Gros Morne - Green Gardens Hike

We saved the best for last!

Today was our last day of relatively good weather before we leave Gros Morne National Park, here in Newfoundland.  We really, really wanted to hike the Green Gardens Trail because our park ranger told us we couldn't miss it and that it was her favorite hike.

So here we were, at 10:00 in the morning, embarking on the trail, and all we could see was fog, and all we could feel was the strong wind pelting us with drops from the enveloping clouds:

Still we decided to soldier on.  We got rewards right away, because the first part of the trail took us across the Tablelands, where we got to look more closely at all the rocks spewed up from the Earth's mantle when the shift of tectonic plates left this section of mantle subducted upward and abandoned over this section of North America.  Here's Kathy salivating at her chance to look at more mantle rocks!

There are three main examples of the mantle rocks, and you see them here.  Both of these large rocks have the characteristic orange look of the iron mantle rock that has oxidized on the outside.  However, the surprises are inside.  On the right, the serpentine formation was created when the mantle rock split and the cracks filled with minerals of all sorts -- often quartz.  On the left, the internal, dark mantle rock was subjected to so much heat and pressure that it further metamorphosed into a shiny, green mineral:

As we climbed the tableland, we reached what we have known as the krumholz, and what the Newfies call the tuckamore - dwarf spruce blown and deformed by wind in the boreal and subarctic zones.  David looks pretty arctic here, too:

The trail led us about 3.5 miles out to a gorgeous shelf above the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where Kathy had her photo taken with her favorite tuckamore.  The fog and clouds and wind had eased, and we were starting to get some great sun and blue sky:

This was our view west down and along the beach, which is dominated by volcanic rocks -- a major change from the mantle rocks we saw at the beginning of our hike:

We knew that sheep graced these shelf meadows, but we weren't sure we would find them.  However, find them we did!  They seemed to be enjoying the sun after a couple days of fog, wind and rain:

We turned back out to our view of the beach and couldn't resist taking this 360 degree video of Old Man's Cove from the meadow.

Once down on the beach, we took a look back up the stairs we had climbed down from the meadow above:

It was now warm and sunny, and we eagerly set out on our stony, gravelly beach walk:

On this side of the ridge we crossed, we discovered a wider variety of rocks.  This beautiful conglomerate, with quartz and other minerals filling in the spaces between older rocks, caught our eye:

The water was filled with all sorts of volcanic rock formations:

At the west end of the beach, we encountered the stream we had crossed above on our hike out to the beach.  Here, however, we found a dramatic waterfall.  Below, Kathy picks her way across the stream in order to get closer to the falls:

From her vantage point, Kathy caught this view of the volcanic rocks out in the water, with David stepping carefully across the stream on the rock beach in the mid-ground:

We paused for a waterfall selfy and Kathy couldn't help herself:

Hiking back from the waterfall toward the beach, we ran across this beautiful little (what we think is a) female black throated green warbler:

Kathy found her favorite rock in the crashing waves and barely escaped wet feet trying to make friends with it:

We climbed the stairs back to the meadow on the shelf above, and David pointed the way home:

The hike back was a marvel of discovery, because we saw so much that the fog had obscured on our hike down to the beach.  For example, we spotted these beautiful tarns left by some hanging glacier when it receded from the area.  The fog had been so heavy that we didn't even realize we were hiking above great empty space as we passed along this way in the morning:

There is no doubt this hike provided us one of the most verdant and luxuriant rewards we have had for any hike.  The beach was a thing of beauty, almost as striking as the black sand beaches of Hawaii.  We worked our way back across the tablelands, thinking of all that we had seen -- but not so distracted that we didn't keep our eyes out for more mantle rock as we crossed the plain to our trailhead.

At the trailhead, we met one of the hikers we had encountered on the trail -- a young woman from Germany who had attended university in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, not far from here.  She finished college and has returned for a year-long visit -- hitchhiking around Canada and perhaps working, or perhaps not.  We gave her a ride out to the TransCanada Highway and saw her off as she stuck out her thumb for a further ride to Norris Point, to the north, near the campground we had been in a week or two ago.  We wished her well on her grand adventure.

This might have been our last outing in Gros Morne, but it was memorable and will leave us wanting more of this wild and varied environment.  Perhaps we will be back!