The weather this morning was not great – it was rainy and cold. But we’re here, right? So off we went.
We started the day at the Visitor’s Center just down the road. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, we found another Land Cruiser. It’s like my husband has some sort of magnetic attraction or something. Anyway, it turns out that this was a couple from Denmark that have been traveling all over the world in their Land Cruiser – they told us they’ve been in 30 countries and counting. Jon knew about them (of course he did), and has been kind of following them on Facebook. We found their website here (warning, it’s in Danish). We chatted with them for a bit and took some pictures:
Jon didn’t stop grinning for an hour.
We headed over to the southern side of the park. We had to backtrack a ways to drive around the Eastern Arm of Bonne Bay; along the way we realized we could see the waterfall we hiked to yesterday:
We ended up at the other Visitor’s Center, then because the weather still wasn’t great, we went to Woody Point for lunch. Jon’s still talking about that hamburger.
While we were in town we kind of got adopted by this dude named Don who was very nice and kept pointing us to all this places he thought we should go. I know he was just being enthusiastic and talking up his town to tourists, but it did get a tad creepy when he followed us into the restaurant to see if we were enjoying our food.
By the time we finished eating, the weather had finally started to clear up, so we drove up to the Tablelands for our first real hike.
Brief digression for some science here, but this is important. Newfoundland was pretty much formed by plate tectonics when the supercontinent split apart. Then it was completely covered during one of the ice ages, and the retreating glaciers carved the land into the mountains and fjords you can see today. When the island was formed, a huge chunk of the ocean floor was pushed up, and then the earth’s crust eroded away, leaving the mantle exposed in what’s called the Tablelands. It’s the only spot in North America where you can actually walk on the mantle.
The rock is primarily perodontite, which has a lot of iron and other metals in it. The rock itself is this deep green color, but because it has so much iron, it rusts when it’s exposed to the air. When perodontite is mixed with water, the calcium bubbles out and the rock turns to serpetinine, which looks oddly like snakeskin. The result is this really weird, eerie reddish landscape, that looks a lot like Mars does in my imagination. Because of all the toxic metals, not a whole lot of plants grow there, and we didn’t even see any birds flying overhead. I don’t know how clearly you can see it in the pics below, but the right side of the road is all forested and full of trees, and the left side is just this alien landscape.
It was a really different and unique experience.
We drove down to Trout River, and generally tooled around the park talking pictures:
On our way heading back towards the hotel, our attention was caught by this big flock of very excited seagulls flying around one spot in the bay. We stopped (of course), and talked to some people who said it was a herd of seals – the seals push the fish up towards the surface to eat, and the birds take advantage. I don’t think you can actually see the seals in the picture, but we did catch some glimpses of them.
Not too long afterwards a big bull moose ran across the road in front of us, but I didn’t manage a picture.
The weather’s supposed to be a lot better in the next couple of days, so we should get some more hiking in.