Dwight Peck's personal website

Newfoundland is still there (2006)

The island that became part of Canada about the time that I was watching Captain Midnight on a 10-inch B+W TV screen and sending in my cereal boxtops for the code ring.

The Gros Morne National Park: Trout River and the Green Gardens

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

For us, the Trout River experience begins at the Crocker & Son grocery (which coincidentally was going out of business the next day), where we were looking for butter. Butter is evidentally not to be found in Newfoundland -- even when you ask for it, they obligingly lead you to the margarine.

We'd already tried Hann's Confectionary for some butter -- alas, just margarine! (And truly bad beer.)

But Trout River is near the heart of the Table Lands, where the tectonic plates keep slipping under one another in turns and throwing up shelves of raw "mantle", like 500 million years ago, so nothing grows now, and we've come all the way here to walk about this so-called "mantle" on the Green Gardens trail.

Trout River is a fine little coastal town at the southern end of the Gros Morne National Park (and UNESCO World Heritage site), south of Bonne Bay -- see the map below --

and we've just scored this extremely satisfactory two-bedroom doublewide at the entrance to the town, rockbottom prices, no charm, lots of space, and really really clean.

This is the world I want to live in -- with grade schools designing environmental signs, local lobster committees supporting them, everybody doing what they can to make it all bearable. Not the world of Blackwater, Halliburton, Homeland Security, Carlyle Group, immigration fences, Siege of Gaza (where did those people crawl out from?).

In any case, a bare kilometer's walk brings us into the village on the coast, and . . . and . . . once again, we're really really hungry!

And this is the perfect place to solve that problem. The upstairs panoramic room looks out over the sea, and the food is stupendous.

The next day, a lovely view of Trout River Pond near the Table Lands, but in fact we were on our way to the Green Gardens hike on the Table Lands at the time, and couldn't linger.

We're just stopping in, first, to the Park's "Discovery Centre" near Woody Point, to view the exhibits, buy muffins for lunch, and utilize the facilities for the purpose for which they were intended, and they were very clean, too.

You hear that, Bush?!?!

I'm always astonished that, almost wherever you go, people are building such intelligent, well-intentioned things. And with no obvious Profit Motive, just to do good. They must know what's coming, but they keep on doing the best they can in spite of that.

And now it's time to go for a walk across the lower Table Lands towards the sea. This is genuine, original "mantle" or "crust" or something, sticking up out of the magma or tectonic plates. Or something.

And we're welcome here! How often do you get to say that nowadays?

Kristin leads off across the Earth's mantle . . .

. . . and continues on across the Earth's mantle for a ways . . .

. . . and finally begins to find us some greenery roundabout, but not much. It's a lot like Turkey here.

This hidden valley relieves the California desert scenic effects and leads down into scrub forest towards the coast.

With the sea in the distance. Or the Gulf of St Lawrence, rather. (Left: "tuckamore")

A few more little valleys to pass through and we're at the sea. Trout River probably lies just over those hills.

Sea stacks

The coast just north of Trout River, on the Green Gardens trail, June 2006

Looking northeastward along the coast (though Kristin is looking southwestward)

Sea stacks, looking to the southwest

The narrator, finally running out of patience, posing the "Lunch Question"

But there are more sights to be seen before we settle down for lunch.

Finally, we're settling down for lunch. With a careful eye for the poison ivy or nettles all about.

Heading back to the car later in the day, up over a couple of ridges with "tuckamore"

Kristin heading towards Long Pond -- in Newfoundland most lakes seem to be called "Long Pond".

And there's the parking lot, at the far end of Long Pond, and we've just time to drive north to Cow Head before Happy Hour!

Passing the higher Table Lands on the way back out to Woody Point and around Bonne Bay to the northward road to Cow Head. That's original "mantle" there.

From National Parks of Canada

Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, . All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 12 August 2006, revised 7 June 2012, 22 July 2013, 15 August 2022.

Newfoundland 2006