Gros Morne National Park

FjordsNewfoundland,Canada

A glacier-cut fjord in Canada's Newfoundland walled by 600-metre cliffs, cruised by boat, beside a plateau where you walk on the Earth's exposed mantle.

September·Peaking now

Jul–Sep

The park is at its fullest. Every trail is open, including the reopened Gros Morne Mountain summit, and the Western Brook Pond boat sails beneath 600-metre walls. Days are a mild 16–20°C, and the first autumn gold reaches the valleys by late September.

Year-round The rust-orange Tablelands of raw mantle rock and the fjord of Western Brook Pond are here year-round; cool summers fill the trails, and October gilds the valleys.

Gros Morne is a stretch of the Newfoundland coast where the Earth's mantle lies open at the surface and you can walk on it. The Tablelands are the place: a rust-orange plateau of peridotite from below the crust, carrying so much nickel and chromium, and so little of what a plant needs, that the ground is poisoned. It crunches underfoot, bare and Mars-coloured, and a marked path crosses the line where crust once met mantle deep under an ocean. What grows there grows in spite of it. A few alpine flowers hold on, and so do pitcher plants, which trap insects and take their nutrients from them rather than the soil. In summer their red blooms are the only colour on the orange rock. Across the water the park's other half is a fjord. Western Brook Pond was cut by glaciers and sealed off as the land rose. It is fresh water now, pure enough to barely register on instruments. Getting to the boat takes you three kilometres of gravel and boardwalk over open bog, bog cotton and more pitcher plants at your feet, the flat-topped walls growing ahead. Then the cliffs take over: six hundred metres straight up, waterfalls threading down, the walls closing in until the boat under you feels like a chip of wood. The park is named for the mountain at its centre: gros morne, roughly the big lone hill. At 806 metres it is Newfoundland's second-highest, climbed up a boulder gully to a bare arctic top above the gorge of Ten Mile Pond. Elsewhere there are the grassy headlands of Green Gardens, with seabirds on the stacks and whales offshore. Moose graze all of it, and none of them should be here. The island's whole herd came from a handful released around 1900, and with no wolves they have eaten patches of forest into open meadow. The pitcher plant belongs. It grows at both ends of the park: in the wet bog on the way to the boat, and on the one ground here that will feed nothing at all.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The Western Brook Pond boat runs from mid-May to mid-October — reserve ahead, and allow forty minutes for the flat three-kilometre walk from the car park to the dock before departure.
Save the Tablelands for low afternoon light — the raking sun sets the rusted mantle rock glowing and reveals the strange, plant-free ground far better than flat midday glare.
Moose are easiest to see at dawn and dusk in the roadside bogs, but that is also when they wander onto the highway — drive slowly after dark, when collisions are the real danger.
The Gros Morne Mountain summit trail is closed May 1 to late June to protect calving caribou, and weather on the exposed top can turn cold and wet within minutes.

Things to do

1
Walk the bog, then cruise into Western Brook Pond
Reaching the boat means a three-kilometre trail of gravel and boardwalk across open bog and coastal plain, pitcher plants and bog cotton at your feet and the flat-topped fjord walls growing taller ahead. Then glide deep into the landlocked freshwater fjord, where cliffs climb some 600 metres straight out of water so pure it barely registers on instruments. Waterfalls thread down the rock faces, and the walls close in until the boat feels like a chip of wood beneath them.
2
Walk on the Earth's mantle at the Tablelands
Cross the rust-orange plateau of peridotite — rock lifted from deep in the Earth's mantle, so laden with metal that almost nothing grows on it. Underfoot the ground crunches bare and Mars-like, and a marked path leads past the very boundary where crust once met mantle far below the sea.
3
Spot wildlife along the Green Gardens coast
Along the grassy headlands of the Green Gardens coast, watch for moose and caribou grazing the meadows and seabirds nesting on the sea stacks below. Whales sometimes surface offshore, and the wind off the Gulf keeps the cliffs cool even at midsummer.
4
Take in Bonne Bay from Norris Point
Look out over Bonne Bay, a deep fjord-arm ringed by the flat-topped Long Range Mountains, from the lookout above the fishing village of Norris Point. Small boats work the sheltered water below, and in the evening the light softens the peaks and the painted houses along the shore.
5
Climb Gros Morne Mountain, the park's namesake
Tackle the steep sixteen-kilometre loop up the park's namesake peak, Newfoundland's second-highest at 806 metres. The trail scrambles up a boulder gully onto a bare, arctic-like summit, where the reward is a bird's-eye view down into the glacial gorge of Ten Mile Pond and out across the Long Range plateau.