Between Seasons
on the North Head Trail

Introduction

The North Head Trail stitches downtown St. John’s to the edge of the Atlantic. It feels sewn into the hillside, alternating between boardwalk and bedrock, threading in and out of fog. It meanders along the steep coastline above the Narrows, wends around Ross’s Valley to the headland, then ascends abruptly to the summit of Signal Hill.

Like most walking trails, the North Head Trail is hard to pinpoint as a “place”. Over 1.7 kilometres and 150 metres of elevation, it shifts from a rural seaside ramble to a wild windswept mezzanine to a graveyard of glacial erratics. It’s a landscape of weatherworn stone, sheer hillsides and shearing wind. It’s home to colonies of screeching gulls, elusive foxes, blueberries, junipers and chuckley pears, even an apple tree. The trail swerves jubilantly, linking many places and things. But it’s fastened most firmly to the Battery, where it begins.

Parks Canada tends to describe the trail as “descending into” the Battery, as if it begins in the parking lot by Cabot Tower, and certainly many people hike it that way. But it likely originated the other way around, as a way to walk from the Battery out to the headland. The trail’s history is hazy – Parks notes that “it may have been in use as far back as the 1500s,” and I’m told it appears on maps from the 1700s. Before stairs were built to the summit, it would have been a natural way to access the North Head on foot.

Older residents of the Battery remember playing on the trail ages ago, before it was adopted and built up by Parks Canada. Many of their stories are collected in the wonderful folk history Out to the Battery. Wes Pretty describes playing baseball in the Valley, and Joanne Butler recalls collecting seashells and fossils. Carl Pearcey says:

“As young boys, we climbed around, especially out towards the Narrows, out in the Valley, we called it. That path that’s there now where all the people, all the tourists walk out, there are steps out there now and a chain and everything going around the dangerous spots. But when we were going out there as kids, there was none of that.”

Ross’s Valley is a hanging valley, a remnant of the same geological processes that created The Narrows. It’s mostly wetland, snarled with prickly vegetation. From the hillside above, especially if there’s a thin layer of snow, you can see the remnants of trenches that were dug in attempts to drain the land.

In his book The Lookout: A History of Signal Hill, James E. Candow chronicles a few centuries’ worth of military and architectural misadventures all over the hill, including a few attempts to build in Ross’s Valley. The most famous is the Marine Hospital, a facility which was built in 1892 in anticipation of a cholera epidemic that never happened. Nicknamed “Prowse’s Folly,” it burned down in 1911.

The Marine Hospital on the southern end of Ross’s Valley (see MUN Digital Archives).

Photos of the Marine Hospital are startling – anyone who has visited Signal Hill will recognize what a remote location this is. The hospital was designed to accept smallpox and cholera patients from ships on their way through the Narrows, to quarantine them from the city. Part of the path up from the shore would no doubt coincide with the present-day North Head Trail.

This cultural history is easy to overlook today, when the North Head can feel like wilderness. But there is evidence of human activity everywhere: the scraggly apple tree, iron rings embedded in rocks, pottery shards in the valley. Sadly, the valley is also littered with tires and garbage bins rolled down from above. The hill can be a busy place – tourboats and lobster traps in the water below, massive ships trundling through the Narrows, aircraft roaring overhead. And of course there are hikers and dog-walkers, whale-watchers and iceberg-hunters, and tourists who can’t resist stacking loose stones.

Looking down over the Valley from the hillside.

When I started this project, I set out to write twelve short passages about walking the North Head Trail, one for each month of the year. But months mean nothing to the trail. Ocean-edge effects and elevation changes send its seasonal compass spinning. Wildflowers and snow appear at different times of year than elsewhere downtown, and fog sometimes buries one part of the route while another is brightly sunlit. It’s a place in flux, a place that resists calendars and almanacs. And of course this capacity to surprise and dazzle is what draws me to the trail over and over.

So instead of monthly dispatches, I ended up with Between Seasons on the North Head Trail. A warning, though! Parks Canada would like me to remind you that the trail is officially closed in winter, when conditions can be quite treacherous.

Winter into Spring

I haven’t been up the North Head Trail in two months now, and it’s lodged in the back of my brain like a fishhook. It tugs, nags, snags on things. The more I imagine the trail as a hook, the more it fits – the lower path along the Narrows bending into a U-turn as it wends around the headland, ending in the jagged barb of the steepest stairs. On particularly tantalizing days, a wriggle of fog worms through the trail like bait.

In the slog of early spring in St. John’s, it’s easy to blame my laziness on the weather, or on worrying whether it’s too icy up there. There’s a reason they officially close the trail in winter. But the sidewalks downtown have been clear for days, and this time last year I’d been up there a dozen times. The only ice is my inertia.

The hillside glowers. It looms over the city as if seeking me out, as if itching for an argument. I hide out in coffee shops downtown, or in my kitchen with its view of Cabot Tower. Safely behind glass at Atlantic Place, I study the hill to figure out how angry it is. I ask friends: Have you seen the trail lately? How is it? Oh, it’s not bad, says Bee. They’ve torn out some of the boardwalks so you have to clamber a bit. Greg says: It’s rough. It’s rascally. Wear crampons.

Instead of crampons, I buy new sneakers and escape to the gym at the Sheraton. The treadmills have large touchscreens so you can distract yourself with Netflix, or see your workout visualized as a writhing neon inchworm. The ellipticals offer “virtual hikes,” ten-minute videos showcasing treks around the world. I spend sweaty hours as a floating eye, hovering through far-flung national parks and mountain vistas. Landscapes I’ve never visited unravel on the screen like balls of yarn: Tierra del Fuego, Maui, the Pennine Way.

I find myself spiralling down the side of Crater Lake, Oregon, and realize: I’ve been here in real life. The hikes feel interactive at first, but slowing down or stopping doesn’t pause the video, and of course I can’t pick a different path, or turn around. And after a few sessions they begin to loop, becoming uncanny. I ghost through a trail in Yellowstone for the second time, and pass the same tourist in front of the same waterfall. He nods at me, just like last time, acknowledging our shared déjà vu. He’s been avoiding the North Head Trail, too.

Spring into Summer

The trail wriggles out of the city like a plant sprouting from pavement, the prickly stem of the Narrows blooming into a broad horizon as you ascend. I’m drawn here partly by its changeability: arpeggios of boardwalk slats cut to fit the rocky slope, cloud shadows somersaulting down a hillside, a lattice of light glinting from the harbourfront. Bee loves its steadfast remoteness, often jogging up by herself after dark. We weave the bright thread of the trail into our lives, making it part of the patterns we inhabit.

Sometimes it feels as if I come to the North Head Trail to confirm that the horizon is still here, that this place hasn’t lost its capacity to enchant. That we’re still on an island. Bee and I feel our way along this wrist of Atlantic rock, two fingers taking a pulse. On colder days the trail’s heartbeat is sleepy and solitary, while on the first warm afternoon in May its pace picks up, palpitating with a steady flow of footsteps and the rhythm of runners negotiating uneven ground.

Today we walk slowly, almost an amble. We pause often at the bottom of staircases, to let others pass. The trail itself wheels and dives at a seagull’s pace, but we take our cues from more distant objects: a tanker’s laborious progress through the Narrows, the lazy-eyed lighthouse at Cape Spear. We stop to rest on a little footbridge below the first tall crevice in the cliff. Bee says this spot feels like a threshold, the place where you pass outside the reaches of the city. Peering inside the dark crevice feels like pressing an ear to the earth. We can hear the throb of ocean waves slopping through the artery below, pigeons mucking about deeper in its veins.

Listening attunes us, and we press on up the trail paying more attention to the hollow plod of boots on boardwalk, or the cacophony of crows, pigeons, and gulls. There’s a spot at the top of one of the staircases where I always stop now, where the wind rattles a wooden post and a loose washer chimes against its bolt, ringing like a small bell. I walked here a few weeks ago on a day when you could hardly see the harbour, and a lone voice bobbed up through the fog: Last but not least, on our right hand side, we have Fort Amherst. Trust me.

Fog can produce optical phenomena, like this Brocken spectre and glory seen from the top of the trail.

On this warm afternoon the trail is crowded, so the voices we overhear are closer. Tourists marvel loudly at icebergs, while locals converse more intimately. On the more exposed parts of the trail, conversations are shredded into pieces by the wind. As we near the top, the sharpness of the staircases grinds down the talking around us, leaving only breathing. By the final staircase you can almost hear the fire roaring in your ankles.

Summer into Fall

Eighteen degrees yesterday, a welcome reprieve after an early fall chill. It rained overnight, and today the trail crosses a river that isn’t usually there. The hill is uproarious. Runoff flings itself toward the ocean, the last apples strain from their branches. The sides of the path blush with the fierce red tips of blueberry bushes. Compared to their colour, the juniper berries are burned-out lightbulbs. I don’t make it far before taking out my macro lens.

Kneeling, I hold my phone camera close to a berry, a leaf, the space between a berry and a leaf. It’s like lighting a candle; it takes a moment for the autofocus to find an edge to latch onto. My hands barely move but the image on the screen veers wildly, every drifted millimetre dramatically altering the composition. Focussing so closely, only a thin slice of the world is sharp. It’s easy to end up with blur instead of berry. The feeble light isn’t helping.

I look up to see a tsunami of fog sweep away Fort Amherst. The wave of nothingness seethes through the Narrows and into the city, leaving the skyline barely visible against a band of yellow. Seconds later the world is gone, as if someone has zipped a tent shut.

I bend to the underbrush again. A few seconds of microcosm and I’m sucked in. When a jogger huffs past it feels as if they shouldn’t be able to see me, as if I’ve shrunk to the size of an ant. Down here in the turf, rose hips are perforated like showerheads. Juniper berries hang low, weighed down by water drops nearly as big as themselves. Inside each liquid backpack glints my reflection, tinier again, worlds within worlds. The entire hillside full of eyes glinting.

I rise up out of it, fasten my rain jacket. The fog is an atomizer, depositing tiny eyes everywhere. Each bush bristles with hundreds of berries, millions of droplets of water. I look down as I walk, but not to watch where I’m stepping. My eyes skirt the edges of the trail, skimming branch-tips, brushing patches of grass, dipping into shadows. Each red leaf is hypnotic as candle flame.

It feels as if I’ve dropped my eyes into the brush and they’re gallivanting downhill, taking it all in. The sky dissolves into grey. Likewise, my peripheral vision darkens, closes in on the camera screen. It’s hard to see anything else. I waft and surge, drift at the speed of fog, nearly wander off the path. I forget about the cliff, the harbour lights, the city. The macro lens is a magnet pulling me closer to the centre of the Earth.

Sometimes I don’t even take photographs, I just look. Vast tapestries of moss, cathedrals of crumpled leaves, stained-glass insect wings. Tangled among so much gold and green, a filament of blue thread feels so otherworldly that I almost gasp.

North Head Trail

Vocals by April White, guitar by Stephan Walke, backup vocals by Virginia Mitford. Lyrics by Matthew Hollett. More on Bandcamp.