Viking Trail: Deer Lake Newfoundland to Port au Choix

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Deer Lake Newfoundland

   Deer Lake is where most people's Newfoundland begins or ends, since its small airport takes the jets from Toronto and Halifax, and it is also where the Viking Trail leaves the Trans-Canada Highway and turns north. The town sits at the foot of the lake from which it takes its name, at the mouth of the Humber River, with the dark hills of the Long Range rising behind and spruce forest everywhere you look. It is a plain, practical place, and that is how you want it to be at the start of a long run north.

   Read the complete Deer Lake Newfoundland write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Deer Lake Newfoundland is where the day begins. Next is Gros Morne.

2. 2. Gros Morne

   Gros Morne is the second-highest mountain in Newfoundland, a bald dome of about eight hundred metres, but the name is also used for the whole national park that surrounds it on the island's west coast, and the park is the point. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1987, largely because of its geology: here the deep rocks of the Earth's mantle have been pushed up and exposed, and you can see the process that is usually hidden miles below the surface. The Tablelands, a flat-topped massif of orange-brown rock that looks more like Mars than Canada, are the best example, and almost nothing grows on them because the rock is toxic to most plants.

   Read the complete Gros Morne write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Gros Morne comes up 223 km in. Next is Port au Choix.

3. 3. Port au Choix

   Port au Choix sits at the tip of a low, flat peninsula on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, where the Viking Trail, Route 430, runs along the coast of the Gulf of St Lawrence. It is a working fishing town with colourful houses, stacks of lobster pots and boats drawn up on the shore, and it has a surprising depth of history. The Port au Choix National Historic Site preserves the remains of some of the oldest settlements in the region, with burial grounds used by the Maritime Archaic people about four thousand years ago, and later by Dorset Palaeo-Eskimo groups. The graves contained tools, ornaments and spiritual objects, giving a rare glimpse into a prehistoric culture.

   Read the complete Port au Choix write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 242 km.