Hi everyone, I'm Alice Ford.

If you joined me last season, we hiked the West Coast Trail in Pacific Rim National Park on the far reaches of Canada's western coast.

And this summer I am doing something just as epic.

I've flown all the way across North America to reach its most easterly point on the island of Newfound Land, and it's got stunning coastline, epic wildlife, and fantastic hiking trail called the East Coast Trail.

This trail is 335km, and I'm not going to be doing the whole thing, but we will be spending a couple of days hiking along this trail, seeing some of the stunning beauty of this coastline, experiencing some of the amazing marine life, hiking through some small communities.

And there'll be lots more surprises too.

I'm Alice Ford and we're back in Northern Norway.

This is the Garden Island, Kauai, Hawaii.

As you guys can see, it is absolutely beautiful down here.

The views are just already stunning.

We are on our way to Antarctica.

So right now we're having a traditional tea here.

Wow.

It's my first official day here on the East Coast Trail.

I could not have asked for better weather.

The skies are blue, the temperature is warm and the views over the Atlantic are absolutely epic.

The East Coast Trail is way less discovered than many of the traditional true hikes in North America.

Which means the next few days will have a fair amount of solitude.

It can be hiked in full, which takes about 15 days to conquer the 335km.

Or you can do day hikes or section hikes.

I've chosen to put together about six sections of this 25 part hike, starting in the Lemont Provincial Park and making my way north back towards the city of Saint John's.

Ive come to what I have called Frog Pond because, hi little guy walking up to this area was so loud I wasn't sure if there was ducks or geese, but it happened to be a pond full of frogs.

There are lots of mature ones, like this little guy right here, and a ton of tadpoles that are beginning to turn into frogs as well, which is really cool.

So you can see that some of them still have the tails, and some of them are just little baby frogs.

But already such beautiful nature here along the East Coast Trail from the Lamont Provincial Park section, hike is one of the more popular day hikes, attracting many people that want to walk over the beautiful suspension bridge at the edge of the sea.

I was easing into my first day on the trail with a planned 11 to 13 kilometer hike, which would get me acquainted with the stunning jagged coastline and the beautiful flower filled meadows and forests of the Avalon Peninsula.

From here I continue along the trail, taking in the spectacular sea views and walking into the small community of Tors Cove.

The trail is punctuated with small communities where weary hikers can rest, stay, swim or just relax.

The community walks add some mileage to the hikes, but also give you an inside look into the small villages and the local island culture that make this little slice of Canada so utterly unique.

I've made my way back onto the trail after going through those first couple of communities, and we're back along the beautiful coastline now off shore here, a couple of islands, and these are full of thousands of birds.

There are gulls flying ahead.

There are cormorants in the waters, and there are also Atlantic puffins.

These are my first puffins of the trip.

And many people come here to Newfoundland just to spot these birds.

And surprisingly, Atlantic puffins are actually quite a small bird.

And when they come in to land to nest, their beaks actually change color with the more orange color that you may be used to seeing puffins with.

Pretty cool to see these creatures out here.

Lots of them swimming around and enjoying this beautiful day.

The coastline here is just unbelievably beautiful.

As it came down the hillside here, I saw big groupings of birds sitting on the water out here near some of these bird islands.

And that usually means that it's a great feeding ground.

And sometimes that means there's whales.

Now Canada has about 35 species of whales that patrol through, live in, or migrate through the Canadian waters.

22 of those can be found off the coastline of Labrador and Newfoundland.

So there's a lot of whale species that live around here and off the coast.

I've already seen today minkes and humpbacks.

Keeping a watchful eye for some more.

But this is just one of the amazing marine creatures you can see if you're doing this hike.

One of the really awesome things about this trail is that because it comes through all of these different communities, there are inns, there are cafes and restaurants and food trucks and lots of places for people to stay and eat along the trail.

So even if you didn't want to backpack, you could still thru-hike this trail and stay at inns and bed and breakfasts along the way.

Tonight is the first night on the trail.

I'm ending my hike here in Mobile, and I'm staying at a little place called the Whale House.

Right after leaving the Whale House, I seem to have missed a turn.

This would have taken me along the beaches path.

My next leg of the East Coast Trail, a 7.1km trail along the ecological reserve's coast.

But instead I had a long, hot, and somewhat miserable walk along the loud road.

We may be in one of the moose-iest countries on Earth, but this part of Canada never actually had any native moose.

They were introduced here way back in 1904, when four moose were introduced to the islands in hopes of establishing big game hunting, which the government thought would attract visitors on a newly opened railway.

Now Newfoundland has few, if any, predators, so moose have really thrived here.

There is definitely something to be said about actual trail this morning.

All those hours just walking along the road.

I really do not enjoy that.

Gravel and pavement, cars whizzing by.

The temperature is hotter, it's more humid, it's louder.

So really happy to be back on the East Coast Trail.

Now, this next section is called McLean's path.

It's about seven kilometers.

Hopefully it took a couple of hours.

It's just about noon now, and I'm expecting this next part of the trail to be really beautiful.

It should be through the forest and along the coast.

I think one of my favorite parts along this trail so far has been all of the whale spotting, and today has been no different.

Yesterday we saw a bunch, but today there are so many whales.

I am looking at a few off the cliff here in the water that are feeding quite far off shore, but I just came around a bend a little bit ago and there was a humpback feeding pretty close to shore, flapping his flippers and smashing his tail.

And it is so loud the sounds it carries all the way up here onto the hillsides.

There are 10,000 different whales that migrate through this area between May and September.

Tons of different species.

But humpbacks always return to this area, feeding on the abundance of fish that's in the shallow waters here.

I did not expect this to take as long as it has today, and I was expecting to be a lot farther along the trail.

It's after 4 p.m. now, and where I want to end up is realistically, several hours of hiking still.

And that means I'm most likely not going to get to a campsite.

There's only a few of them along this entire path, and I believe the next closest one is something like 12km from here.

So we'll see.

I'm not exactly sure what my next kind of course of action is going to be, but I'll see how I feel when I get to town.

The next small community I wandered into was called Bay Bulls.

The small ocean port is home to a few whale and puffin tour companies, and there were also a few bed and breakfasts in the area too.

Because I was trying to cover as much ground as possible, I kept pushing through the town of Bay Bulls and made my way onto the next section of trail, which is called the Spout Path.

I was hoping to find a suitable place to camp somewhere near the Babel's Lighthouse, which is a couple kilometers into this trail.

Now of the more than 250km of coastal trail, there are just five established campsites and a few wilderness sites as well.

One of the more established campsites is located about seven kilometers past the Bay Bulls lighthouse, and another wilderness camp is located just a couple of kilometers past that lighthouse as well.

But this is one of the most strenuous sections of trail, and the end of the day was soon approaching, so I hoped that I could make it past the lighthouse and find somewhere to camp that was devoid of water or mud before the night fell.

Alright the lighthouse is just there, so I almost made it.

To where I think I'll be most likely camping tonight.

There is a wilderness camp of sorts, about a kilometer past the lighthouse.

So if I can't find a suitable spot by the lighthouse, I'm going to go a little bit further.

As long as the daylight persists.

It's about 7 p.m. now, so I do have about two hours until darkness, but definitely don't want to be hiking on this trail in the dark because it's got a lot of roots and a lot of rocks and could be a little bit treacherous.

So definitely need to make camp soon.

Okay, very short break here at the lighthouse.

This is the Bay Bulls Lighthouse.

It hasn't been in operation in a very long time, but definitely an icon of the past.

I'm not sure this is going to be the best camping area, so we're probably going to keep going.

But I'm going to look around a little bit first.

All right.

I hear a river and I just saw a tent.

So I think we've made it.

Goodness gracious.

All right.

Oh, I found a camp spot for a nice flat spot up here, tucked in between the rocks.

It is very, very buggy.

Wow.

So I'm gonna haul ass and get my tent set up as well.

Yikes.

It is so buggy there are like no-see-ums but you can see them because they're everywhere.

And I am so thankful that I packed rain pants because that's what I'm wearing to protect myself from the bugs right now.

This is a bug-iest.

It's been.

On this trail, you know, there were mosquitoes the first day, but nothing like this.

So I'm sure it's just because it's kind of getting to that time of day, but.

Wow.

Yeah, I have never experienced this many bugs backpacking.

I'm just getting some dinner prepared.

I'm going to get some water boiling.

And tonight I'm making.

A mushroom pasta.

Then I'm going to go grab some more water.

My tent is set up, so at least that's done.

And, I'll be bug free later on.

Just waking up.

It's actually almost 8 a.m..

I slept a little late because the storm last night was long, and I just kept waking up and going back into dreamland.

And then waking up to the rain.

So hard to kind of sleep through that with the thunder and some of the lightning too.

You know, Newfoundland is actually the foggiest and windiest place in all of Canada, and I hadn't really seen the fog until this morning.

Obviously, it's blanketing everything, and that's one of the reasons why the weather here can be so hard to gauge.

You know, when I left Los Angeles, I did check the weather.

There was not supposed to be rain this entire week yet.

It rained Monday and it's raining today.

But this fog, when it rolls in, it brings in so much moisture that it kind of creates its own weather systems.

And I'm sure for weather man, it's very hard to predict.

I'm sure in a few hours this will have burned off and it will be a hot, scorching day like it was yesterday.

But really cool to finally see this fog.

It goes so far out to sea.

It looks like there's an eagle on the top of that tree over there.

Let's see if I can get a little closer.

Gosh you really can't get views much better than this along a coastline.

It's just spectacular.

We're about an hour and a half into the hike today.

And where we're heading, we are on the Spout Path, and we are heading actually to a water driven geyser that should be in about seven kilometers.

It's near kind of the end of the trail when you're hiking south to north, which is definitely not the typical direction most people hike, but it's one of the more popular trails.

But also one of the more strenuous ones.

So there's a lots of ups and downs on this path.

I haven't seen anyone this morning, so I've got the whole place to myself.

And if you look way down the coastline here, you can see that last little mass of land that is the easternmost point in Canada, and we'll be heading there tomorrow.

All right.

We've made it to the spout.

As you can tell, this little geyser here is fed by the ocean.

And it's a pretty calm day out there.

So this isn't super active or super crazy high, but it is really neat to see.

It's also incredibly loud.

Finally made it to the end of this section of trail.

It is 4:30 p.m..

It's been a long day.

It's been hot, humid, muddy and wet.

And from here, there's options.

You can continue on the East Coast Trail, which takes you on the motion path, which can spit you out at Petit Harbor, which is about 13km from here.

I am actually going to hop off the trail.

There is a road or I'm not sure I would even call this a road, but this is called the Shoal Bay road.

You can hike out here.

It's about six kilometers to the main road, and from there I'm going to hop in a car and head to town.

This is definitely not what came to mind when I read road.

more of an ATV road and it has been completely turned into a river.

The wet shoes continue Another spot along the East Coast Trail is here, at the easternmost point in all of North America.

It's called Cape Spear.

There's an old lighthouse here, and a lot of history.

They actually use this site as bunkers during World War II.

And there's a lot of other cool history as well.

But standing here on the most easterly Shore and all of North America is definitely a great way to end this little adventure off.

You know, the last few days have been grueling, hot, wet, muddy, sometimes buggy, but absolutely epic.

The views have just been fantastic.

And even here at Cape Spear, I just watched a whale go by.

There has been so much wildlife, it's just been astounding.

But I want to show you around this awesome historic site and then a few things in the town of Saint John's, because hiking isn't all that you can do here.

This place is absolutely beautiful and full of history.

The lighthouse was built in 1836, and visitors here can tour the old light keeper's residence, which once housed the families operating the lighthouse.

Or you can just take in some of the whales or icebergs passing by the coastline here, depending on the season.

Just north of Cape Spear is the vibrant city of Saint John's, known for its colorful architecture, rich history and stunning natural beauty, it boasts a unique blend of old world charm and modern conveniences, and the East Coast Trail connects directly into the city, giving visitors and locals alike the ability to hike and explore the stunning coastal trails.

The city itself has museums, restaurants and even a car free street full of shops and places to eat, as well as numerous historic sites dating back to the early days of European colonization.

There's a lot of really interesting history here in Saint John's, and one of the most prominent features that you have to visit dominates the skyline and overlooks the harbor.

This is Signal Hill.

This historic site is famous for the first transatlantic wireless signal that was received in 1901, in this very spot by Guglielmo Marconi.

And it's also famous for being the strategic outpost and site of the last battle during the Seven Years War.

After taking in all the history and the views at Signal Hill, a great way to get back to town is to walk along the north Cape Trail.

This is a really scenic hiking trail that goes along the cliffs.

There are stairs and walkways.

It is absolutely beautiful and it will spit you out and that little tiny part of town called the Battery.

My time here in Newfoundland has been absolutely beautiful, but the Avalon Peninsula is just a little slice of what you can see on this island.

There is so much more.

There are four national parks here.

There are beaches there forests and bogs and marshes.

And as we have seen so much wildlife, more whales we're just swimming off the coast here.

And there's a ton of history here, too, from naval history and military to fishing and immigration as well with all the Irish history.

And if you go across the water to Labrador, there are polar bears and lots and lots more wild adventures.

I hope you guys enjoyed following along on this trip, and I will see you all in the next adventure.