Cape Onion and the very rare weeds

I never did finish talking about our Canadian vacation. Where did I leave off, up in Newfoundland I think.

After we left Gros Morne, we drove up the coast up towards Viking territory. Well, what was Viking territory, for a little while, a long time ago. On the way, right at the northern tip, we stopped at nature sanctuary that was called, if I can still remember right, Cape Onion. It was right by this picturesque little village, very beautiful. The park itself was unremarkable, a bunch of limestone gravel with flat bushy plants on this little hilltop with the ocean on three sides. A park guide took us and a couple of others around to show us what there was to see. When we first got out of the car, she led us over to a bunch of little weeds and said "By the time I'm finished with you, you are going to be terrified to take a step all around here." In my head I was like "Yeah right." I mean, I consider myself pretty environmentally conscious, but still, like I'm gonna be afraid to step on a weed?

The first thing she showed us was a small, flat, bush. "This," she said, "is a 400 year-old tree." Say what? Turns out that because of the cold and the high winds, nothing can get tall. These same trees grow all over the place, and grow nice and tall elsewhere, but here on the cape they are no more than a few inches tall, growing flat along the ground in cute little bonsai fashion. "Step on one of these and you could kill something that has been growing for hundreds of years." Point taken, but still, the trees were pretty obvious.

I love this photo. See all the trees on the ground? This is a forest, just the craziest forest you've ever seen. Love it.

Then, she pointed out another tiny plant, one that was a similar color to all the gravel and so blended in and was much harder to see. "This is called" -crap, I forgot what it is called, sink foil? Something like that, David will remember, I'll update this when he gets home - "and it grows here and no where else. Step on this and you risk killing off an entire species of plant."

Holy crap! She was right, we were all on tiptoes for the rest of the trip. About halfway through the tour a couple of cars drive up to join us. These people hadn't heard the warnings, and my group was totally hating on them as they carelessly walked over to see us, trampling on these precious plants all the way. It was a group reaction, I could see everyone getting angry, which was really pretty funny.

Down by the water, we saw some Minke whales jumping around in the ocean, which was really cool. Out in the horizon we could see mainland Canada, Labrador to be specific. Our guide told us that in the winter, the ocean can freeze solid all the way across, and occasionally polar bears will wander across looking for food. Wow. We were at the wrong time of year to see any icebergs ourselves though, darnit. Many restaurants in town will take boats out to harvest the iceberg, and then sell drinks to tourists using "15,000 year old ice-cubes". Heh.

The last awesome thing were these bizarre formations in the gravel, and unfortunately my photo doesn't really show the phenomenon very well. But there were these little circles all over the place. Turns out it is a product of the frost. As the ice forms, melts, freezes, melts, the process slowly pushes the larger rocks out, leaving the smaller pieces in the center. The process can take a long time - I can't remember if she said decades or centuries now, but probably centuries, because the shift would be miniscule each season. So there are just all these little circles in the ground all over the place. It was pretty awesome.