The Christiansens invade Newfoundland: July 29-Happy Birthday Devon and hiking the monster trail

Started the day by placing banners all around the trailer hoping someone would wish Devon a happy birthday, but no takers. I feel a bit guilty about having us away most years on his birthday, but we usually manage to do something special on the day, so he does fine. We had given him his birthday gift a couple of weeks early, a new digital camera of his own, as he has been using mine for awhile and is getting quite good at taking pictures. I made some sandwiches for the day as we have planned to hike the Alexander Murray hiking trail today, a very ambitious plan for me with my ankle and knee always a bit of a concern on hills and steps. When we arrived at the trailhead building, the staff warned us the trail was 8 kms, but included over 2000 steps. OMG. We decided to go down the road and check out the Rattling Brook Falls as I had originally just wanted to see that, but thought you needed to hike on the big trail to get there. In fact, the waterfall trail was pretty high up itself, it was about 300 steps to the top. By the time we got to the top, our jackets were off and Rob pulled his sweater off too, despite the cool air. The view was spectacular.

Rattling brook falls

Beautiful trails to the falls

View from the top of the Rattling brook falls climb-it was gorgeous.

Once we had seen that trail, we decided to at least explore part of the Alex Murray one, so drove back to the trail head. Another guy was in there, and he said many people just go as far as Corner brook falls, and then come back, and he said -well, there's just 3 sets of steps to get there, so it's pretty easy. Well, we could see steps climbing all the way up the mountain side from the road from about 5 kms away, and knew we were never going all the way up there, so decided to try for the falls. We almost made it to them, but in fact the whole trail was thick with sets of steps, 10-20 at a time, and his three sets were close to 100 steps in each block. We stopped short of the falls after seeing about 100 steps going down a cliff, knowing we would have to climb right back up them. We were on the trail about 3 hours altogether. We went back to the campground, and cooled off our hot bodies in the lake (which was freezing cold), then had a nice birthday dinner for Devon. (100 km and about 700 steps)