20020602

June 2, 2002

Day 24

Start: Grand Codroy RV Park, Doyles, NF
End: Gros Morne RV Park, Rocky Harbor, NF
Miles: approx 170

The low last night was 50f and the high today was 67f in southwestern Newfoundland.

We left after breakfast and headed north. Sunday, and there was no one on the road except a few construction people repairing the road. I guess you fix roads when you can up here. 

We stopped for fuel in a station and kept going toward Corner Brook. On the way, Dolores saw a moose out of the corner of her eye. 

Corner Brook is the second largest city in Newfoundland due to a tremendous paper mill. Our guides said the information center there would be open. It wasn’t. 

We went down to the river side shipping area in a district called Humbermouth and stumbled into the railway museum for the old Newfoundland Railway. In the local dialect of English, it’s proper to say “the” without pronouncing the “he” part, so “the car” comes out “t’ car”, and so forth. Thus, the Newfoundland Railway became known by everyone as “T’ Railway”. 

T’ Railway ran from Port-aux-Basques to Corner Brook to Gander to St John’s, some 500 miles. The express train took something like 26 hours to make the trip at the average rate of 20.5 mph. During WWII, American soldiers stationed there began calling it the "Newfie Bullet". The name stuck.  The museum has a 1927 locomotive and three cars used on the Newfie Bullet. On another track is an old wedge snowplow and the last diesel engine used in Newfoundland. The museum building was supposed to be open. It wasn’t. I’m detecting a trend here.

The weather at least was nice, partly cloudy but with little wind. We kept going to Deer Lake, on the lake of the same name that is about 20 miles long. There, we left the Trans-Canada Highway, branching off onto the Viking Trail, route 430. 

After a bit, we came to the Gros Morne National Park booth, stopped, and paid for two days of admission to all areas of the park, and got some information. The park surrounds several little towns that were there when the park was formed. One is Rocky Harbor, and that’s where we stopped and set up the trailer. The Gros Morne RV Park campground is close to town and is quite nice. The sites are large and the facilities are new and well-kept.

Then we took the truck out to see things. The campground owner told us of a place to see and a tour we should take (that’s on for tomorrow). We went to see the southern half of the park, which is a World Heritage Site, per UNESCO, due to it’s internationally significant geological highlights, called the Tablelands. This small set of high hills, surrounded by ordinary hills, is composed of material forced to the surface when the European and American plates collided. Other sites worldwide are compared with this one to date ancient rocks.

On the way, we stopped at a trail and hiked out to its end, only a kilometer. The path went through a bog area with many trees uprooted and fallen in the bog – it would be terrible walking without the path. Naturally, moose use it too, so the additional hazard of moose droppings was present. At the end, we found a tremendous water cascade (multiple levels of waterfall) with attendant roaring and spray. The drop of the river that we could see must have been 100 feet. We took a few pictures that probably won’t do justice to the scene, then went on.

We stopped at a park campground our campground owner told us about. The admission kiosk operator said a moose and baby had been seen where we were going. We drove down, but parked the diesel before we got there so we wouldn’t drive them off. It turned out that others had been driving around before we got there. Dolores got just a glimpse of them heading up the hill into the brush. We chatted with a retired army guy and his wife there for a while.

On the way out of the campground, a guy passed us, then slammed on his brakes and stopped. A full grown adult moose had trotted out of the brush and across the road just in front of him. He went on, but the moose stopped just off the road. We got a picture that might be quite good.

We went on, out to the Tablelands area. It really looks weird. We drove down a valley, with perfectly normal high hills on one side. They had granite-looking sides where rock was exposed, but with grass and trees where the slope of the hill permitted. On the other side of the valley was a range of hills with nothing growing on them. They looked like they might be made of sandstone, but it wasn’t that because there were boulders of this light brown material. I just couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

We kept going to a little lobster and fishing village called Trout River, at the very end of the road. The village fronts on a little bay and the Gulf of St Lawrence beyond that. There’s a very good little restaurant here (mentioned in several magazines) called the Seaside. We arrived early, so we ate lightly. It was very simple and very good – just pan-fried cod for me and halibut for Dolores. 

The waitress told us to drive carefully when we left. She was telling everyone this. We found out why on the way back to Rocky Harbor.  Moose.  Big moose.  Moose all over the place. At one point, I was watching a moose on my side to ensure he didn’t jump up onto the road while Dolores was looking at a moose on the other side. They come out to the edge of the road to eat tender young grass at dusk. 

Nobody knows what a moose is thinking of. They will jump up and take off for no apparent reason, in any direction. If they run in your direction, you get run over. They will attack a car. If they have young with them, they’re doubly dangerous. Since they don’t fit behavior patterns we recognize, we think they’re goofy. 

By the time we got back to the little house in the campground next to the Jehovah’s Witnesses house of worship, Dolores had seen about a dozen moose and I’d seen half or them. We’d also seen a lot of local vehicles driving slowly up and down the highway. It might be some local rite that one hops in the pickup and goes moose spotting on Sunday evenings.

We watched a TV special on the only channel (CBC) and settled for the night. Tomorrow, we’re going on a boat tour of a lake scoured out of mountains by glaciers. The scenery is supposed to be spectacular.