besthike.com - the blog

Hiking guru Peter Potterfield was much impressed with his first off-the-map hiking adventure in NFLD.

… the rangers here make you take along a locator beacon, what they call a “caribou collar,” before they’ll even give you a hiking permit. The idea is that if you get lost, they can find you with the transmitter much more quickly than searching through the vast expanse of this remote range that follows the spine of the Great Northern Peninsula. …

… I was amazed to find a lakeside camp site of pristine quality, in glorious solitude. This was exactly the sort of wilderness experience I had hoped to find here in Newfoundland. …

When hiking in the Long Range Mountains, the ptarmigan, fox, caribou and moose we saw along the way are reminders that this is genuine wilderness. And finding the route through all this varied terrain kept our heads in it as well as our bodies, and we got pretty good at it. We’d travel by compass, following a vector as much as topography allowed, then confirm our dead reckoning with GPS at our infrequent stops. Keith would read out the UTM coordinates from his receiver, I’d write them down in my notebook, and then we’d locate our position on the map.

We thankfully avoided the famous fog and bad visibility that is a standard feature of this hike. …

read the detailed trip report on Great Outdoors - Newfoundland’s Long Range Traverse

more hikes in Newfoundland - NewfoundlandLabrador.com