Every day in Newfoundland we explored new-to-us places and these three hikes were remarkable. The Skerwink Trail. Tablelands. The Green Garden Trail.
Len and I traveled in Canada several times in the past few years; here’s what I have to say about Canadian Park hikes. They are gorgeous. People are friendly. Also: parking, signage, explanations of what you are looking at, and bathrooms are few and far between. You will see beauty that seers your soul and knocks your socks off. You will also negotiate crooked steps and sketchy paths with camouflaged roots and rocks. Stairs are sometimes two feet high. I mean, you are climbing up or making your way down, and the step is higher than where your knee bends. Also, probably there’s no handrail right there so Len sort of pushes you from behind or pulls you from above. This doesn’t happen at every step – but it happens. If it has rained or drizzled lately (it’s Newfoundland!) some parts of the trail will be inches deep mud. You will gingerly edge around that part of the path and you will be okay because you are paying so much attention.
Ahead of time: read the trail descriptions on All Trails. https://www.alltrails.com/ Keep in mind many of these descriptions are written by fit people in their 20’s. If it says, “sometimes challenging,” bring your own travois.
If you would like one last bathroom stop before you get on a trail consider - that gas station you passed eight miles back. I read somewhere that ibuprofen sort of tamps down the need to pee. Obviously, if you have ongoing issues, talk to your doctor, not me. But if you are going to hike for two or three hours in a place where there will be plenty of other cheerful hikers but no pit stops, the ibuprofen thing is helpful to know. Also, the muscle relaxant benefit will not be wasted.
Bring a backpack with binoculars and whatever you need when you get sweaty, tired and possibly dehydrated. Wet wipes for one’s neck felt good halfway through a hike. Clementines were straight from the bodegas of heaven.
I don’t know why Canada does such a lackadaisical job with their world class hikes. They have universal health care, great education, gun restricting regulations, and some of the friendliest people on earth. These are more valuable that a sign that will tell you why there are rocks that look like chimneys along some parts of coastline. But still… Once in Manitoba we were an hour along on a hike that ended pretty much at rock wall climb up to the view they were touting. It would have been helpful to know that before we drove two hours out of our way to hike it.
Just saying. Expect challenges.
Also expect that when you finish the hike a couple hours later, you will be absolutely obnoxious with self-esteem that you just did that. And for the rest of your life, you will remember that hike and those views and that time, looking out at the sweep of the whole Atlantic Ocean from a high and windy promontory, you felt a bug and swatted at it but it was Len trying to kiss your ear.
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Tablelands.
This is the place where the mantle of the earth slid up and we can see it (https://www.marybethdanielson.com/content/finally-seeing-newfoundland ) We joined the free Park Interpreter-led hike; those two young women were smart and wonderful. After the hike they said people could ask them more question. Guess who plastered them with questions for another half hour?
Those green swaths look like grass, right? The interpreters said we were welcome to go off the path, so we did and lo and behold that grassy stuff is ‘muskeg’ aka bog. You won’t sink in it up to your knees, just your ankles. I wore my other shoes the next day. But now I know that moose and caribou spend a lot of their life wading.
This is from Wikipedia about bogs: A bog is a wetland that accumulates peat as a deposit of dead plant materials – often mosses. Other names for bogs include mire, mosses, quagmire, and muskeg; alkaline mires are called fens. The gradual accumulation of decayed plant material in a bog functions as a carbon sink.
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The Green Valley hike is literally across the road from Tablelands. It wends from the rocky tablelands, through forest, down to the sea where one can walk a long distance. It was our last exploring day in Newfoundland and it was raining. We didn’t want to hike down and then back up for hours.
This is the hour of hiking we liked very, very much.
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The Skerwink Trail was our hardest hike– and was worth it.
You can’t see it in my phone camera photo but on that horizon is an iceberg that was easy to see with binoculars.
Go out for a walk around the neighborhood. Fly 2500 miles to an inconvenient place to hike fabulous edge-of-the-earth trails. There is something outside of us that fills the empty places in us. Or maybe it’s that when we are outside the chaff of our daily lives blows away for a while and we remember our job here in our short lives is to pay attention.
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