Manuels River and trail

Manuels River opens into Conception Bay, which I referred to another post.

The Conception Bay offers a long and beautiful coast with many beaches, coves, amazing scenery, trails and interesting names for places as in the picture below. Our son got married in Brigus, one of the beauty spots on this coast and shown in this map.

Coming back to the trail – in and around St. John’s, Newfoundland there are many nature trails. Our friends and family familiar with these trails suggested a few that are easy to moderate for us to walk and this included the trail along the Manuels River. The river originates in the highlands of central Avalon and flows into the Conception Bay. The river is named after the community it flows through.

This trail was different

This trail, about 6 km long, turned out to be different from several others we walked. For one, this is a linear nature park along the banks of a river. It is also a protected nature conservation area and fossil site. Needless therefore to say that it is rich in flora, fauna, geological history and features. It is home to a very diverse variety of aquatic plant and animal life, insects, birds and animals, small plants and big trees. From what I read, over 30 species of wildflowers have been identified in this area. And so it is a great place to study all these in their natural habitats or just wander about enjoying nature. The linear park is a designated Municipal Heritage Site.

In addition, here you can see evidence for some major events that occurred during the earths evolution, I described in an earlier post. This river valley was part of the volcanic edge of the African continent about 600 million years ago. It rammed into the north American continent about 400 million years ago. Later the rest of Africa separated, leaving some bits behind in Newfoundland.  Evidence for the collision can be found on the different types of rocks and other features along the river valley. Ice age and glacial activity also played a part in shaping the river and its valley.

The area near the river was settled since early 1800s and was also a leisure destination in earlier times.

Walking along the trail

The trail can be reached from the Manuel’s River Interpretation Centre, to go down stream or upstream. We went down stream to start with and were greeted by the view of a broad stretch of the river flowing down ancient rocks.

The scenery along the trail changed every few hundred metres, with the river winding its way to the Bay. The trail itself is flat, easy to walk and well maintained with forested areas, bogs, wetlands, bull rushes, rocks and hills on the sides. The variety of trees provide spectacular fall colours.

Where the river meets the Bay, there is a beach created by the sea.  Large cobbles of rock rounded by the waves are distributed up the beach. Yet another feature that attracts scientists interested in studying this.

There are various kinds of exposed rocks and fossils. Most fossils are that of trilobites, which are a group of extinct marine arthropods that inhabited shallow oceans from early Cambrian periods for millions of years. This means that this area was under the ocean many million years ago. The bodies of trilobites have three lobes as the name suggests, and they shed their outer shells periodically. Most of the fossils found here are from the discarded outer shells, some measuring up to 30 cm. My earlier post on fossils in Newfoundland provides some insights into fossils in general.

There are also other fossils. The Interpretation Centre houses some of these and explains the geology of the area. There are also guided tours

Here are some links with more information

https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=10638

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuels_River

https://heritagenl.ca/heritage-property/manuels-river-linear-park-municipal-heritage-site/