Chapter 3 - Nova Scotia to Newfoundland
July 25 - August 12, 1997
This tale takes up where Chapter Two left off, in central Nova Scotia on July 25. Unfortunately, it is being written for several different audiences, and what it interesting to some will be boring trivialities to others. This also makes it longer than I'd like. Perhaps in future chapters, we'll try to edit different, shorter, versions for smaller distribution lists. Opinions welcomed!
We keep getting reminded that we are in a foreign country, in many small ways. Today, I couldn't find a bottle of Ibuprofen in the drug store - no Advil or Nuprin, no generic - nothing. I finally asked the pharmacist, who pulled a bottle of generic Ibuprofen from behind the counter. It's not a prescription item, but is kept concealed from the public. Why? I was in a big hurry and didn't take time to ask.
We've been in the middle of dairy country for weeks, yet we can find no interesting local cheese. In the US Midwest, it seems like every county has a couple of brands of local cheese - here, I've seen none. All we can get in the grocery stores are the national or store brands of bland generic cheese, and an occasional imported European specialty cheese in the largest stores. Black Diamond Canadian cheddar - available almost anywhere in the northeastern US - doesn't seem to exist in Maritime Canada.
The Newfoundland ferry is booked solid until next Thursday - eight days away. At the time I called, the standby line had 50 vehicles, and they were averaging two or three standbys getting on each sailing - at three sailings per day (it's a six hour trip, one way). Change of plans! We'll tour Cape Breton Island to fill the time until our ferry reservation.
7/26 We moved the trailer to Lakes Campground, on Lake O'Law, in the Margaree River Valley. This is beautiful country - we caught glimpses of the huge Bras D'Or Lakes, through lush green forest, with practically no junk or advertising along the highway. It was quite a warm day, and after setting up camp, we headed down to the lake for a swim. Very refreshing. I think it was the first swim this summer. The campground advertises 37% exchange on American money, making it even cheaper than we expected. Irving Oil - the most common gas station here, also has a 37% exchange rate. They do ok on this because they avoid the several percent fee that they would have paid if we used a credit card. Went to sleep to the sound of loons calling on the lake.
7/27 The Margaree River is one of the famous places to fish for Atlantic salmon. We stopped at the Salmon museum, and it turned out to be mostly biographical information about the various famous fishermen who came here to fly fish ( the only legal way to catch these fish here). All commercial ocean fishing for Atlantic salmon has been stopped, to help the population recover. We then drove out to the west coast (Gulf of St. Lawrence), and followed a bad gravel road to its end, where a network of hiking trails starts. We took a long hike along the cliffs, high above the ocean.
7/28 Emptied out the truck, moving almost everything except the boxes of camping gear into the trailer, so we could sleep in the truck tonight, leaving the trailer behind in the campground. We drove the entire Cabot Trail (the periphery of the north part of Cape Breton) - much of it within the national park. We walked two of the park trails. One short trail was entirely on a boardwalk through a bog. Two different white orchids were in bloom all over the swamp. Two varieties of laurel, quite similar to our own mountain laurel, were in bloom. Lots of insect-eating pitcher plants in bloom. Another trail led through a bog and a spruce forest out to a rocky headland extending well out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The wind was almost enough to blow us off the cliffs. Overall, we probably walked about 13 km during the two days.
We arrived at Cape North in the evening, hungry, and hunted up Morrison's Restaurant - about which Helen had read a glowing newspaper article. After finding the restaurant, we spent a while locating a nearby but elusive campground (Hideaway - well named), reserved a site, and went back for a leisurely dinner. The place lived up to the article - wonderful food at a moderate price, and even some drinkable wines. I had salmon tournedos - salmon stuffed with apple and onion and wrapped in bacon. We split an interesting appetizer - a smoked salmon filled cabbage roll. Helen had halibut, wrapped in a network of browned, slightly crisp thin potato strings, an anchovy on top, with interesting spices. We had bumbleberry pie for dessert - a local specialty - a mix of raspberry, rhubarb, and apple. Highly recommended! Incidentally, for the Farley Mowat fans among you, "The Boat Who Wouldn't Float" is sitting alongside the road in front of a restaurant called "The Schooner", a few miles from here. Much of the book takes place in Newfoundland, and it is full of funny Newfie stories, so being reminded of it was good preparation for our impeding trip to Newfoundland.
7/29 The road along the West Coast of the Cape Breton Highlands snakes along high cliffs and rocky headlands, with dramatic views. The East Side is more rounded - lots of ups and downs, with picturesque fishing villages. We prowled over the rocks in several of the little interpretive pull-outs along the road, and learned a bit more about geology and rock identification, and identified a few more plants.
The Cape Breton highlands and coasts are said to look very much like Scotland and they were settled by people from the Isle of Skye in the 1600's. The area makes much of the Scottish heritage. Clan gathering dates are posted in the newspapers. Many small businesses are run by the MacLeods, the MacKinnons, the MacDonalds, the MacPhersons, etc. Place names include Inverness, Aberdeen, Dunvegan, Creignish, Ingonish, Clyburn, Dundee, etc. Half the gift shops are advertising plaids. The resorts advertise 'Ceilidhs every Saturday night'. Background music here is mostly tapes of bagpipe music, and many of the historic museum sites have live pipers on hand daily. Despite all this, I haven't seen one person in a kilt or tartan except the live pipers, who always wear full regalia.
Americans should feel welcome here. The place abounds with Bed 'n Breakfasts, and the law requiring French and English on many signs is mostly ignored. Nearly all are in English only, although every shopkeeper gets in the first word(s) with "Bonjour, Hello", hoping your response will tell them what language to talk to you in. Distances are still quoted in both km and miles. I haven't found a toilet yet that was dirty or out of toilet paper. (That's because all the paper tears off lengthwise instead of crosswise so nobody can use it! Diabolical.) Tourist information is available everywhere, there are hundreds of gift shops, lobster huts, and whale watching tours outside the park, and many places give extra points on the exchange rate for American cash! (But, not on credit purchases.) Sometimes I feel like the goose with the golden egg. Tourist dollars are the golden egg, and they will be killed by an (over)eagerness to please. Even with all this, there are miles of unspoiled scenery with nary an advertising sign, and I am having a great time!
7/30 We moved the trailer to Arm of Gold Campground, about three km. from the ferry dock to Newfoundland. Our site had a nice view of a portion of Bras D'Or Lake, but is otherwise not an impressive place. It's a family operation with perhaps 60 sites, about 20 of them fully serviced, as a guess. It was about the most informal office operation I've seen yet. The sites didn't even have numbers, and there was no record keeping other than writing our name and home city in a log to satisfy legal requirements. They were happy to let me use the phone for Email. Both the owner and his 8-year-old son were full of questions about the Email process, the laptop, the Internet, etc. It's nice to be back near a "big" town - we found a shopping mall with a Wal-Mart and a big grocery store, did some shopping, and got some film developed and printed at Wal-Mart's one-hour facility.
7/31 Arrived at the dock at 2:30 for a 4 p.m. ferry departure. Loading started at about 3:00, but for some reason we were left until almost last. They load these things like a jigsaw puzzle, from a football-field-sized parking lot of vehicles. We were parked near the front where I could hear the guys on the boat talking to their traffic directors in the parking lot on hand-held radios. "Hey, Joe - I need a 35 footer." "Haven't got one. There's a forty here". "Nope - send two medium-sized cars". And so on.
I started getting worried when one of them came over and asked our exact length (55'). We were sent aboard, directed right up against the vehicle ahead of us, and then asked to back out, move a few feet to the right, angle a little, and come in again. I had about three different dock workers all yelling conflicting directions at once and waving their arms as I tried to back out. They finally got us in position, then went into a huddle. I walked back and joined the huddle. We were the last vehicle in that row, on the lowest vehicle deck, and it seemed that the huge steel doors that slam shut to keep the waves out might, or might not, clear the back of the trailer. They finally decided that there was an inch or so of clearance, but suggested that I stick around until departure (all the other vehicle occupants around us had locked up and headed up to the passenger decks. Another truck and trailer was loaded in next to us, and clearly was hanging out by a foot. They made him back out and wait for the next boat (7 hours). It was kind of scary watching those giant doors rumble toward the trailer. But they slammed to a stop about two inches from our bumper.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. We arrived in Port Au Basque at 9:45 p.m., and headed directly out onto the Trans-Canada Highway - abbreviated to TCH on all the signs. After a brief stop at a tourist information area (still open at 10 p.m.), we drove to the provincial park, about 15 km north, and arrived to find ourselves last in a long line of assorted RV's waiting at the entrance. They had several staff people on duty (clearly well aware of when the ferry arrived), and we were quite quickly directed down a narrow gravel track into the pitch-black forest, told to pick any empty site and then to come back and register. Trying to identify a site into which we would fit and then backing into the site between the trees, in the dark, was a new experience. The hand-held radio again proved invaluable - Helen walked back into the site with a flashlight and the CB while I listened to her instructions on the CB in the truck, slowly easing back into the site. We fit, with the back 8' of trailer hanging out over a small brook. We're in Newfoundland at last.
8/1 We took a morning walk on a trail that went 1 km or so from the campsites along a little rocky ridge to the ocean beach. Already, there are noticeable differences in the plants. A few more of the familiar species have vanished, and we identified a couple of new ones. An attractive white spike of flowers was later identified as Canadian Burnett. A tourist brochure noted that as we drive up the length of the "Great Northern Peninsula" of Newfoundland, the spruce trees would go from full-sized in the south to low ground-hugging spreading shrubs (locally called tuckamore) about 2/3ds of the way up, to nonexistent at the north end. We chuckled at the "full-sized" description, since the mature trees around us here at the southern end of the island are at most about 20 feet high, although a few have thick trunks and may be hundreds of years old. We see trees being harvested for lumber that would barely be considered for fence posts back home.
This morning, we had our first blowout on this trip. The other axle continued to support the trailer, and we didn't notice it until we pulled into the campground, but I think I know when it happened - earlier, we had heard a soft noise, a barely noticeable "pop" that didn't quite sound like a stone thrown up from the road (and we were on good pavement). Fortunately, we were close to our destination, Barachois Provincial Park - no services, but a pleasant, wooded park, with 150 sites spread out for a mile or more along a lake. We limped slowly past the first 80 sites before finding an empty one big enough to hold the trailer. We decided to change the tire after dark, unhooked hurriedly, and left the campground to try to use the remaining few hours of daylight to circumnavigate an interesting-looking long narrow peninsula that separates St. George's Bay from the Gulf of St. Laurence.
Stephenville is at the very narrow neck at the beginning of the peninsula, a fairly large town for NF, some of it dating from a US Air Force Base which was closed in the 60's. At one point, the highway crosses a huge runway - asphalt extending in all directions to hangers and other buildings set far back from the road. The road was defined only by the yellow and white paint stripes, and in some parts by a wire fence. Except for these symbolic barriers, we could have closed our eyes and driven off in random directions for as much as a mile without leaving the pavement. Some of the buildings have been converted to other uses - the provincial government has a training center which uses some of the big buildings and barracks, some are a somewhat seedy looking industrial park. Many looked vacant.
Just beyond Stephenville, the narrowest part of the peninsula has a tiny settlement called Port au Port. We don't know much French, but we know enough about sailing to see that a portage across here from the Gulf to St. George's Bay (perhaps half a mile, consisting of a big tidal pool in the middle and sandbars at each end) would save a long and difficult windward passage out around the peninsula. The entire Peninsula is now called the "French Coast". The names were mostly French, the schools and churches all Catholic. Until recently, it wasn't possible to drive all the way around the peninsula. In fact, our new map shows a gap of 15 km or so in the highway. At this point, the rocky spine of the peninsula meets the ocean, dropping abruptly in high sheer cliffs - very impressive. A brand-new highway has been blasted diagonally up the side, heading back inland to bypass the steepest part, and then over the barren top and back down to meet the old road on the other side. We stopped on top and walked around. The rock is uninteresting limestone, and there is little foliage - an occasional stunted cluster of spruces or ground-hugging juniper, occasional dense patches of bunchberry, little else. I found an attractive woody ground cover with tiny shiny leaves creeping out across the rocks, and Helen found it in one of her books - bearberry, although I didn't see any berries on this specimen. Interestingly, the Tamarack, a deciduous coniferous swamp tree in the eastern US, also appears as a small shrub in these semi-alpine areas.
The standard of living all along the NF coast is very noticeably worse than NB and NS. Many of the homes are smaller than a typical American two-car garage. Some are covered with flakeboard sheathing, with no protective or cosmetic siding at all. For the most part, they are well spaced on individual plots of land, often separated by decrepit rail fences. And for the most part, they are neat, sometimes with flower beds - still much more attractive than any American slum. Some have stacks of lobster traps in the yard. The fishing boats are small - barely more than dories, hand launched off the beach. I'm sure these people live on a lot less money than a typical American welfare recipient, but something in their attitude about life is radically different.
8/2 We packed up and left early, expecting that tire stores might close at noon on Saturday. Corner Brook was about an hour's drive, the second largest "city" in NF and a likely place to find a tire. Asking along the way, we were directed to Canadian Tire, and found it without much trouble in the center of Corner Brook. As expected, they didn't have an exact replacement tire. Just as well - I've decided to change to radial ply tires, which are more readily available and run cooler, and also to change to an oversized tire that might have a better chance of survival. (This is the third tire that's failed in the brand-new set installed when we bought the trailer). They had a radial trailer tire of the right size in stock. We double-parked in an aisle of their parking lot, not quite blocking access, while they fairly quickly mounted and balanced the new tire.
On the way out of the parking lot, I miscalculated and scuffed a trailer tire against an unusually high rough concrete curb, puncturing the sidewall. If it's gotta happen, the best place is in the parking lot of a tire store. We immediately had an audience of half a dozen friendly Newfies, directing traffic and offering advice. We pulled on out of the lot, up the street 50 yards, and across into a big empty parking lot behind a government building, where I parked, jacked up the trailer, and again changed a wheel, carrying the wheel back to the store for another purchase. Fortunately, they had another in stock. This whole episode only cost us a couple of hours (and of course the price of two tires).
Before leaving home, I had bought a second, unmounted, spare tire to carry in the back of the truck. So now, I still have four of the old-style tires on the trailer, and have two new radials - one on the spare wheel and one loose in the truck. If (when?) we have another tire failure, I'll buy two more radials and put a set of four on the trailer, and will then have two of the old-style tires as spares.
We continued on to our destination for the day - George's Campground, and had our first bad campground experience since leaving home. George's was a tiny, cramped, place, close to the highway and sharing the property with rental cabins, a gift shop, several other little stores, a ski equipment store, and assorted other things. It's adjacent to Marble Mountain ski area - the site of the next Canadian Winter Games. They had reserved a 24' site for our 35' trailer, and there was no way we could shoehorn it in. It was the only site that they had left. It was their mistake - their written notes showed that they had planned to give us a 40' site. We had booked here a week ago, choosing it because of a convenient location and a fairly good description in the campground guide, so we could have our mail forwarded here. At least they were cooperative - agreeing to hold our mail packet when it arrived, and helping us phone another campground 10 miles up the road. It worked out well - South Brook Park is a much nicer place.
We had heard the Newfies were the worlds most friendly and outgoing people. We now believe it. It's becoming routine, when we stop somewhere, for a local to wander over and initiate a conversation. The accent is very thick - difficult to understand. They talk very fast, but slightly mumbled, as though with a mouthful of marbles, and the pronunciation is significantly different than the rest of Canada - slightly reminiscent of Australia. (Incidentally, the proper pronunciation of both Newfoundland and Labrador is with a strong accent on the last syllable). The negative feeling about the Quebecois is very strong and open here as well as in NB and NS. They feel they've bent over backwards to be nice, have gone through a great deal of trouble to establish the national dual-language system and to give Quebec a lot of local autonomy, and yet the Quebecois are still agitating for independence. The attitude now is "no way". I was shocked to hear them talking openly about the possibility of an American-style Civil War if Quebec persists in its independence path.
8/3 It's been raining off and on all night, and an all-day drizzle seems likely. Two small children, bundled securely in high boots, rain pants, and hooded parkas, are playing in the road in front of our trailer. At the moment, they are systematically jumping into each mud puddle, comparing splashes. I've wondered how one deals with restless children in a small trailer on a rainy day. Now I know.
The license plates around us are mostly Newfie. This name does not appear to be pejorative, and is widely used, both by and about the residents of Newfoundland. In this era of political correctness, it sounds very strange to us.
We've noticed abandoned railroads, tracks long since removed, almost every place we've been along the NF coast. Helen heard the story last night. At one time, NF had a large number of railroads, built by a large number of entrepreneurs, and often incompatible - different gauges and different kinds of equipment. At one point, Canada nationalized the railroads, agreeing to maintain them in perpetuity. Subsequently, they decided that this mess was too expensive to fix, and offered to build a two-lane highway across NF in return for abandoning the railroads. This was the original highway 1, from Port au Basque to St. Johns. We drove some of it in 1975, and it wasn't much of a road. It was later upgraded, lowering grades, straightening curves, adding passing lanes on the steep grades, etc It is currently being upgraded again, to a 4-lane limited-access expressway. In typical Canadian fashion, it is being done a few miles at a time with a minimum of heavy equipment and a maximum of local labor. Before it is finished, it will be time to rebuild the early sections. Yesterday, we drove a section that is just being completed, and were amused to watch an old "steam shovel" (diesel, not steam, but almost that old) spreading a layer of "top soil" over the recently graded gravel slopes along the road. It wasn't the right tool for the job - a front-end loader could have done a better job in a fraction of the time, but the amusing part is that the "top soil" was a mixture of sand and rock, barely distinguishable from the gravel used for the roadbed. Soil of any description is scarce around here.
The rain stopped in mid-afternoon, although it still looked threatening enough so that we decided not to take a long hike and instead, headed out to do some exploring in the truck. I discovered that we had a 22-year-old map of NF, and it contained quite a few small roads that aren't shown on the current "official" tourist road map. So we headed down one of these little roads towards a group of small lakes off to the west of our campground. The roads turned out to be primarily for logging, but were passable. The road wound up and over some high, steep hills which separate the Humber River watershed from the streams flowing west into the ocean. We had great views from the top, passed several attractive lakes, skirted a beaver pond which was threatening to flood the road, and after about 25 km, got stopped by a washout that we couldn't quite negotiate. There was quite a bit of lumbering - many of the hills had been clear-cut, but had a dense carpet of small intensely green spruce trees already covering every inch of soil.
8/6 Drove to Lomond Campground, in the southern part of Gros Morne National Park. Unserviced sites, spectacular scenery. Next morning, we did some exploring in the truck. We spent quite a while in the Gros Morne NP visitors center - they have very well-done slide presentations on the park and on the geology of the area. (The Park is an UNESCO World Heritage Site because of the unique geology - one of the best places in the world for studying the details of plate tectonics.) They also had an excellent bookstore, and we bought three more field guides. In the afternoon, we did a couple of short hikes to scenic points
8/9 A lazy morning, recovering from sore muscles and enjoying the ambience of the Park. A flock of noisy crows is drifting through the treetops around us. From our campsite, we have a panoramic view north across the South Arm of Bonne Bay into the Long Range Mountains. The ground, sloping down to the Bay, is boggy (most ground up here is either solid rock or bog - deep well-drained soil is practically unknown. The hillside is dotted with spruce, and in the clearings, the meadow is enlivened by bog candles - an orchid with a tall spike covered with tiny delicate white flowers. There are numerous other flowers too - keeping us busy thumbing through the field guides. Moose sightings are frequent. Yesterday morning, I took a walk around the campsite while the coffee was brewing. I heard a branch snap, just down the hill from me, and then noticed a moose grazing about 50 feet away, mostly concealed by a little thicket of spruce. The night we arrived, our exploratory walk, just at dusk, took us on a boardwalk through a broad meadow near the Bay at the other end of the Park, leading to a picnic shelter in the day use area. Part way across the meadow, we saw a half-grown moose near the water, and it saw us at about the same time. We froze, and in the poor light, upwind of us, the moose apparently couldn't identify what we were. It moved towards us, circling around us perhaps 25 feet away, until it got downwind, caught our scent, and trotted rapidly away. We had mostly been worrying about where momma moose was and whether she would be galloping to the defense of her baby.
Yesterday we took a long hike - over eight hours, during which we climbed about 500 meters of vertical elevation gain, up through a steep canyon onto the high plateau called The Tablelands. In north-facing portions of the upper reaches of the canyon, there were still large, deep snowfields, feeding a vigorous stream which cascaded down the canyon in impressive waterfalls. From the top of the plateau, we had a wonderful view out over Bonne Bay to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the west and the Long Range Mountains to the North and East. Gros Morne Mountain, the second highest peak in NF, is a prominent landmark almost due north. Several little fishing villages are huddled in coves along the bay shore. Bonne Bay is an impressive fjord, with sheer rock walls, generally narrow, and extending inland for 20 miles or so.
The Tablelands is a geologically fascinating structure - a huge chunk of the earth's Mantle from under the deep ocean floor. Two crustal plates collided here, with the eastern plate being subducted under the western one, except for a few pieces like the Tablelands which skidded out on top. This mantle rock is peridotite, almost jet-black when freshly exposed, but weathering to an interesting light tan when exposed for a few years. Occasional veins of serpentine, mica and other minerals we couldn't identify run through the otherwise uniform rock. This rock has a high content of chromium, magnesium, and a couple of other metals which are harmful to most plant life. As a result, the plateau and the area around it are mostly barren. No trees at all, and few of the familiar plants. Bog plants like the Pitcher Plant and sedges seem to thrive, and on the slopes we saw occasional stunted ground-hugging juniper and tamarack, and a few flowers - bright blue campanulas, yellow cincfoil, and rose campion. Because of the lack of plant life, we also saw no animals of any kind, except for a few insects.
8/10 Another long hike today - this time the Green Gardens trail. The trail winds through varied terrain - barrens, tuckamore, bogs, spruce forested hillsides, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Along the coast, there is a strip of good soil, perhaps 100 yards wide, supporting a lush grass meadow - giving rise to the name. Long ago, sheep were pastured here, as one of the few places on the island capable of supporting livestock. The beach has interesting rock formations - caves, isolated rock fingers sticking up out of the water, sheer cliffs, and outcroppings of volcanic pillow rock.
8/11 We rose early and moved the trailer fifty miles north to Shallow Bay Campground - still within Gros Morn National Park. It was time for a change of scene, and we wanted to get closer to the various activities in the northern part of the park. We were settled into a campsite by noon - a new record for us. The campgrounds in the National Park have been filling up by evening, even on weekdays, but always seem to be half empty in the morning. From here on, perhaps we'll make an extra effort to travel early. We're a few hundred yards from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and one of the few sandy beaches we've seen - complete with large sand dunes gradually inundating the dense spruce forest. It's been windy for a few days, and the surf is a constant background roar, even with the trailer closed up tight.
A red squirrel is making the rounds, coming through our campsite about every 15 minutes to check for food - scampering over and under the picnic table, around the fireplace, and then under the chair where I am sitting quietly. After lunch, I was again sitting quietly, reading and nibbling a cookie. Apparently the smell was irresistible - I was startled to find the squirrel in my lap.
8/12 Got up early to make the 10 a.m. boat at Western Brook Pond. Two rabbits are grazing just outside the trailer door. They look quite a bit bigger than the kind we had in Rochester. Strange - as we move north the plants get smaller and the animals get bigger. It's a 20-minute drive to get to the trailhead, then a 45-minute walk to get to the boat dock, so we hurried through breakfast. The walk has been improved to be accessible to an all-terrain wheelchair - about 5 feet wide, smoothly graded gravel. It winds through bogs, spruce forest, and tuckamore, with occasional interpretive signs along the way. The bogs are slowly rising, and the water retention abilities of the sphagnum moss is so great the bog level is actually above the level of the limestone ridges which "enclose" them. There is now 13 feet of peat accumulated in the bogs. We saw a couple of new (to us) plants along the way. Everything is miniaturized here - the trees, and all the plants. The Joe Pye weed, now beginning to bloom, can be over my head in New York, and is barely knee high here. A mature spruce under ideal growing conditions, perhaps hundreds of years old, will have a trunk a foot thick and be at most about 25 feet high, and such giants are rare. We were worried that a "wooded" campsite would shade our solar cells, but in fact, the tree are usually not much higher than the trailer, and are so slender that they cast little shade.
Western Brook Pond is spectacular. "Pond", in Newfoundland, refers to any body of fresh water, regardless of size, and this pond is 16 km long. The rock walls rise straight out of the water to a height of 2200 feet. In places, they also go straight down into the water for several hundred feet. This is part of the Appalachian Mountain chain, formed at the boundary where two plates of the earth's crust collided and folded up, about 600 million years ago. The present shapes are due to repeated scouring by glaciers. Today, it would be easy to imagine the glaciers returning - it is chilly, dark, heavily overcast, with the tops of the cliffs often obscured by cloud, and we can see occasional snowdrifts still clinging to the north-facing cliffs in mid-August. Several times, we noticed a pair of bald eagles soaring high above us. Later, one landed in a tree on shore 100 yards or so from the boat. Before leaving Rochester, the only eagles we had seen close enough to recognize were in zoos. Now we've seen several. A few weeks ago, while rafting the Shubenacadie River, there were eagles overhead most of the time and one had swooped quite low over our raft, checking out the prospects for dinner. We also got to observe a nest, with two young eagles looking over the side. They appeared almost big enough to fly. We didn't seem to disturb them as we motored slowly up a little side channel to just below their tree. As we were leaving, momma was returning.
Western Brook Pond is very pure water, fed only by a multitude of tiny streams draining from the high, inaccessible and uninhabited, tablelands above. Many of these streams form very impressive waterfalls as they cascade nearly half a mile down the bare cliffs. One stream dropped off an overhanging cliff at the top and fell free for nearly half way down - perhaps 800 feet, slowly dissolving into fine mist before hitting the wall and reforming into a stream. At the inland end of the pond, there is a small dock where the boat will drop backpackers. A trail leads east up a canyon onto the high plateau, and then south to join the Gros Morn trail. "Trail" is a misnomer, since it is entirely unmarked, requiring continuous map and compass navigation. It is only about 20 miles as measured on the map, but starts with a 2000 foot climb and is reputed to take 4 to 6 days for experienced hikers. The special permit for this trail is issued only after a one-hour orientation lecture by a park ranger. We didn't attempt it.