Coastal Living: Of Ice & Men, Follow the path of glaciers and Vikings toward the untamed beauty of Canada’s remote Northern Peninsula.
/Excerpt of text by Jeff Book
Standing atop an island cliff, Ed English looks out over the Strait of Belle Isle. “In March,” he says, “this looks like peppered porridge—a sea of ice floes speckled with seals.” Now, on a soft summer evening, it’s a salty blue stew flecked with white froth from waves and breaching whales. In the distance float the glacial fragments that give this part of Newfoundland (newfun-LAND) its nickname: Iceberg Alley.
After the spring thaw, the Labrador Current (that’s Labrador, visible across the strait) carries these massive ice chunks from Greenland, 1,000 miles away. They glide past Newfoundland’s north and east coasts, shrinking as they melt. And Quirpon (kar-POON) Island, at the tip of the province’s Great Northern Peninsula, makes an ideal viewpoint for both the bergs and the whales that arrive around the same time. Along with extravagantly long days and mild temperatures, they signal the sweet fullness of summer in this remote corner of North America.
A decade ago Ed bought the Quirpon Island lighthouse and its outbuildings, sight unseen. He turned them into a cozy inn, in a setting that, wrote one visitor, “Captain Ahab would give his other leg for.” Guests kayak among whales and icebergs. “Most of the bergs’ ice is underwater, and they sometimes capsize or calve, so you have to be careful,” he cautions as we paddle near a “bergy bit,” the term for a house-size formation (that one day will melt down to a grand piano–size “growler”). Across the cove, seals speed through the water like sleek black shadows. Close encounters with dolphins and sea otters are not uncommon. Nearby, guests gather on the clifftop helipad, watching for the plumes of breaching humpbacks feeding just offshore, so close we can hear them exhale in the evening calm…
…Up near Quirpon Island lies L’Anse aux Meadows, the peninsula’s other UNESCO World Heritage Site (with Gros Morne). Here, around 1000 A.D., Norsemen led by Leif Eriksson arrived from Greenland. Discovered in the 1960s, this National Historic Site yielded artifacts and the remains of sod houses, now carefully reconstructed. Interpreters in Viking garb shed light on the first known European settlement in the Americas, giving new meaning to “pre-Columbian.” What’s more, because the Vikings encountered local natives, this marks the closing of the so-called Great Circle, the first meeting of peoples from Europe and Asia whose ancestors migrated from Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
The Vikings returned home after a few years. Like them, later European settlers had to learn to survive in a challenging environment. Given their historic isolation, Newfoundlanders might be expected to be wary of outsiders. Yet I found them friendly and welcoming, given to addressing friends and strangers alike as “my lad” or “my darling.” Travel around the Great Northern Peninsula and you’ll find not only natural wonders, but also people whose warmth could melt an iceberg.
After the spring thaw, the Labrador Current (that’s Labrador, visible across the strait) carries these massive ice chunks from Greenland, 1,000 miles away. They glide past Newfoundland’s north and east coasts, shrinking as they melt. And Quirpon (kar-POON) Island, at the tip of the province’s Great Northern Peninsula, makes an ideal viewpoint for both the bergs and the whales that arrive around the same time. Along with extravagantly long days and mild temperatures, they signal the sweet fullness of summer in this remote corner of North America.
A decade ago Ed bought the Quirpon Island lighthouse and its outbuildings, sight unseen. He turned them into a cozy inn, in a setting that, wrote one visitor, “Captain Ahab would give his other leg for.” Guests kayak among whales and icebergs. “Most of the bergs’ ice is underwater, and they sometimes capsize or calve, so you have to be careful,” he cautions as we paddle near a “bergy bit,” the term for a house-size formation (that one day will melt down to a grand piano–size “growler”). Across the cove, seals speed through the water like sleek black shadows. Close encounters with dolphins and sea otters are not uncommon. Nearby, guests gather on the clifftop helipad, watching for the plumes of breaching humpbacks feeding just offshore, so close we can hear them exhale in the evening calm…
…Up near Quirpon Island lies L’Anse aux Meadows, the peninsula’s other UNESCO World Heritage Site (with Gros Morne). Here, around 1000 A.D., Norsemen led by Leif Eriksson arrived from Greenland. Discovered in the 1960s, this National Historic Site yielded artifacts and the remains of sod houses, now carefully reconstructed. Interpreters in Viking garb shed light on the first known European settlement in the Americas, giving new meaning to “pre-Columbian.” What’s more, because the Vikings encountered local natives, this marks the closing of the so-called Great Circle, the first meeting of peoples from Europe and Asia whose ancestors migrated from Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
The Vikings returned home after a few years. Like them, later European settlers had to learn to survive in a challenging environment. Given their historic isolation, Newfoundlanders might be expected to be wary of outsiders. Yet I found them friendly and welcoming, given to addressing friends and strangers alike as “my lad” or “my darling.” Travel around the Great Northern Peninsula and you’ll find not only natural wonders, but also people whose warmth could melt an iceberg.