Gros Morne Park North

Hiking in Gros Morne National Park is a lesson in plate tectonics and a day out in a stunning landscape all rolled into one. Given the nickname for Newfoundland is ‘The Rock’ it’s not surprising most of the hikes vary from boulder hopping to scrambling up steep slopes of scree. We spent a week in the park and loved it all. Everywhere you go there are spectacular views of fjords, rivers and lakes in every direction.

The north part of the park is dominated by high cliffs with steep walls hundreds of meters high punctuated every so often with deep gorges formed in the ice age. Some of it is easily accessible, such as Western Brook Pond where you can take a boat trip on the fjord, or Green Point where you can stroll down from the car park. Others take more effort such as the summit of Gros Morne.

Gros Morne Mountain

The bald head of the park’s namesake stands out from all the surrounding peaks like a giant egg carefully placed in a sea of trees. We’d been told it was one of the toughest hikes in the park. And indeed, the view from the trailhead is a little daunting – how in the world do you make your way up this thing? It’s so… steep looking…

As we left the paved trail and set off for the summit we passed a guy looking forlornly up at the steep scree. He was a keen trail runner in his past but is no longer physically able to climb this kind of trail. After several hundred meters of heart pounding scrambling up steep slope covered in small rocks, we were thinking he’d made the right choice. But then as we turned to take in the view (and maybe use this as an excuse to rest) we were rewarded with beautiful views back over Millbrook fjord and out towards the Tablelands.

From there it flattened out to the arctic tundra type landscape we’d seen in Gaspé. Once we reached the summit we could wander to see views across the North of the park which is quite different to the South, From up here you look down and out across the forested plateau dotted with sparkling lakes and punctuated with deep gorges, One of those places where it’s really hard to fathom the scale.

From the summit we walked down the back side of the mountain and through a gorge to our starting point. While the first half of the hike was tough, the rest is quite easy. Not nearly as exhausting as our day on the Tablelands. 

The hike took us in a complete circle and as we sat looking up at the summit once more people started wandering past off the mountain. One couple had just finished the three day trek from Western Brook Pond. It’s one of those experiences you plan a year in advance and only a few people get to experience. The look on their faces said it all: amazing, stunning, exhausting.
 

Green Point

Green Point was another one of those places in Gros Morne that leave you a little stunned. Knowing nothing about it, we thought it would just be a nice place to go and visit. It turns out that it’s (another) place of incredible geological significance. 

Back in 2000, Green Point was designated as ‘the global stratotype for the boundary between the Cambrian and Ordovician systems’. Hundreds – nay, thousands – of layers of sediment deposited over millions of years, chock full of fossilized remains of ancient creatures. Two layers of which represented different eras in the evolution of life here on good ol’ planet earth, and whose ages could definitively be determined. Hence, the designation as the ‘global stratotype’. And super cool looking!
 

 
From Green point there is a walk along the rocky coastline where Juniper trees bent over by the harsh ocean winds form a forest like something from The Hobbit.

Western Brook Pond

The final ‘bucket list’ item on our Gros Morne agenda was the boat ride through the Western Brook Pond fjord. The view from the end of the fjord is one of the most photographed in the park (though a little higher than our vantage point on the boat (we couldn’t justify spending $300 per person to hike up for the photo op and hadn’t booked the three day trail a year in advance). But the boat ride was pretty spectacular!

It’s one of those times when you feel very small in the scale of natural landscape and kind of hard b fathom the scale. At one point along the fjord, the walls are higher than the CN Tower in Toronto, once the highest man-made structure in the world.