Green Gardens at Gros Morne

The Green Gardens at Gros Morne is best known for its  spectacular coastline of cliffs, sea stacks, and the lush meadows along the coastal headland. The trail is 9km long round trip. It is ranked number 2* on the trails we planned to hike at Gros Morne, only after Tablelands "off trail" exploration.

We went hiking on Green Garden trail late morning (11:00 am or so) on our fourth day at Gros Morne - which was foretasted to be Sunny in early morning and cloudy rest of the day.

The trail head of Green Gardens  trail is near the end of the scenic drive 431 by the road side.

The initial kilometer of the trail cut through an open barren land dotted with unique and colorful flowers, with a large pond to the far right. Then the trail descends to coast through dense forest, part of it is pretty steep, and small portion of the trail was pretty muddy due to frequent rains in early Summer. 

As we were approaching the coast, the cloudy sky started to break up, Sun peeked out. The Sun was shinning on the shoreline when we got there! A large meadow was in front of us, extending all the way to the edge of the coastline cliff, some portion is "fenced" by pine trees. Looking beyond the meadow, we saw the ocean - more accurately the Gulf of Lawrence, cliffs, sea stacks. It was gorgeous and we took them all in.

Then we asked the only other persons at Green Gardens, a young couple, who arrived shortly after us, took a picture of us on the ubiquitous red couple's chair at the park!! 

Lily and I followed Nicholas' lead, who was on the beach already, we went down the cliff to the beach via broken stairs - we strolled on the beach, had a close up look of the sea stacks, checked out the water fall near the far end of the beach

It was 1pm, wind was gaining speed, clouds moved back, and we left for the Green Gardens above the beach, found a picnic table in the trees, had our quick picnic lunch. 

The hiking back to trail head felt much quicker, we got back to our rental car before the rain arrived. Our total time for this hike was about 3 and half hours including strolls and picnic, total distance walked was over 10 km.

* Gros Morne Mountain Trail would have been the # 2 trail for us - but it was closed during spring and early summer until the last Weekend in June - which was one day after our planned departure from Gros Morne.