Views from from east of Capstick

Both of us red-faced from the strong winds, we picked our way carefuly back across the icy wharf to the car. We next made a short stop at the Bay St Lawrence Community Centre, after which we continued south to the Y across from the Coöp in St Margaret Village and turned right onto the Meat Cove Road. The paved portion of that road was as you see it in photo #1: in decent condition and no problem at all for a four-wheeled drive vehicle. Before arriving there, however, we stopped first at a wide spot east of the Salmon River (whose bridge was rendered unusable in a 2010 August storm and had to be replaced by a temporary Bailey bridge), from which the telephoto view of Cape North seen in photo #2 was taken. Most of the photos I took at this stop (not shown) still show driven snow below and parallel to the massif, but with the sun breaking through at the northern end and providing the dazzlingly bright view of Cape North seen here. Notice too, just beyond the end of the Cape, that one can see open water in the Cabot Strait, allowing one to judge much better how far out Bay St Lawrence had been covered with ice.

By the time we had made it over the Salmon River bridge and up the hill on the other side, the snows had mostly abated (you can still see some snow in the air in photo #1 where it gives the trees at the far right in the middle ground a whitish halo) and the sun was shining down on much of the entire massif, not just Cape North at its end. The simply stunning view in photo #1 took my breath away: the first time this trip I had seen the west side of the whole glorious massif at once!

In photo #1, the wharf from which the previous photos were taken is somewhat right of centre: from left of centre to right of centre, the cliffs make a dark line to the right that is interrupted by an area of white without any black markings; it is in this white area where the wharf is (in the original, there is a thin line of black at the end of the wharf just above the ice of the Bay that makes it easy enough to see, but in this version, that line has been reduced to near invisibility). About a quarter of the way in from the right of the photo, notice the very sharp line the snow cover makes where the cliffs descend down to the water; what interesting effects the winds create!

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Photo #3 gives a better idea of the rough, agglomerated quality of the sea ice covering Bay St Lawrence than do either of the previous two photos; the textured surface is rough and uneven and would be very hard to walk any distance on on foot. Again, one can (barely) see open water beyond the Cape at the far left. This photo also shows the upper part of the path the Money Point Light Trail takes as it ascends the massif at the end of the Money Point Road. If you follow the crest of the massif to the right from the left, you will see it rise to a high point and then fall off, after which it rises once again. The Trail can be clearly seen as a curvy snow-covered line reaching the ridge in the dip; to the right but still in the dip, you will also see a diagonal straight line descending—this is a power line that provides power to the communiciations towers (including a CBC Radio transmitter) that are found at and beyond the right edge of this photo (there’s actually a smudge in this photo that the original shows is the northernmost of those towers, but none of them are visible in the original of photo #1, doubtless an effect of the much wider angle of the lens).

St Paul Island was missing this day—we saw it nowhere along this road; it was doubtless hidden by the haze and fog in the Cabot Strait formed by the conjunction of open water and colder air.