Get out of town: short drives from St. John’s From iceburgs to grottos, just out “round the bay” BY DARCY RHYNO
I
t’s a gloomy, blustery day with rain threatening, but when I see them, I can’t help but stop the car and head down to the water’s edge. A dozen curious onlookers are crowded onto a rock, gazing out over a small iceberg anchored on the rocky bottom of Deadman’s Bay on Newfoundland’s east coast. Two smaller chunks of ice float nearby and a larger iceberg lurks in the distance. The icebergs and the weather magnify the impression that this is a raw place exposed more than most to the elements. Icebergs are common here, but visitors to Newfoundland like me and the other dozen onlookers find them mysterious
and haunting. All four of these bergs were calved off a Greenland glacier two or three years ago and have drifted nearly 3,000 kilometres so far. The one offshore still has far to go before it will completely melt in the warm Gulf Stream waters southeast of here, but the other three are at the end of their journey. Back in the car, I head to my destination just a few more kilometres down the road, a rocky bluff that is literally the edge of North America: Cape Spear Lighthouse National Historic Site. This is the most easterly point of land on the continent. I climb up to the top of the craggy cliff to the province’s oldest
surviving lighthouse. Looking north along the coast, I spot the offshore iceberg and beyond it, the mouth of St. John’s harbour.
Worlds away, minutes from downtown Passing icebergs add to the lonely atmosphere at Cape Spear, a place that feels so isolated, it’s a bit jarring to remember that this beacon on the cliff top is just a 15-minute drive from downtown St. John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John’s is that kind of city—a small enclave in a remote, sometimes forbidding corner of the world.
Cape Spear Lighthouse is located on the
NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR TOURISM
most easternly point in North America.
NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
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