GROS MORNE
Park Interpreter Cedric Davignon is absolute about the importance of Gros Morne National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the province’s western coastline: “The landscape in the park is a bit like a mini laboratory of geology. The area known as the Tablelands tells the whole story of continental collision.” Indeed. The distinct orange peridotite rock of the Tablelands is a slice of ancient ocean floor, thrust to the surface, and one of the few spots on the globe where you can actually walk a hiking trail on the mantle of the Earth.
Luke Payne, a recently retired Parks Canada interpreter at the Broom Point Fishing Exhibit, says he’s one of a dying breed who has lived the life of a Newfoundland fisherman.
Josephine Matyas O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch abode —part of an 8,500-hectare parcel of land that includes the Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center where visitors can take courses, attend workshops and stay overnight or for the week.
The Abiquiu home is meticulously preserved — you half expect the artist to come walking around the corner into a room at any second — means no food, drink, cameras, video, cellphones, notetaking, tape recording or sketching are allowed anywhere, although the herb, vegetable and flower garden has recently been opened up for people to come and paint a couple of times a year.
The two most astonishing rooms are O’Keeffe’s large whitewalled studio and tiny grey-clay bedroom, the latter with a keva fireplace with a Buddha hand sculpture mounted on the wall that means “Fear Not.” Two enormous picture windows in each space frame the glorious landscape like one of O’Keeffe’s paintings.
Mid-century modern furniture is everywhere — suitable for the woman they called the Mother of American Modernism — although O’Keeffe made her dining room table out of two pieces of plywood and a rattlesnake skeleton is preserved under glass in the living room, where yet another big picture window looks out to a back garden.
Sweet-smelling sage, which O’Keeffe liked cut bonzaitree style, grows in various courtyards.
By the time we get to the 145-year-old Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs Resort and Spa to spend the night, I can’t wait to have a soak — following an Ancient Echoes spa treatment using East Indian head massage techniques — and literally marinate in the day’s transformative experiences at both of O’Keeffe’s homes.
And after a delicious dinner at the resort’s Artisan restaurant that included yummy green-chile fries, I’m treated to 50 minutes ($40 for two) in my very own mineral pool under the desert stars with a keva fireplace and a mountain face all lit up in lights.
As the Wisconsin-born O’Keeffe herself said in 1977, long after moving to New Mexico permanently in 1949: “It’s something that’s in the air — it’s different. The sky is different, the wind is different.”
Now I know what she was talking about.