The TRAVELER'S JOURNAL: June twenty-sixth, looking for Vikings amid the earth's bones.

The western coast of Newfoundland, the Pennsylvania-sized island that juts from the Atlantic off Canada's far eastern end, is a hard but beautiful place. The rocks here formed ten miles inside the earth during its early creation. Thrust to the surface by the tectonic meanderings of Europe and North America, the bedrock was scoured by glacial ice. Plantlife, inhibited by magnesium in the soil and savaged by fierce winters, is scarce.

The tablelands of Gros Morne, one of Canada's 35 National Parks, are the broadest, most accessible portion of the earth's mantle anywhere. A stroll between the gray cliffs that jut from the barren, orange-brown terrain is literally walking on earth's bones. The hard trek to the top offers many broad views of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where icebergs flow south all summer in glittering processions.

North of Gros Morne, Newfoundland Route 430 follows a trail laid down by Europeans who came to North America five centuries before Columbus. On Newfoundland's very northern tip, Leif Ericsson, son of the Viking Eric the Red, founded a colony he called Vinland.

Today, bronze pins, iron nails and bits of slag are all the real artifacts that remain at the World Historic Site at L'anse aux Meadows. Several reconstructed sod huts provide an inkling into how these intrepid seafarers lived and exhibits trace their American explorations. This evidence of elemental forces and early explorers combine to make Newfoundland a landscape that truly feeds the imagination.

FMI For Gros Morne National Park - 709-458- 2417 or www.parkscanada.pch.gc.ca/parks/newfoundland/gros_morne/gros_morne_e.htm

For L'anse aux Meadows National Historic Site 709-623-2608 or www.parkscanada.pch.gc.ca/unesco/mead/mead_e.htm

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