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 two landscapes pressed together on the west coast of Newfoundland. One is a freshwater fjord: Western Brook Pond, a long finger of water that glaciers cut out of the Long Range Mountains, walled by cliffs some 600 metres high with waterfalls sliding down their faces. The other is the Tablelands, a bare rust-orange plateau where almost nothing grows and there is no birdsong, so empty that it looks more like Mars than like the green island around it. The reason it is orange and barren is that this is not ordinary ground. It is rock that normally sits kilometres below the ocean floor, shoved up here about 460 million years ago when two ancient continents collided. Geologists come to walk across a boundary that is usually tens of kilometres underground. Getting onto that fjord means a three-kilometre walk over bog and boardwalk to the boat, and the walk is part of it: the mountains keep the gap hidden until the last moment. Elsewhere the park spreads into mossy bogs, coastal meadows and the deep blue reach of Bonne Bay below the village of Norris Point. Moose are everywhere here, in numbers no island this size should hold, and the forest shows it. Cool summers fill the boardwalks and coastal trails, and by early October the valleys burn gold and copper before the highland weather shuts them down. The bald dome the park is named after stands over all of it, climbable in a long day. It stays one of Canada's quietest wild corners: vast, thinly peopled, and geologically unlike anywhere else in the country.

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.