Gros Morne National Park straddles a portion of the Long Range Mountains – part of the Appalachian Mountains – at the base of the Northern Peninsula. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it was the geological features present here, including rock formations and soil types, that persuaded geologists to support the plate tectonics theory to explain the configuration of the worlds continents and oceans. The Appalacian Mountains were formed roughly 1.2 billion years ago when ancient North America and a part of Africa collided forming an enormous mountain chain that extended up eastern North America and across what is now Great Britain and Scandinavia and squished to extinction an ancient ocean that lay between them. Evidence of that vanished ocean is in the rocks and soils of the park. Subsequently, the land mass moved apart again, forming the Atlantic Ocean. Needless to say, these mountains are old and bear the effects of being scrubbed over by multiple episodes of glaciers dragging enormous bolders embedded in the bottom of the glaciers across their surfaces. There’s not much in the way of soil and the mountain tops are vast bogs.
The plant life in the mountaintop bogs is also quite interesting. It includes carniverous plants (they have to get their nutrients from something, after all) and this cotton grass (the flowers of which were used as lamp wicks by the Arctic peoples).
One of the striking features of the park is The Tablelands, a barren section of the mountain that is a very rare example of a portion of the earth’s mantle pushing up through the crust. Because it is mantle, the composition of the rock is very unusual. It’s called peridotite and has a lot of magnesium and iron and toxic levels of heavy metals. When pieces of it break open from the normal action of the freezing and thawing water, you can see the dark interior of the rocks on the surface. The brownish surface is essentially rust and plant life is quite sparce throughout the exposed mantle area due to the toxicity of the resulting soil.
We very much enjoyed hiking in the park, but drew the line at following this trail that required fording a stream.
