Skiing the Tablelands. Andrew Finlay, Couloir, October 2003

A friend once told me about the oddest piece of geology that he had ever set skis upon. It's in Newfoundland, roughly 50 square kilometers in size, as flat as a pie plate and there's not a stick of vegetation to be seen poking from the snow. As a perfect compliment to this rather stark surrounding landscape, ferocious winter gales were rumored to frequently beat in from the Gulf of St. Lawrence - in winter, a shifting mass of frozen pack ice 120 miles clear across to the shores of northern Quebec. Surrounding this strange massif on all sides are bowls and couloirs, set against a jaw dropping background reminiscent of Norwegian fjord country.

A sucker for skiing in strange places, I decided to investigate further.

Known as the Tablelands, this is one of few places in the world where the earth's mantle, normally 16 kilometers below your feet, has been pushed to the surface thanks to the cataclysmic forces of plate tectonics or continent building.

It's the centre piece of Gros Morne National Park in western Newfoundland, and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 because of the park's outstanding display of geological anomalies. The mountains of Gros Morne are also the northern extremities of the same ancient peaks that form the Adirondack Range that snakes its way up the eastern seaboard of the United States.

At first blush flying cross country from my home in British Columbia, an international backcountry skiing destination, to carve turns in the province of Newfoundland-best known for its prehistoric Viking settlement, Celtic music, and a bumper crop of comedians-is akin to swimming upstream. Effort that, unless one knows better, might seem misallocated. However, I had heard enough from well-placed Newfoundland contacts about the spring skiing potential in western Newfoundland to know that in this case, it was worth swimming upstream. Besides, the hospitality of Newfoundlanders is legendary and it seemed like a good excuse to explore Gros Morne National Park during the winter off-season.

So when I spoke to Bob Hicks of Gros Morne Adventures over the phone in January about what I could expect, he urged a spring trip.

"It's cold enough to skin ya right now bye," Bob said, in that lyrical way of speaking endemic to Newfoundland. "Oh, and did I mention the wind?" I could almost hear it blasting over the phone line.

April it would be.

Two months later my faithful partner in adventure, Lisa Hallstrom, and I hopped on a plane in Vancouver. After our coast-to-coast flight and a brief stopover in St. John's we were shoehorned along with our skies into a turbo-prop and started doubling back across "The Rock" to Newfoundland's western shore. Below us spread the fat, frozen, and marshy landscape of central Newfoundland, and it reminded me of the epic mid-winter walk undertaken by Joey Smallwood as told by author Wayne Johnston in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, his fictionalized biography of Newfoundland's first premier.

Soon the flatlands gave way to rounded mountains, deepening valleys, and frozen lakes, and before long, we were enjoying afternoon tea with Bob and his partner Sue Rendell in the living room of their house in Norris Point, one of several fishing villages in Gros Morne National Park. Bob, soft spoken with a dry wit, bailed on his high-tech, high-stress job in Ottawa a few years ago and returned to his native Newfoundland. Around the same time Sue, an energetic Newfoundlander and former university volleyball star, met Bob and together they formed an outdoor tour outfit called Gros Morne Adventures.

The weather seemed very un-Newfoundland like for winter - mild and sunny. And as in any coastal community, wind and rain are a frequent topic of conversation; our hosts almost seemed disappointed that we hadn't yet experienced a good Newfoundland blow, though we'd been on the rock less than 24 hours.

"Wind and water are by far the most important components of weather for anyone visiting the park", writes Gros Morne naturalist Michael Burzynski in his excellent field guide to the park. Of course there are also the interminable clouds and coastal fog to contend with.

"If the sky drops down on the Tablelands it's just like skiing in a ping pong ball," Bob warned us grimly, pointing a finger across Bonne Bay towards our next day's destination. Hungary after a long flight, we headed to nearby Rocky Harbour for some fish and chips. Along the way, our hosts entertained us with stories about local characters, of which Newfoundland appears well supplied. The art of language and story telling is as natural in Canada's youngest province as walking or sleeping, thanks largely, one might assume, to the rich Celtic cultural legacy. The most mundane of things, like the bend in a road or someone's mailbox, might unleash a hilarious anecdote or tale that helps to illuminate the zeitgeist of Newfoundland; a profound collective of humour that has no parallel in Canada.

Perhaps a good funny bone helps one deal with isolation and a rather unforgiving climate and topography, a landscape that is beautiful but in a decidedly severe way. Driving through Norris Point, Sue pointed to a row of houses each with a half collapsed picket fence out front. She explained that this was the aftermath of the town's rookie snowplow driver who couldn't seem to get it right and had been destroying fences of Norris Point at an alarming rate all winter.

When we arrived at Rocky Harbour, the village was quiet. Fishing dories had been dragged up their slipways into dry dock. Lobster traps were trimmed with snow and stacked deep next to colourful weather-beaten shacks. Across the harbour, the lighthouse tower at Lobster Cove Head glowed golden in the afternoon sun.

Over lunch, Bob and Sue provided some background on Gros Morne park's 1,805 square kilometre's of mountains, lowland marshes, and spectacularly deep fjords. Gros Morne was established as a park in 1973, its name pays tribute to the early French settlers who fished the Gulf of St. Lawrence from these shores. Gros Morne is a Creole word meaning big isolated hill. However, morne also means dismal or gloomy, which, depending on the state of the weather, can be a fitting description of the area.

Twenty years ago the park became internationally renowned in geology circles when Bob Stevens, Hank Williams, and other scientists foam Memorial University helped unravel the puzzle of Gros Morne's endlessly complex rock formations, in turn helping to prove the then-new theory of plate tectonics.

Today there are two key resource management concerns in Gros Morne Park, both of which involve evasive species. The first is the moose, the gangly ungulate that was introduced to Newfoundland almost a century ago has become a prolific reproducer and over-grazer, as well as a goofy but endearing wildlife icon that numbers at the six individuals per square kilometer in the park. The second is human beings who ride snowmobiles, a sport that is one of the most popular winter activities in Newfoundland.

When the Park was created thirty years ago, bureaucrats made concessions to communities within the park whose citizens had been using snowmobiles for winter transport, hunting, and collecting firewood. Since then however, recreational use of snowmobiles in the Park has reached epidemic proportions. Bob, Sue and a handful of other skiers in the area are leading an effort to have certain areas of the Park declared off limits to snow machines to create quasi-backcountry skiing preserves.

The following morning we drove for an hour around Bonne Bay to the trailhead at Birchy Head that would take us to the Southwest Gulch Cabin. This is one of two cabins funded and managed by the Gros Morne Cooperating Association. Bob and Sue volunteered to guide us up to the cabin and do some skiing for the afternoon before returning to Norris Point.

Our trail followed a diminutive "gulch" that ended after two hours at a sturdy and spacious post-and-beam cabin, set amongst a thicket of fir on the western edge of the Tablelands (another endearing quality of Newfoundlanders is their distinct turn of phrase and gift for understatement. Large lakes are "ponds", raging rivers are simply "brooks", and valleys are "gulches"). We stashed our overnight packs in the cabin and, after a quick snack, wove our way gently uphill onto the Tablelands for a few warm-up runs. From our high point, we could see the frozen Gulf of St. Lawrence curving off into the horizon, a brilliant white against the azure sky, and soon we were etching turns on snow that had been pounded by wind into a fast and grippy canopy.

Before parting from our new friends in the fading light, we made plans to meet Sue for an ascent of Gros Morne Mountain in two days. Then we returned to the cabin, stoked up the wood stove, and pondered the concept of backcountry skiing in Newfoundland. I read through the logbook-mostly snowshoers, skiers, and university students from nearby Corner Brook who, by the sound of their inebriated scribblings, did more drinking than skiing.

The next morning was warm, clear and calm. Lisa and I were excited to explore the Tablelands, the fantastic chunk of rock that reared up above our backcountry refuge. In winter, the Tablelands are so flat and smooth you could land 747's on them; however, on all sides retreating glaciers have chiseled the terrain into an amusement park of chutes and bowls of varying steepness. Tangerine-coloured outcrops of peridotite rock give the terrain a surreal moonscape quality, which is the reason NASA once pondered testing its lunar landing craft here. The lack of essential building-block minerals for plants, such as phosphorous and nitrogen, gives the Tablelands an unusually barren, desert-like feel in summer.

After consuming too much instant coffee and a Spartan breakfast of oats, we started skiing up and onto the Tablelands. At a rocky promontory, we took in wild views 800 meters down to one of those Newfoundland "ponds". This one, called Trout River Big Pond, is 16 kilometres long and flanked with sheer 150 meter walls. The entire scene could have been cut and pasted from a tourism brochure for Norway.

I waited while Lisa cut runs on a buffed slope of nicely corned snow-she appeared miniscule against the imposing backdrop of the "pond" and the Mt. St. Gregory Highlands beyond to the south. For the rest of the day, we worked our way around the southern edge of the Tablelands plumbing fresh lines, many of which likely hadn't seen ski tracks before.

After two similar days of sunshine and solitude on the Tablelands, it was time to shoulder our overnight packs and angle across this surreal plateau one last time. A warm but vicious wind howled in from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and I had the impression we were skiing on a treadmill; it was much the same as I would imagine traveling by skis to the Poles would feel. We were headed to Winter House Brook , a watercourse that has scoured deep into the Tablelands, forming a craggy valley with a rich supply of descent options.

Staying upright in the lashing onshore wind proved to be a challenge (Bob and Sue would be quietly pleased), so we beat a hasty retreat down Winter House to the road that cuts through the gap between Woody Point and Trout River. Above the road, we spotted half a dozen snowboarders and skiers laying tracks on a popular Tablelands feature that locals have dubbed with characteristic understatement, "The Bowl". I stuck my thumb out for a ride back to our rental at Birchy Head. The first car stopped and the driver told me cheerfully that in the dead of winter, the winds are at times so strong and the driving so fierce through "the gap" that people travel in teams of two-one to drive the car, the other to walk in front and find the road.

As planned, we met Sue the following morning at the Gros Morne parking lot. Gros Morne is yet another of the park's geological oddities and also the highest summit in the park at a deceptive 805 metres. The mountain is all that remains of an old beach, a monstrous pile of quartzite that has churned up when the continents collided and closed over the ancient Iapetus Ocean.

From the road, a pair of prominent thousand-foot-long white stripes are visible plunging down the sides of Gros Morne Mountain. Down at these elevations, the forest is impossibly tick (Newfoundland for thick). So "tick" in fact, that if it wasn't for the summer hiking trail, you'd need a size 20 waist to squeeze between the timbers. We were aiming for an ascent of the main gully that leads directly to the wide rocky summit of Gros Morne, which, according to the guidebook, is key winter forage for the native woodland caribou. Emerging from the forest, we spotted one of its grazing competitors, our first Newfoundland moose, casually browsing a birch tree a hundred yards off the trail. It seemed completely disinterested in us so we moved on.

An hour and a half of steep switchbacks brought us to the apex of Gros Morne National Park, where we snacked on fish cakes while Sue told us about a neighbour's house that had blown off its footings in a winter gale.

She and Lisa pushed off the summit block and lay tandem tracks down the wide gully. I started out across the rolling bench lands below towards the tablelands satisfied that the three of us and the ubiquitous Newfoundland moose were the only ones playing in the snow in Gros Morne National Park, a land of windswept vistas, good-humoured folk, and surprisingly fine spring ski touring.

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