Are you sure we're on Planet Earth?

With our time in Newfoundland winding down (insert sad face here) we made sure to stop in an area in Gros Morne National Park called The Tablelands. In the summer months there is a fascinating, fun - and free - guided walking tour every day at 10:00am. That’s a bit early for both D and I, but we managed to get there in time - just in time. Guided tours are so much better than going it on your own, I think!

The tour takes you two kilometres along a trail through barren landscape of rusty orange-coloured rocks - rocks that have been pushed up from the earth’s mantle (a layer of rock found deep beneath the earth’s crust) hundreds of millions of years ago. Peridotite is the name of this rock. It is a greenish colour that looks a bit like snake skin, before it changes to rusty orange with oxidization.

The only way I can describe The Tablelands is… otherworldly. I wasn’t surprised to find out that two sci-fi movies have been filmed here, and the area has been used to train astronauts for missions to Mars and the moon. Oh, and this is where geologists were able to definitively prove the theory of Plate Tectonics.

That’s quite an impressive resume for a bunch of old rocks!

Peridotite rock from the Earth's mantle

Gros Morne - Part I

 

Gros Morne - the mountain the park is named for

Gros Morne National Park lies on the western side of Newfoundland, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with dramatic scenery shaped around 1,200 million years ago by colliding continents and grinding glaciers.

We camped for three nights at a private campground in Norris Point, where we biked, hiked, and ferried our way around the central part of the park – seeing just a tiny slice of the 1,805 square kilometres of land inside this protected area.

Bike and Ferry to Woody Point

Main Street - Woody Point

Hiking the Burnt Hill Trail

View of Neddy Harbour from the top of Burnt Hill

D has a funny saying, which turned out to be not so funny for us. “Why don’t you see any moose in Newfoundland? Because they’re hiding in the potholes!” True, visitors to Newfoundland rarely see these majestic creatures (they are shy, I guess). And true, the potholes can be so large that the moose can actually fit in some of them!

Driving along the highways here in Newfoundland, it can be difficult to miss the potholes since there are so many of them. We may have hit a few too many, and one of our front tires started to develop a strange warble. Concerned that any more potholes may be the death of our good friend Stevie the RV, D looked in to having the front tires replaced. Turns out the only ones that would fit Stevie were in St. John’s – clear across the province, 708 kilometres away.

The wonky, warbly tire

So off we went. We’ll save the rest of Gros Morne for later.