graculus

One of the things about my trip is that it was taking place just as the Newfoundland tourist season starts, in other words once everything is just starting to open for the summer but before the influx happens and/or schools break for the holidays. This meant that I kept bumping into the same folks in a number of places, at least in the west of the island - kept seeing the folks from the Western Brook Pond boat trip on a regular basis, then other folks where I'd stayed at the same B&B, ate at the same restaurant...

In general terms that wasn't a problem and it got quite funny at times, though there was one group of folks that bugged the crap out of me - two couples visiting from 'Trono' (a very nasal pronunciation of Toronto) where I would have bludgeoned one of the guys to death in his sleep if I'd had to travel with him. Most of the folks travelling were retired couples, but as a solo traveller you get used to that!

First stop on my last full day in Gros Morne, though I came back later on and more of that in time, was Western Brook Pond - in Newfoundland, I discovered, all lakes are ponds, regardless of size. Setting off, I got a great look at the Long Range Mountains, complete with snow:

That was literally just hours before these pics, which shows how fast the weather changes:

Western Brook Pond was once a fjord (insert Monty Python comments here...) except that now it's cut off from the sea and is fresh water so it technically isn't a fjord any more - the surrounding cliffs are up to 600m (2,000 feet) at their height. It's a 45-minute hike from the road to the ~~lake~~ pond itself and then there's a boat trip that takes you all the way in and back again. One of the boats was brought in on rollers over the surrounding bog in the winter and the other in bits by helicopter and reassembled.

One of the outstanding features of the pond is the number of waterfalls that enter it, including this one:

And this one, the delightfully named Pissing Mare Falls:

Then, the following day it was north towards Iceberg Alley, though I had a couple of places to stop off before I got that far north... it was on this trip that I had my closest moose encounter, when one decided to come charging out of the forest on my left and then run alongside the road, legs flailing, before disappearing into the forest again. Fortunately, the width of a lane was the closest I got at any point when I was driving!

According to the Western Brook Pond guide there are the equivalent of 6 moose per square kilometre in the province, so I guess if you sit somewhere long enough the moose will come to you. I actually saw way more moose north of Gros Morne than I did in the park itself, which was ironic given that they're apparently such a plague there.

First stop the next day was Arches Provincial Park on the coast, and again the weather has changed, this time with a nice mist coming in off the sea:

That evening I stopped in Port Au Choix, home of another national historic site - it's been inhabited for over 5,000 years with the most recent occupants being the French and then the English, so many French placenames survive. This is the lighthouse at Pointe Riche, just up the coast: