What we will do for a picture

July 21, 2010

By the time I got all the pictures downloaded last night I was to exhausted to do the blog, but here goes.

Day before, at the visitors center I saw a note on the bulletin board about a walk into Green Garden, which is a beautiful area often shown on tourist films and books so I got it in my mind that I really wanted to do that, so we headed off this morning in that direction.

First thing we saw were two moose up on the hillside, we were told later that most of Canada has .2 moose per 4 sq km area, here in Gros Morne it is 44 moose per 4 sq km. This is wonderful to us but a problem for the park they the moose are distroying the ecosystem.

From here around Bonne Bay to a few other towns on the other side, this is Woody Point, the final little town before climbing up onto the Tablelands over the hill.

Downtown.


You can see this steeple from across the Bay on the highway into Rocky Harbour.

Just up the road is a National Park Discovery Center and Ron found a friend. It was here that I found out that the hike I was wanting to take was 9 km long and strenuous to hard, the guide will take us out for two hours and then leave you on your own.

Heading up onto the Tablelands, note one side of the road is barren and the other is lush, this is a seismic fault running down the entire valley.

At the end of the road you reach Trout River, a cute little community. Named Trout River because when the English came here the they had never seen Salmon but saw all these big fish and thought they were large trout, hence Trout River.

The Harbour was very small just on the entrance of the River to the ocean.

This fellow was repairing his nets.

These fellows were getting ready to go fishing and were baiting their lines.

So on to our walk, I knew the degree of difficulty but though lets give it a try, we could of course always turn around, and the first part did not look so bad.

This was the easy part, although not that easy the path was loose stone of all sizes, often wet and more than unsteady. You can see way in the distance, the cars, that is where we started from.



Up on top we sat and watched for some moose but none would show, are they sure they have their stats correct.

When the guide left us we could see the ocean and it did look like a rather far way away and pretty much a long ways down, up and down again and I wondered, if I went down would I be positive that I could get back up. Just then another tourist was coming up the trail and she looked in worse shape than I was so that made up my mind I was going for it. The guide said if you are in shape the climb back up from the beach should take about an hour and a half so I figured even if we took our time, perhas two.

Our hike started at 2pm and the guide left us at 430pm and we were half way to the shore, she was great told us so much about the area. We reached the shore line at 5:10pm

The trail name is Green Gardens, because in the early times, before the park, the locals would come and plant gardens above the cliffs and you can still see signs of this.

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It was certainly worth the walk down, but I knew we still had to make it back out.




So with the sun getting a little lower on the horizon we decided we better start making our way up the mountain. There were three very steep areas which were made even more difficult by the footing.

Not half way back and we turned to take a picture of where we had come, if you look just on the horizon you can make out the see, had to look right into the sun.

By far one of the most difficult walks I have done but very rewarding, and we made it out in an hour and a half with a few stops on the way, very proud of myself and Ron is getting to be a very good hiker.




From the trail head we still had an hour drive home to Rocky Harbour and to tired to cook supper at 8pm we went to Jackies Restaurant, good food but unfortunately a little slow tonight and we missed getting in the sunset, oh well always tomorrow.