Views from near the Meat Cove Campground

We continued on into Meat Cove, stopping on the way well above the village to talk to a father at the side of the road awaiting with his snowmobile the return of his daughter on the school bus, as their driveway was long and unploughed. The gravel portion of the Meat Cove Road was snow covered, but not slippery, and we had no problem negotiating the spectacular descent from Black Point into Meat Cove. The weather was not the greatest, with snow in the air and no sun to light up the scenery, so we did not stop for photos on the way down.

The point seen in photo #1 is Blackrock Point, which defines the western edge of Meat Cove (the water). The snow especially emphasizes its 45° tilt. The incoming waves off the Gulf of St Lawrence, a large one of which can be seen at the far right of the photo about halfway up—another of those “dark lines” seen previously—were fairly gentle and did not cause a lot of foam as they hit the point. Notice here too the incipient ice forming: the darker blue patches are open water and the lighter blue ones are ice floes that will eventually coälesce. The snow bank in the foreground and the use of the telephoto lens both conspire to conceal the height from which this photo was taken: the campground sits on a cliff roughly 70 m (230 ft) above the water—see this photo for a better idea of the drop below the snow bank (use the height of a house to judge the height of the cliff).

Photo #2 shows the shore to the east across the mouth of Meat Cove Brook and captures an icicle-clad cliff, seen at the right; the telephoto lens again makes the cliff on which it is arrayed seem just across the snow bank in the near foreground when it is, in fact, a goodly distance away. The white granules seen on the rock face at the far right and in the air against the trees in the upper right of the photo are falling snowflakes. The water in Meat Cove seen at the middle and far left of the photo is mostly open, with an edging of ice on the shore and the partially submerged rocks; the waves were making a bit of froth as they reached shore, but nothing like I have seen them do here at other times. For sure, this is an altogether different scene than I have ever captured here before—and as pretty and peaceful as those taken in other seasons in this beautiful place.

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Photo #3 shows the folded rock formation on Black Point that has layered concentric arcs, very different from the straight lines seen on Blackrock Point in the photo at the top of the page and with a shallower angle. As with those lines, so here too the snow delineates the curves in the formation in a way that makes them stand out even more than they do in warm weather. Icicles have again formed on the sides of the point, left of the middle, in the middle, and at the right just above the water. That water is open only at the left and in the foreground, with ice floes closer to the point (one of them is bending with the incoming waves at the far right of the photo). Meat Cove Road climbs up to Black Point at the far upper right; utility poles near the upper centre of the photo mark its path as it continues east on the other side of the point towards Capstick. Though much less obvious in this photo than in the previous one, the original also shows numerous snowflakes in the air.