Highland Habitats — Long Range Traverse, Gros Morne

Highland Habitats

The Long Range is home to both arctic alpine and more temperate species. Newfoundland's wild weather and topography group them into widely varying habitats, an uncommonly beautiful collage of nature.

Tuckamore: The gnarled, tangled, weatherbeaten stands of spruce and fir called "tuckamore" are the graphic symbol of Gros Morne National Park. Hikers used to hardwood forests will be unpleasantly surprised by their first tuckamore traverse. No limp juniper, tuckamore is resilient, dense and almost impossible to cross at will with a pack on. You can't walk over it, you can't walk under it, so you have to go through it: preferably following a moose.

Sedge meadows: We commonly think of wetlands as low places, but in the Long Range high does not necessarily mean dry. Drenched sedge meadows are found on high and low slopes. Small, deep pools called flashets are connected by a slowly overflowing sheet of water on shallow slopes. The shallowest slopes feature meanders of deeper water (not easily seen from further than 10 meters) and a higher concentration of sphagnum moss. We also saw marsh cotton and the yellow flecks of horned bladderwort.

Arctic carpet: The Long Range's exposure to high winds favors many arctic alpine plants, which are here near the southern border of their range. These include crowberry, clubmoss, diapensia, alpine azalea, mountain heather and willowherb. Willows and the occasional birch are dwarfed here and barely recognizable with leaves no more than an inch long. These plants form a strikingly textured red-green carpet on hill tops, ranging to knee-high on the highest slopes.

Fern and grass slopes: Ferns seem best adapted to the slopes where loose granite boulders hide soil. The broad foliage of these ferns hides holes and crevices and creates treacherous though beautiful hiking. Grasses are more common on slopes where the soil is deeper, and the Long Range's moderately steep, grassy south-facing slopes seem to be its driest and most accomodating places.

Forests: Aside from tuckamore and dwarf willow, there are few trees on the Long Range. An ascent of the Western Brook Pond gorge leads hikers through a rather lush forest of white birch and softwoods, but on the plateau there is no more than a half-kilometer of forest hiking, mostly on the south-facing slope above Hardings Pond. Spruces and firs that grow beyond the "tuckamore" stage often exhibit a strange pattern of growth: a cone-shaped bottom, naked midsection and a pom-pom top of densely packed branches. Presumably, as branches grow longer and more widely spaced they are too exposed to the weather to survive.
Note: Find out more about highland habitats in Michael Burzynski's book "Gros Morne National Park," 1999, Breakwater Books, St. John's, NL A1C 6E6, ISBN 1-55081-135-5.