Thursday, August 1, 2013

Cape Spear

Cape Spear is one of Canada’s National Parks and is renowned for several things. First, it is the most eastern point in North America; second it’s lighthouse is one of the more photographed in the country; third, from there you have a magnificent view of The Narrows leading into St. John’s harbor; and, fourth, for those infrequent mornings when it is not cloudy or foggy, the sunrise can be spectacular.

We arrived at Cape Spear on a beautiful, clear day around 10:00a. Since the Cape is only about 5 miles from St. John’s we were worried it would be too built-up to find a good boondocking site. Not to worry. As you can imagine, they have a large parking lot that overlooks the ocean. There were no signs prohibiting overnight parking so we asked the ranger about boondocking here. She responded “No problem, lots of people do!” So we spent the night here watching small boat fishing for cod and large freighters and container ships steam through The Narrows into St. John’s harbor (in addition to a wedding party, motor cycles, tour groups, and some jerk parked next to us running his generator as they watched television until 10:00p)!

Cape Spear is one of Meriam’s “must” hiking points along the East Coast Trail so arriving we donned our hiking gear and headed for the trail. The ranger had previously said the trail went by the lighthouse. No problem! We walked down some stairs leading to a lookout point below the lighthouse and spotted the trail. The trail was fairly narrow, but certainly hike-able. The views were magnificent as we hiked along the coast. High rock cliffs above and below us created outstanding vistas. However, as we continued our hike for about ½ mile, we noticed the path got progressively narrower and more difficult to follow until we came to a point we could no longer see any path. We sat on a rock, trying to locate the path. Finally we decided to return, thinking perhaps we missed a cutoff. Returning to the information center we discovered we had taken a “very dangerous” path, not the East Coast Trail path. Duh!

Locating the “correct” path, we hiked along it for about another two hours! Magnificent views. We stopped several times and sat on rocks looking for whales. Pleasingly, we spotted at least a dozen, although most of them were fairly far out.

This morning we awoke to a wonderful sunrise!

The much photographed lighthouse at Cape Spear (below)