It’s the single most iconic vista in all of Newfoundland, all the more prized because it’s so hard to reach. By the time we clambered over the final set of boulders to get there, we’d been climbing for more than six hours, accompanied by clouds of voracious and seemingly waterproof black flies that were undeterred by the steadily falling rain. We turned to look back at the route we’d traveled: the sinuous, glacier-carved fjord 2,000 feet below us, the billion-year-old cliffs that hemmed it in, the jumble of rocks and rainforest that led steeply up to the plateau where we now stood. This view of Western Brook Pond is a staple of the island’s glossy tourism campaigns; we’ve seen the pics, but on that particular day it was nothing but a blanket of mist.
We didn’t have time to linger anyway. It was nearly noon by the time the boat had dropped us off at the head of the fjord, then climbing up the gulch had taken twice as long as we’d anticipated. We were barely halfway to the alpine pond where we’d hoped to camp that night. As the mist thickened, finding landmarks was getting increasingly difficult. Muddy game trails carved by the area’s ubiquitous moose and caribou led in every direction through the boggy grass, frequently disappearing into sinkholes filled by several days of nonstop rain. No matter how often we stopped to orient ourselves, we were turned around again within minutes.
I felt panic rising in me. We were already a day behind schedule, because the waters of the fjord had been too choppy for the boat on our scheduled departure day. That had forced us to burn a day of food while camped by the dock waiting for our ride, leaving us with just four days to complete the hike instead of the planned five. And while my wife, Lauren, and I were capable of hiking as long into the night as we needed to, we couldn’t ask the same of our daughters, Ella and Natalie. They were just eight and six, respectively—and, aside from being exhausted, they were being driven bonkers by the flies, despite their full-body bug suits. But there were no exits from this hike. No roads traverse this part of Newfoundland. The boat was gone, and so was our cell signal. The only way out was onward. In that moment of maximal uncertainty, a puzzling thought nagged at me.
“You know,” I said to Lauren, “this isn’t bad planning or bad luck. It’s exactly what we asked for.”
The post Why We Explore appeared first on Outside Online.
