The World is Our Oyster: Gros Morne

When I was in middle school, I read this futuristic short story with an environmentalist bent, which had something to do with what would happen if global warming caused the entire midwestern U.S. to become a sea and Denver was then a coastal city, with the Rockies rising up behind its shoreline. I have no idea what the story was called, but it made a really big impression on me.

After Twillingate, I continued back to the western side of Newfoundland and then crossed up into the northern peninsula, bound for Gros Morne National Park. Which is as stunning as promised. And looks a lot like what Colorado might look like if, as in that long-ago story, it were a place where the mountains meet the sea.

There is also some absolutely amazing geology here. First, there's the Tablelands--flat-topped mountains composed of rock from the earth's mantle. There aren't many places on earth where mantle rock has been pushed to the surface, and certainly none where it is more accessible and easy to reach than it is in Gros Morne. It (again) reminded me of Colorado, when you get up above treeline and not much can grow. But in this case, things can't grow on this rock because its composition is so unusual and alien at Earth's surface. The mountains directly across the valley from these were green as Ireland...

After gawking at Tablelands, I hiked to the water on the steep but beautiful Green Gardens Trail.

And then the next day hiked to Bakers Brook Falls, through bog and pines.

Later that afternoon, I went to a ranger-led walk at Green Point, only to find four Parks Canada rangers being led by a fifth in an educational session that would help them lead these walks in a few weeks, when the tourist season actually gets started. (Theme of my trip so far: I am several weeks ahead of the typical tourist season, which is basically just July and August. This is great in that nothing is very crowded and I never have to make reservations for anything. The downside is that it's definitely on the chilly side, and a lot of things just aren't open yet.) Happily, they invited me to listen in, so I got a full lesson on the geology of Green Point, which is also totally incredible. Here, the rock was folded up during a continental plate collision and is now folded past 90 degrees from where it was deposited. There is an uninterrupted exposure here that includes the Cambrian and Ordovician (apparently very rare to find uninterrupted), and an even more rare layer where a shallow-water reef avalanched into deep-water sea, forming a conglomerate that has fossils from both ecosystems, allowing geologists and archaeologists an amazing opportunity to cross-reference their dating of many fossils species of that era. And on top of all of this, the rock layers here just looked really beautiful. Fun to dork out on a geology class all afternoon.