreds of millions of years ago! We of course left our finds at the park and enjoyed showing them to other visitors who were on the hunt as well. I loved the sort of communal spirit that we all shared in our common quest after the lecture. That seems pretty far off as we enter year two of Covid-19 and socially distancing, but perhaps that is why I remember it so fondly.
After our stay in Labrador, we headed back to Newfoundland on the ferry, and then drove back down the coast, the same way we came up. We would have loved to have circled the island, but three weeks was just not enough time to explore as much as wanted. However, we were delighted to return to Gros Morne National Park, and see some areas we had missed on the way up. Western Brook Pond was a real highlight.
We took the Western Brook Pond boat tour through this land-locked fjord, and it was a great way to experience it. The tour guides were great, and there was even traditional music by a live performer on the way back. The kids were encouraged to join in and my daughter had a blast playing tambourine.
The scenery was stunning, from cliffs to waterfalls to verdant forests We didn’t see any wildlife, but apparently moose and bear can sometimes be seen.
The tour goes all the way to the far end of the ‘pond,’ though I’d definitely categorize this as a lake. You can see the dock in the above photo. Another way to experience this area is to take the boat to the dock and then begin hiking. They offer a guided hike as well, though it remains to be seen if it will return in 2021. It’s more strenuous than we wanted to do with an 8-year-old, but we have our eye on this for the next time we return to Newfoundland. The views from the cliffs look amazing.
We spent the afternoon and night at Shallow Bay, the longest sand beach in Gros Morne National Park. Because, and I’m just guessing here, the water is shallow far out into the bay, the swimming was glorious. It was truly warm (and I am a tough critic, being from South Carolina where the water gets bathtub warm :) and I wished we had stayed a little longer.
The campground was situated in lush forest, and we walked a trail lined by these crackerberry flowers to the beach - maybe a quarter of a mile. It was quite a pleasant stay.
Our next hike at Gros Morne National Park was Trout River Pond. We only did about the first half, which was quite muddy and very closed in by the forest. We did take a quick breather by the pond, where W thought she would see just how fast Lyle would run (answer, so fast she could hardly keep up.) I can’t remember if we even saw any other hikers on this trail, which made it a good spot to let W take over walking the dog, except when the mud was too slippery going up or downhill.
One good thing about the mud is that it is great for spotting tracks. Here she and Bri pulled out the activity booklet provided by the park and tried to figure out if we had found moose tracks.
One of our favorite hikes of the summer, though a tough one, was Green Gardens in Gros Morne National Park. The way out is pretty much downhill, and it was pretty muddy in places. That’s half the fun, though, right? It’s not long before you can see the ocean, and eventually you come upon a green, grassy ridge that overlooks the shore.
And then there are more stairs, just in case you had not had enough.
But look at the reward! A wide beach (at low tide, anyway) fans out into low rocks that we had fun climbing on.
Some of the rocks at the beach are cracks filled with calcite and quartz. They are quite striking. We sat on some as we ate our picnic lunch and enjoyed the view.
We were hardly the only ones there, though like everywhere else we went in Newfoundland, it was not crowded.
We were so excited to go see The Tablelands at Gros Morne National Park. This is an interesting place in geological terms - one of the few places where the Earth’s mantle protrudes above the crust. There is little vegetation, and glaciers carved beautiful curves into the landscape. It makes for a very unique sight when you can see green hills in every other direction.
There is a path that ends in a boardwalk at Winter Park Brook Canyon. You are allowed to hike, however, off the trail here, which we would have done had we more time. On the way back, we examined the pitcher plants that are easy to pick out of the landscape. My daughter had been given an eye dropper as part of her National Parks booklet, so that she could pull the liquid out of a pitcher plant, examine its contents, and then return the liquid to the plant. It was really neat to see the half-digested bug parts.
