Category Archives: trans labrador highway

Saturday 16th September 2017 – THAT WAS …

… a much better sleep last night. There was a little movement around from a few of my fellow guests but nothing that seriously disturbed me.

Mind you, talking about being disturbed, I was disturbed enough on my travels though. We were walking through Crewe around Manor Way, a few of us, and my mother was there with us. We ended up for some reason going down Birchin Lane in Nantwich and my mother suddenly had one of her “turns”. She crept up to a semi-detached house and loitered around the door – and when the old woman came out stalked her for a while before pouncing. She succeeded in persuading this woman that they had been girls together in 1939, although my mother hadn’t visited this area by 1939. But then, that kind of thing never worried my mother. She lived on a different planet to the rest of us.
Later, I was helping someone move house. We were down in the cellar sorting out stuff to go in the back of my red Cortina estate to move, so some stuff we were taking and other stuff, which the girl who owned the house here could take in her car, we left. A while later I was back with another woman and she was having a look around, seeing the nice wooded floor but a load of car tyres cut horizontally in half and embedded in the wooden floor stopped things touching the wall. She was horrified by this but I explained that they were only temporary and they would be moved once we were straightened out.

The landlady wasn’t there at breakfast, but I had company in the shape of an Indian couple and their little boy. We had quite a chat.

Having packed Strider, I checked his oil, put 5 litres of fuel in out of a can (just enough to keep him going) and set off for town.

Up to the Walmart car park, not for shopping, but for the obligatory photograph.

This is one that we always seem to be taking – of the water tower here in Labrador City. It goes to prove that I was actually here

Not all here though, as many people have commented in the past.

And in the quest for the perfect pitch, as you might say, here’s yet another football pitch.

Even Labrador City can boast a football pitch these days, and that’s certainly progress.

We seemed to have had all kinds of difficulties finding football pitches in Canada in the past and I remember my reaction when I found my first one. Now we seem to be finding them everywhere.

About 20 kilometres outside the town is the border between Labrador and Quebec.

And it always makes me smile because on the Labrador side, we have the Canadian flag, the Newfoundland and Labrador flag, the Union Jack and the Labrador flag.

Here on the Quebec side, there is just the Quebec flag.

You’ve all heard all of these stories of this Quebec “monolingual” policy, and you’ve all seen enough evidence to show that it’s just window dressing and sabre-rattling by the Quebec Government – nothing more than that.

Here’s an official Quebec Government road sign about 100 metres inside the Quebec border.

That’s not monolingual, of course, and it tells you all that you need to know about this “monolingual” policy.

We go into the town of Fermont for fuel. It’s about 2O kms closer to Baie Comeau than Labrador City, and that’s extremely important.

Fermont is a mining town created to house the employees of the huge Mont Wright iron mine just a couple of miles down the road.

and its claim to fame is that I reckon that it’s the coldest place on earth, and totally windswept. It’s punishment to stand outside here

If you look in the background to the left and see the light brown building, that’s where everything happens in Fermont.

All of the shops and offices are in there, and there are apartments above. That means that the people don’t have to step outside in order to carry out their activities.

Of course, though, the town has considerably expanded since that was built.

I mentioned that Fermont was a company town for the workers at the huge Mont Wright iron mine.

And if you are looking for “Mont Wright” – that’s it, that hole in the ground. So much ore has been extraced that the mountain has gone and they are now working in the surrounding areas.

Originally owned by the Quebec Cartier Mining Company, it’s now operated by Arcelor Mittal, the world’s biggest steel producer.

The mine here covers an area of 24km² and has enough ore to last until at least 2045.

The ore is taken to the crushing plant that you can see in the background.

The ore contains about 38% of iron concentrate and when the concentrate is separated, it’s shipped to Sept Iles on the company’s railway line for shipping onwards.

There’s only one way to come here by road, and that’s on Highway 389 from Baie-Comeau.

It’s 564 kilometres in length, and I do have to say that there’s about 200 kilometres – in two separate stretches – that ranks as about the worst road in the world.

You wouldn’t believe it possible, given the traffic that is obliged to come up here.

And furthermore, according to Provincial legislation, road trains are permitted to use the Highway too.

That’s all very well, but it’s not such good news if you happen to be stuck behind one. They bowl along pretty well on the asphalt highway, but on these roads they can hardly move at all.

and the amount of dust and stones that they throw up is astonishing

Having said all of that about the road and how miserable is its condition, it’s still magnificent all the same.

And in the right weather and in the right vehicle such as Strider it’s quite a beautiful road to drive.

Even though the autumn has yet to arrive, the colours of the plants up here in the Pays d’En Haut are superb all the same.

Over the last couple of years, the iron ore mine at Fire Lake has restarted full production.

The ore-bearing rock is blasted out, loaded into the dumpers and tipped into wagons pulled by the company’s locomotives.

These take it to the crusher up the road at Mont Wright where the concentrate is extracted. The ore here is said to be even richer than the ore at Mont Wright.

Next stop is the abandoned town of Gagnon – and in particular, the airstrip.

The reason why the airport is of interest is that the town was abandoned in 1985 when the iron mine was exhausted and yet the airstrip is in pristine condition with not a weed growing anywhere.

Given the speed at which arctic willow grows, it’s clear that someone is maintaining this airport in this condition,
but for why I really don’t know.

But it’s certainly weird.

Anything that you will ever read about the town will tell you that all that remains of the town is the highway and the airstrip.

That, of course, is total nonsense. Someone probably drove through here quickly without stopping and made a brief note.

And everyone else ever since has done a simple “copy/paste” of the original comments without ever taking the trouble to check

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have found the cemetery – which despite whatever you read, is still extant.

We always pass by to pay our respects to the inhabitants, because it’s quite evident that no-one else ever comes here to pay their respects.

As I have said, everyone else doesn’t even know that the cemetery here at Gagnon still exists.

Last time that we were here we noticed the small graves outside the precincts of the cemetery, and a list of burials marked anonyme.

You may remember that I speculated that they might be the graves of unbaptised children

Having a bit of a rummage around, I found a couple of headstones in this part of the cemetery.

They follow the lines of this tombstone here – a baby born and died on the same day in 1969. It seems that I may well be right in my supposition.

But it’s astonishing that there are so many of these anonyme graves. I reckon that it’s not far short of half of them.

But I have to laugh at the dual carriageway here. It’s the only section of dual carriageway in the entire length of Highway 389.

The irony is that it was built for the town of Gagnon long before Highway 389 was ever proposed, and by the time the Highway arrived here, the town had been abandoned for several years.

And despite it being asphalted, it’s probably worse than some of the dirt sections of road.

I find a beautiful place to stop and eat my lunchtime butties.

Being Pisces I have to be close to water and this will do me fine – overlooking one of the thousands of rivers that thread their way through Upper Quebec – the Pays d’En Haut.

And with the telephoto lens, I can take a good photograph of it stretching away into the distance.

Back on the road again and I intend to make it more-or-less non-stop to Baie Comeau.

Our road threads through the hills of Northern Quebec in the early autumn just as the leaves are changing colour.

I could show you dozens of photographs of the road, but just one will suffice. You’ll need to imagine the rest of them, because they are all as beautiful as this one.

Mind you, it might not look like this for much longer – the road, I mean.

As you can see, it’s not just a maintenance crew that we have here but they are doing some serious reconstruction.

And a little later on I encountered a lorry coming my way with an asphalt layer on the back. THat can only mean one thing …

We have to have a photo of the dam at Manic 5 – the 5th damo the river Manicouagan – to signal that we have arrived.

It’s not actually the 5th one but the fourth. Manic 4 was never built because they discovered that the lake behind Manic 3 would flood the potential site.

And it’s not officially called Manic 5 either but the Daniel Johnson Dam. He was the Government Minister sent to open it but he died in his sleep in the motel the night before the opening ceremony.

We push on and arrive in Vallant.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when we came past in 2010 it was a ghost town. In 2014 it was slowly crawling awake.

In 2015 however there were dozens of trailer homes here for the work crews refurbishing the dams nearby.

But today, we have what look like permanent barracks in place of the trailers. It looks as if the place is settling down to some kind of permanence.

You might remember this road from last time too.

There was a very bad bend just here but in 2015 a work crew was busy blasting away a cutting through a rocky outcrop just here.

Today, we have a modern, high-speed section of the Highway. It’ll all look like this in 5 years time, I reckon.

At 564.3 kms the fuel warning light comes on on Strider. He’s done really well – more than 100 kms more than in previous years thanks to the rebuilt overdrive unit, and the road hasn’t been easy either as you can see.

I pull over and tip the rest of the fuel out of the can into his tank – about 12 litres I reckon, and that’s plenty to take me to Baie Comeau.

Having had motel “issues” in the past in Baie Comeau I drive through the town and out towards Quebec. In the past I’d seen a cheap motel right on the edge of town and so I went to give it a try.

After all of my vicissitudes with accommodation out in Labrador, this at least is a respectable price.

And I can use the slow cooker to make tea but I end up not eating it as I forgot it while I was talking to someone and the pasta congealed.

But a shower, a clothes wash and an Early night will set me up really well. I deserve it.

Friday 15th September 2017 – I’M BACK …

… on the road again today. My stay around the Coasts of Labrador has come to an end.

But I still remember a huge, mixed-up kind of ramble during the night where I was going around all of these little settlements and cabins out on the coast.

And that’s surprising because I had yet another bad night’s sleep. Like I say, they come in cycles … “ON cycles, you mean” – ed … and we’re in one right now.

So after breakfast and sorting myself out, I took my leave of my landlord and went to find the offices of “Them Days”. That’s a magazine that publishes traditional stories about the Labrador coast.

As you know, I’m still looking for the grave of the most famous man in Labrador. It’s here in the Happy Valley Cemetery, but that’s huge and I couldn’t find it the other day.

Much to my surprise they didn’t know where it was either. But a few ‘phone calls later and I was told “he’s in the United Church Cemetery” part”, which of course is the biggest part of the cemetery.

So after an hour, and with the help of a very vocal local yokel, we came up unsuccessful. But there was a phone number there so I called it. And much to my surprise, the woman there didn’t know where he was either.

But it did lead to an interesting conversation. She asked my name – which I duly gave.
“Eric Hall? Let me see – you were in church on Sunday weren’t you?”
Our Hero – “did you see a thunderbolt then?”.
Anyway she promised to phone me back (and Josée’s phone is a godsend on this trip).

While she was making “further enquiries” I continued to search, and all of a sudden I came across it.

I missed it because I was probably expecting something much grander, seeing how his name was on everyone’s lips as the most famous man in Labrador 100 years ago.

Here then lies Gilbert Blake, the man who rescued the remains of the disastrous Leonidas Hubbard party and who accompanied Mina Hubbard on her trip into the interior to complete her husband’s work.

Ha also led countless subsequent exploring parties into the interior of Labrador and was never given credit for much of what was “discovered”.

The lady from the Church phoned me back to say where it was, and to my dismay, I had to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I spoke to Gilbert Blake’s daughter. If you would like to see her to chat, she’s available”.

But it’s 550 kms to Labrador City and it has to be done before dark. I was obliged to turn down the opportunityand I doubt that I will ever have the possibility again.

Usually, this rubbish is littered with photos of old cars in people’s gardens. But we’ve never had a photo of a garden with an old aeroplane in it.

I’ve no idea what it is, but it’s small, an early jet-fighter type of plane, and it won’t ever fly again this side of a miracle.

Labrador is certainly a different place from that respect. Nothing ordinary here.

Having fuelled up, I hit the road. About an hour later than I was intending.

About 20 miles outside the town there’s a cleft in the hills where you can see down to the works that are taking place at Muskrat Falls.

As I’ve said before, I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the project – enough has already been said – but anyone who saw the photos of my first trip to Labrador will seethings differently now.

So off we go down the Trans-Labrador Highway into the interior.

And you’ll notice that it’s not quite autumn yet. The leaves on the deciduous trees haven’t “turned”

And you’ll notice a few changes to the highway too since we first came here. You’ll remember what a struggle it was over some of the worst roads in the world.

Today, it’s an asphalted, paved highway all the way to Labrador City.

With all of the work going on for the Muskrat falls project, a lot of trees have been removed and rock blasted away.

This opens up a whole new vista – views like this one of the Churchill River would never have been possible 10 years ago had they not blasted away some rock to put in a pylon to carry the cables.

You can see where the evergreen trees have been pulled out, and the first growth of deciduous arctic willow that is growing back in its place.

It’s that time of year, isn’t it?

In a week or so’s time it will be the annual tribal meeting of the Innu people, and they are preparing the site ready for the gathering.

I would ordinarily tell you what it’s called, but the problem with Innu names that it’s quite something to read them, never mind remember them.

I talked about the road just now. The one that we are actually on is the third attempt.

It dates from about 2011 – 2012 and it follows pretty closely in most places the line of the second road that we took in 2010.

The earlier road is what they called the “Tote Road” and dates from the period after the occupation of the Goose Bay air base by the Canadian Air Force.

If you thought that we had a struggle in places back in 2010, you can barely imagine what it must have been like in the 1970s.

The road was 10 times worse, single track, and following the contours rather than being graded across the valleys and though cuttings.

But regardless of your opinions, you’ll have to admit that they have done an excellent job of the new highway.

You can see it (and the power transmission cables) disappearing away over the hill in the distance, and it goes on for ever in just this kind of condition.

On the old dirt road, with the 70kph speed limit, in some places it was more like 70 kilometres per week. Here today, it’s a mere 80 kph but with no obstructions to slow you down.

But you slow down every now and again to take a few photos.

You’ve seen the scenery before but I bet that you’ve seen nothing like this.

There are miles and miles of forest where it seems that we have had a major forest fire fairly recently. You cans ee that some of the trees are scorched and blackened, and others have been completely destroyed

The whole of the place is littered with miles and miles of scenery just like this.

About 80 or so kms (I can’t remember now) from Labrador City I pull into Emeril Station to see what’s happening.

This is on the line from Sept Iles to Schefferville and serves the iron mines and the Innu community out there.

We have a line of wagons waiting for a locomotive, and also this dismantled dumper lorry – one of the huge 50-tonne ones- waiting to make their way north.

But I don’t see any locomotives, although I can hear a whistle away in the distance on the line to Wabush and Labrador City.

50 kilometres or so outside Labrador City, we can see that autumn has finally arrived here.

We’re deep in the interior now, and on the north-facign slopes exposed to the arctic conditions, they will be the first to catch the cold air.

Not quite the brilliant colours we are used to, but we are a couple of weeks earlier than usual this year.

Before I had left Happy Valley, my landlord had given me an address for B&B in Labrador City. I phoned her (thanks again, Josée) and she did indeed have a room free.

It took some finding with the roadworks but it was worth the effort. Not only was it the best place where I’ve stayed, it was also, believe it or not, the cheapest. I’ll be coming back here again, that’s for sure.

And hats off to Strider. He struggles on fuel as you know, but since he’s had his overdrive fixed, he seems to be a little better.

So much so that instead of the maximum 420-km distance that he seemed in the past to be able to travel, we’ve just come a mammoth 542.7 kilometres and although he’s below a quarter of a tank, the orange light hasn’t come on.

It is a good road these days – 80kph with the cruise control on all the way – and it’s still not what I would like, but it’s a vast improvement all the same and Strider can be proud of himself.

Tuesday 12th September 2017 – I’M IN GOOSE …

… Bay right now, and this bed-and-breakfast is far too posh for me. Even the spare toilet rolls in the bathroom have little hats on.

But then I shouldn’t even be here. I should have been staying somewhere else but according to mine host here, the guy whom I’m looking for is “out of town” and that’s a huge disappointment.

It means that yet another one of my projects has tombé à l’eau, as they say back home in France.

Last night, I had another disturbed night’s sleep – maybe crashing out for an hour or two in the afternoon yesterday didn’t help. But it took ages to go off to sleep, and I was tossing and turning all night.

But I was on my travels too. Back running my business and it was a Saturday morning, really quiet, and so I wandered away. I ended up at a house ful of people who were visiting someone who was quite ill.People were being let in to see this person two at a time, and there was a lot of noise coming from that room. Eventually it was my turn, and found that the sick person was another former friend of mine. She had a puppy with her – apparently her cat had died. She wasn’t interested in talking much about anything serious – just chatting about nothing. I asked her why her house was surrounded by scaffolding and she gave me a weird look. The other person there said that the house was a wreck and falling down, and this was apparent, although the house wasn’t as bad as the one next door.
Somewhere along the line I was in my bedroom when I noticed a young rat in there. That filled me with dismay.

After breakfast, I set out to tidy up my living accommodation, and that took me longer than i intended too.

And then I had to take it all out and load it into Strider. Luckily I’d tidied him out the other dayso that didn’t take too long.

I could also take a photo of the caravan too. Expensive, but it was the only thing available and I was quite comfortable in there.

And so I went to cash up, and it wasn’t quite as painful as I was expecting. But then again, to do things like this you need to bite the bullet.

It also gave me an opportunity for Strawberry Moose and me to say goodbye to our crew.

Nothing had been too much trouble for them. I was made very welcome and I’ll be delighted to go back and carry out a further exploration.

The road into Cartwright the other day was beautiful and well-worth a photograph. But with it being late afternoon, I had the sun in my eyes to the west.

Not so this morning though. I have the sun at my back and the view is even better.

That’s Main Tickle over there again, I reckon.

Somewhere down there, I reckon, is Muddy Bay where the orphanage was.

It’s impossible, apparently, to go there by road and so we were obliged to go by boat the other day.

But the weather was nothing like as good as it is today and so the photography wasn’t as good as it might have been,
and that was disappointing.

At a certain point the Métis Trail goes over the brown of a hill and just for a brief moment there’s a view in the distance of what I reckon might be Paradise River.

You can see why Cartwright gave it its name, can’t you?

This new zoom lens that I have bought is doing really well and while it’s not as sharp as I like, it’s producing the goods fair enough.

Cartwright wasn’t clearly the only one who considered it to be Paradise.

It looks as if a native Canadian has chosen this spot for his homestead and, honestly, who can blame him?

It’s the kind of place where most of us would like to settle if we have the chance – and I’ll show you my preferred spot in due course.

This is one of the places where we always stop to take a photograph as we drive by – it’s where the Métis Trail rejoins the Labrador Coastal Drive.

It’s the first place where Labrador City appears on the signs – only 813 kilometres away – and it’s only another 500 or so kilometres from there to the North Shore of the St Lawrence and Highway 138.

And I’m not going to be there for a good while yet.

Although this is one of my favourite spots on the Labrador Coastal Drive, this isn’t my ideal place – at least, from a personal point of view.

But with a stretch of 414 kilometres without fuel and any kind of facilities whatsoever, this would be the ideal spot for a couple of fuel pumps, a small motel, a little food shop and coffee bar.

But of course they won’t let me in live permanently in Canada, will they?

Around here on the dirt road the speed limit is 70kph. And although I was doing … err … about 70 kph I was passed by a lorry as if I were standing still.

A few kilometres further on, there he was on the side of the road, receiving the care and attention of the local Highway Enforcement Office, a member of which was busily writing out a ticket.

It’s the first time EVER that I’ve seen Highway Enforcement out here, and if anything is a sign that times, they are a’changing, then this is it.

Somewhere hidden in those trees is another sign of the times – a Highway Labour Camp.

And they need it too because the road – bad when it was new in 2010 – was even worse in 2014, worse still in 2015 and absolutely disgraceful this year.

They can’t let it disintegrate much more than this, surely?

One of the main arguments put forward about the veracity of the Norse sagas of Vinland concerns the cattle.

The Norse are said to have brought cattle with them, and how they had them grazing in the meadows. This is dismissed as fantasy by the critics.

But there certainly are peri-Arctic meadows in this region – dozens of them in fact, and from what I have seen there are more and more of them developing as the forests are cleared, whether by fire or other means.

Another thing that there are plenty of are eskers. These are like sand ridges and stretch for miles.

But they aren’t brought by rivers but by glaciers. The stones caught up in the glaciers rub against each other and are slowly reduced to sand.

When the glaciers recede, the sand is dumped along where the edges of the glaciers would have been, and they are spectacular where roads have been cut through them.

I mentioned earlier where my ideal spot in Labrador would be.

If I could settle here, I would be extremely happy. But also extremely isolated too because it’s miles from anywhere.

Situated at N52° 52′ 30″ and W58° 19’52” in fact.

You can see what I mean about these peri-Arctic meadows. They are all over the place these days.

And assuming that the climate was kinder in the 11th Century – in the middle of the “Medieval Warm” period, there would have been many more too.

Bringing cattle here would not have been any problem whatever, especially if the cattle had been used to life in Greenland.

There’s another enormous work camp here at the side of the road.

We’re currently up on the Eagle Plateau and so it’s called, rather imaginatively, “Eagle Camp”.

I thought at first that it was something to do with Highway maintenance, but closer inspection revealed that it’s all “Valard” – the company that is constructing the electricity transmission cables across Labrador.

Mind you, the highway DOES need attention. It was resurfaced with loose gravel in 2015 and it’s already been ripped to pieces.

At one point I hit a hidden dip, the rear end of Strider lifted off the road and I was going sideways heading for the drop off the verge.

We had an exciting couple of seconds (which seemed like a couple of hours) as I wrestled for control of the vehicle. But we are still here.

I mean – you can see what the labrador Coastal Drive looks like simply by glancing in the rear-view mirror of Strider.

At this point we have loose gravel being thrown about everywhere and clouds – and I do mean clouds – of dust thrown up behind us.

No wonder that you spend so much time fighting for traction if you are thrown off course by the lumps and potholes.

But at least it’s not like the time in the Utah Desert where the trail was so rough that I was travelling slowly and the wind was so strong and in the wrong direction that I had the unnerving experience of being overtaken by my own dust-cloud.

But oh! Wait a minute! Look at this!

When we were here in 2015 we noticed that the asphalting of the highway had started – but had come to a sudden stop with patches of gravel road in between.

But now, the asphalting has extended far beyond where it was back then. There’s the sign telling you to prepare for the gravel road, and there’s the guy cleaning off the edges of the road.

Another 5 years and it will be asphalt all the way.

But despite how good the road might be, there are still challenges to face, such as the incessant climbs and descents.

We’re travelling from south-east to north-west and all of the river valleys around here are going from south-west to north-east.

You can see over there the line on the right – that’s the road back up the other side of this valley. On the left is the track of the Valard cable from Muskrat Falls.

But here is the final descent for now. That’s the valley of the Churchill River, and to the right are the towns of Happy Valley and Goose Bay.

That’s not quite my destination for tonight though – I’m driving on to North-West River where I have things to do.

But I’ll leave you here to admire the beautiful scenery.

But a little further on is the entrance to the controversial Muskrat Falls hydro-electric project.

And opposite is the camp of the protestors. Not quite as big as the Faslane camp, but it’s limited by law, and here all the same.

I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the project, because everyone has his or her own opinion about it, but it’s one of these things where, from my own point of view, the environmental and cultural objections outweigh the profit considerations.

But then again, as I keep on saying, I don’t have to live here

But leaving aside Muskrat Falls for the moment, I clatter across the metal bridge over the Churchill River.

It’s been known by several other names, such as the Grand River (which it certainly is) and the Hamilton River, but it was renamed the “Churchill” upon the death of Sir Winston.

But whatever name it might have, it’s certainly the most famous river in the whole of Labrador,and probably the most important too.

As usual these days, arriving in Happy Valley, I find a different dirt road heading east and follow it all the way that I can.

And on this particular road, I can’t go any further. But it certainly brings me to a spectacular view over Goose bay and the head of the Hamilton Inlet.

It’s very easy to picture the scene as the first European explorers – maybe Louis Fornel the fur trader or maybe John Davis of the Davis Straits – or maybe even the Norse explorers – made landfall here.

But hats off to this guy here at Birch Lane Farm. It’s not everyone who would attempt commercial farming in a place like this.

But he seems to have plenty of crops and a good growth of hay, so it looks as if he can make a good go of it.

It totally undermines the opinions that people have about the “Frozen North” – just as it did when I saw the shipping container marked “Alaskan Agriculture”.

A quick call in to the port here at Terrington Basin in Goose Bay to see who’s about.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a “Ship of the Day” and we strike it lucky here. We have the heavy load carrier Fairlane who left Shanghai on 12th July and came here via the Suez Canal.

That’s a long way to come for any ship and it makes me wonder what it was that she was bringing in.

At North West River we hit a temporary setback. My contact isn’t answering his telephone so that rules out my accommodation and my project for tomorrow, which is a disaster.

Not only that, the B&B in the town is fully-booked up.

The motel has a room, but it requires me to drive all the way back to Goose Bay to pick up the key as the unit here is unstaffed. And the girl at reception is particularly unhelpful.

So badger that for a gale of soldiers. A quick telephone call (thanks, Josée for the ‘phone) conjures up a bed in a B&B in Happy Valley, at a price rather less than the motel. I can do that so I cancel the motel room.

But it’s frightfully posh in here – way out of my league. The spare toilet rolls in the bathroom have hats on.

I’m more used to the kind of place where you can “spit on the deck and call the cat a b@$t@rd” as you know, but beggars can’t be choosers, not by any stretch of the imagination

At least I can use the microwave here, so it’s beans, sausages and spuds for tea. And then an early night.

I’m whacked!

Saturday 9th September 2017 – I AWOKE WITH …

… a start this morning when the alarm went off – to such an extent that reaching out for the telephone I knocked everything onto the floor. And that made more noise than the alarm did.

I can see me being really popular at breakfast later.

But at least it shows you just how comfortable my bed is. That really was a good night.

During the night I’d been on my travels too but don’t ask me where too. Waking up like that, it had all gone completely out of my head … “well, not that there’s much to stop it, is there?” – ed.

For breakfast I sampled the local delights. Partridgeberry jam and cloudberry (bakeapple) jam. Bakeapple jam is apparently the thing out here and people go wild for it, with the berries fetching as much as $80 per gallon due to their scarcity and the very short growing season. But to me, the jam tasted of cheese and I much preferred the partridgeberry jam.

My landlady tells me that she is half M’iqmak on her father’s side and also on her mother’s side too. And that the precious metals prospectors who I met here in 2014 did actually find enough to make exploitation a profitable enterprise, but they can’t raise the capital to start – something that totally surprised me.

After breakfast I did some work on the laptop and then I went off to explore the village.

I’ve been past here on the main road on several occasions as you know, but I’ve only ever stopped for petrol at the garage up on top of the hill.

I’ve never ever taken the time to come off the road and go for a look around.

I was surprised at just how big the town is. There may not be a great number of people living here but it certainly covers a lot of ground.

Down there is the fuel oil store for the harbour and, presumably, the residents.

I hadn’t realised that the harbour was so far out of town – in the opposite direction to the main road.

I drove right the way through the town (and that took a while as I said) and to the quayside.

And at the quayside I fell in with a couple of locals. They told me much of what I needed to know.

Most importantly, this is indeed the quayside where the coastal boats used to tie up and also where the commercial boats used to tie up.

And coastal boats-a-plenty used to come here in the olden days.

Port Hope Simpson is a comparatively modern town and, surprisingly, it wasn’t due to the Resettlement programme but for commercial considerations.

Just like many towns that we have visited in Quebec in the past, Port Hope Simpson was founded as a lumber town, with the aim of exploiting the natural resources of the area.

A survey in the 1930s revealed that the area had a huge potential for the exploitation of timber products.

A really impressive deep, natural harbour was an added bonus and so a small town was created to house the workers who came to exploit the forest.

Unfortunately, the timber exploitation did not last as long as it might have done. By 1968 Bowaters had gone but in 1956 the first of the resettlers had arrived

They had come from the community of Kerry Cove which was abandoned. And other resettlers followed on subsequently from other isolated communities.

Port Hope Simpson is situated on the Alexis River, and it’s certainly one of the most beautiful places to be in the whole of southern Labrador.

And that’s saying something because there are many beautiful places around here as you know. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having visited plenty of them with me in the past

And I might be lucky with the weather too – the sun is doing its best to peek out from behind the clouds. We might even have a nice day.

Lucky with the weather we might be – but lucky with the roads – well, I’ll let you decide that. It all depends upon which side of the fence you are sitting.

But you’ll notice that a great deal of work seems to be going on right now on the highway and there are work crews about in many places.

In five years time travelling this road will be a completely different prospect, and I can’t help thinking that this will be a bad idea, although of course this is written from the point of view of someone who doesn’t have to battle with the natural environment 365 days per year.

There’s a quarry a little further up the road and they are digging out loads of rock.

And so they have a whole fleet of these huge dump trucks fetching the rocks down to the stone crusher.

Why they can’t move the stone crusher to the quarry is something that bewilders me. That would make far more sense, for the stone would only have to be moved by road once.

So here we are again, at the time-zone changing point.

I can understand why Newfoundland would have a time zone all of its own (but not one of 3 hours and 30 minutes) but I could never understand why only part of the mainland – and a small part of that – followed Newfoundland time and not Atlantic time.

That was how come I had MY FERRY ISSUES IN 2010 – because I hadn’t realised this.

Mind you – in a couple of years time there will be a sign up at Dover “You are entering the United Kingdom. Adjust your clock by subtracting 150 years”.

After a while we cross the Paradise River Eastern Arm – something which implies that there’s a western arm somewhere.

I would have expected it to have been flowing towards the sea, which is to the east, but in fact it’s flowing to the west i.e. inland, and that’s something that causes more than a little confusion.

I suppose that it goes in a great big loop round inland and then doubles back on itself and into Sandwich Bay.

After lunch, which I take at the Transport Department’s snowplough store and where I’m attacked by a swarm of blackfly, I turn off onto the Metis Trail and Cartwright.

There’s a few things that I need to do at Paradise River, and then I’m going to Cartwright.

I’ve not been to Cartwright since MY JOURNEY IN 2010 my journey in 2010 and I have an outstanding project to attend to there too, about which you’ll discover as you read on.

When the sun comes out from behind a cloud the view is really nice here.

It’s not quite lighting up the mountains as much as I would like or as much as we have seen in the past, but that can’t be helped I suppose. It’s still beautiful.

And I’m lucky that I made it here at all given my health issues.

According to a Pilots’ Handbook that I downloaded from the internet (and I make no apologies for the spelling) –

“There is important and usefull airport in Paradise River. It is important for people and goverment of Canada.
Paradise River Aerodrome is the most important airport of Paradise River, Newfoundland And Labrador, Canada.
It is modern and one of the largest airport of the North America. Paradise River Aerodrome is important for people and goverment of Canada.”

What more can anyone say?

Happy landing

Down to our usual spot right at the end of the road to see what’s happening.

According to legend, the entrepreneur George Cartwright was one of the first Europeans to come here and when he arrived, on 27th June 1775, he was so captivated by its beauty that he gave it its name.

And you can understand that, can’t you?

Paradise River was one of the largest settlements in this area, and certainly the largest in Sandwich Bay, but it was devastated by the Spanish Influenza outbreak of November 1918.

The Reverend Gordon, minister at Cartwright, wrote in 1918 that “Paradise (River), once the largest settlement in the Bay, is a veritable city of the dead”

Today, just a handful of families cling on, although there are several summer fishing cabins.

One of the reasons for visiting the place again was to look for the cemetery to see the victims of the Influenza epidemic and to see if anyone from the 1945 census was in here

The cemetery took some finding and I had to rely on a very vocal local yokel to point me in the right direction.

Here lie Maud and Robert Mesher (Mesher is one of the “big” names of this region) who, according to the census, had 6 children in 1945.

The cemetery, despite being really overgrown and quasi-abandoned, is quite modern. And despite a great amount of searching I couldn’t find an older one.

Subsequent enquiries revealed that it’s across on the other side of the river and there’s no way of crossing if you don’t happen to have a boat handy.

Next stop – in fact the end of the road – is the town of Cartwright. And while I was taking this photograph, a funny thing happened.

Malcolm the Mountie and a friend pulled up alongside me.
“Have you come from the Highway?”
“As a matter of fact I have”
“Did you see anyone walking along the road just now?”
As it happened, I did, and so the Mountie asked me to describe him – and so I did.
The Mountie broke out into a big, beaming smile, shook my hand (he really did, too!), leapt back into his pickup (I was rather disappointed that he didn’t have a komatic) and shot off down the road towards the highway.

Cartwright is looking sadder and more derelict than I remembered, which is a shame, and I noticed something straight away as I entered town that filled me with foreboding – the big hotel has gone, and the petrol station opposite has closed down.

Like most things in Canada, the hotel has been the victim of a fire – in 2011 so I was told, and the petrol station, run by the same owners, closed down when the owners moved away.

There’s another motel in town right on the docks – where I stayed last time that I was here – but doors wide open, stuff lying around, and as deserted as the Marie Celeste. The girl in the supermarket tracked down the owner and told me to go back and wait.

Eventually, after quite a while, she turned up. But she needn’t have bothered. She could have told the girl on the telephone that the motel was fully-booked. And with Cartwright now being abandoned and off the beaten track since the new road has been built, there’s no-one else in town offering accommodation.

So that was me snookered.

But not quite.

There’s a place across the bay that does these tailor-made adventure tours and they have some kind of accommodation over there. This is, would you believe, the place that I’m looking for anyway and so I went hot-foot over there.

So now I’m installed at an astonishing price in a caravan on the site of this adventure tour place, across the bay from the town.

It’s dark outside and rhe view across the bay to the town is quite spectacular.

As for me, I eating baked potatoes, beans and vegan sausages (at least the kitchen is worth something) and tomorrow I might have some good news, depending on the weather.

Right now though, I’m off to bed.

Friday 8th September 2017 – I HAD A …

…disturbed night last night – hardly surprising seeing as I knew that I needed to be up early.

But that didn’t stop me from going on my travels during the night, such as they were.

I was playing in a rock group and to be honest we weren’t much good – but what worked for us was that we were backing a Bruce Forsyth-kind of character who knew how to entertain the crowds and keep them in suspense as long as possible – hiding in the wings until the climax of the musical accompaniment and then sending on the cleaner or someone like that.

But by 05:30 I had made a conscious decision to rouse myself, pack, and eat my breakfast. Especially the last bit, seeing as it was included. Toast, cornflakes (with my own soya milk) orange juice and, eventually, once I had figured out the machine, coffee.

And much to my surprise I had a phone call. WhatsApp clearly works because Ingrid phoned me for a brief chat and it was nice to hear her voice.

It was only 15 minutes to the ferry terminal and I was second in the queue. So I was soon paid up and down on the quayside.

Apollo came in and, poor thing, she’s looking even sadder an older than she did last time that I was aboard.

47 years old she is now. Surely she can’t go on much longer. But there are no plans to replace her and with the Sir Robert Bond having been sold for scrap, she has to keep going regardless now.

There is, apparently, a type of fish called an “Arctic Char” but I’m imagining a kind of fish dressed in a fur coat that comes round to clean your cabin.

You can still see the signs on the ship written in Finnish and Estonian in the passenger compartment.

This shows you how long it is since Apollo has had a full refit. Even the power sockets are old European 230-volt.

The high winds meant that it was quite a rough crossing – the roughest that I have ever experienced on the Straits of Belle Isle – with the odd crash and bang as we collided with an iceberg or a walrus.

But that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But there was one guy who was leaning over the rail.
“The trouble with you” I said “is that you have a weak stomach”.
“Rubbish” he retorted. “I’m throwing it as far as everyone else”.

And there’s a young girl on board who is the spitting image of an 11 year old Ginny Weasley starting Hogwarts. I had to look twice to make sure. She and her family were off to “Labby”, which is Labrador City apparently.

I was actually second off the boast when we arrived, which is something of a record.

I made a prominent note of that

But the weather was foul when we arrived. High gusting winds, a typical Labrador mist and it was doing its best to rain down upon us but somehow holding off for the moment.

Not as bad as 2014 but not far off.

As you know, I’ve been to Blanc Sablon on many occasions, but for some reason I’ve never taken any photos of the town.

Last year I’d made out a list of things to do next time I was here, and photographing the place was high on the list.

And so I parked up Strider and went for a little stroll around the town

The area was given its name by Jacques Cartier when he came here on one of his voyages of discovery in the 1530s.

No-one is certain though as to whether it refers to the “Blanc Sablon” which is near his home port of St Malo (just across the bay from where I live) or whether it really dos refer to the white sands that are found here.

And the bay here is another possible site for the elusive “Vinland” of the Norse voyagers.

Regular readersof this rubbis will recall that the area is quite controversial too.

It’s actually in the Province of Quebec but an isoltaed part that is cut off from the rest of the Province, and is known by locals as “the Forgotten Coast”.

They claim that because it’s English-speaking here and so isolated, they are (deliberately) starved of resources, and there is a movement afoot to secede from Quebec and join up with Labrador.

We have to have the obligatory photograph to say that we have arrived, don’t we?

I joined the queue, because it seems to be an obligatory thing these days to take your photograph here, rather like the place that we visited in Monument Valley in 2002.

Strider is of course very photogenic as you might expect. Strawberry Moose would have gone out too but the weather was atrocious and you wouldn’t put a dog out in this, never mind a moose.

Another thing on my “to do” list was to sort out the confusion over the churches in Forteau. And so I went in search of the aforementioned.

There were two that I discovered, and this is the Forteau United Church. I did not, however, discover the Forteau City Church. That must be somewhere else completely.

I must make further enquiries.

Before they started to build the coastal road network in the 1950s, access between the villages was by coastal path.

Nothing had changed here for 200 years since the early settlers and merchants had arrived in the 1740s.

This is the coastal path between Forteau and l’Anse au Clair – the next town to the south. It’s closed these days though because of erosion and landslips.

Way over there in the distance across Forteau Bay (thanks to the telephoto lens and a little digital enhancement) is the lighthouse at Point Amour.

We were there, as you may remember, on our travels in October 2010 when we went to inspect the shipwrecks.

There are the remains of two Royal Navy ships out there – the HMS Lily which ran aground in the 1870s and the HMS Raleigh which ran aground in the early 1920s.

Quite a lot of other ships have come to grief there two, including two in one day in 1941.

Forteau actualy consists today of two separate villages in the past.

Here is the site of Buckle’s Point. It’s on the South Side of the river and it’s where the Channel Islanders under de Quetteville settled.

Today though, the modern village has settled a little further round the bay to the south.

The English settled on the north side of the river andtheir settlement was rather imaginatively called “English Point”.

Today, though, it’s more like the suburbs of Forteau because all of the commercial activity takes place on the south side of the river

Very few people actually stop here and the area is quite often overlooked, just as I am doing right now.

We’ve talked … “at great length” – ed … about the Muskrat Falls and the distribution system that takes the generated current under the Strait of Belle Isle.

When I was looking into it, I noticed that Valard – the company that is doing all of the work – had applied for planning permission to build a quay at the site of their subterranean cable in order to offload their own materials.

And so I went in search of the aforementioned – and although I was locked out of the site, with a little judicious manipulation I was able tohave a butcher’s.

But it doesn’t look big enough to be an alternative landing stage for Apollo if Quebec bans the company from the port at Blanc Sablon.

The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador has a history of grand projects that somehow never seem to come to fruition even though a great deal of money is thrown at them

.Here at Capstan Island a great deal of noise was made about a farm and greenhouses that had been installed on the edge of townand it was even listed as a tourism site where people could come to visit.

Today though, it would be a waste of time to visit because it’s all closed down and abandoned. Part of it has collapsed and all of the roofs have gone.

And as a visitor venue – it’s “closed to visits”.

So much for that then;

When I came here in 2010 I told you that a section of the road that followed the Pinware River was one of the most beautiful that I had driven.

In 2014 however, I noticed that they had by-passed the road with a modern highway over the mountains and that this section had been abandoned.

And so I decided that I would do my best to follow the road round today and see how it was doing and to show you what you have missed.

“This Highway is no longer maintained by the Department of Transport. You drive this road at your own risk” said a notice.

And they were right too. Part of the road has been washed out and it was something of a struggle to findmy way around the obstructions.

But this is why I bought Strider, and quite right too. He made short work of this stretch of highway as long as we took it easy.

And it was well-worth it too.

After the recent rainstorms the Pinware River was in spate and the famous rapids were really impressive today.

The noise was deafening and so I took a little video of it from closer in. When I find a decent internet connection I’ll upload it.

I mentioned the new road just now.

Once I rejoined the main road I took a photo of the new route up over the top of the hills.

I remember watching a large artic struggle up there in first gear back in 2014 and remember wondering what was going through the minds of the planners when they re-routed heavy vehicles up there.

This mountain pass isquite significant because once we pass through it and out the other side, we are at the coast.

Red Bay and its famous 16th-Century Basque whaling station is just the other side.

But for some reason this path always reminds me of somewhere in Scotland and I can’t remember where it is.

First thing to do at Red Bay is of course to go and check to see how the MV Bernieris getting on.

She was delivering coal here one November in the 1930s when she broke free from her moorings during a storm and was driven across the bay onto the rocks of Saddle Island.

And here she sits today, looking sadder and sadder as more and more weather takes its toll.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that Red Bay has an exciting claim to fame.

A student was researching the history of Basque whaling in North America when she came across a whole pile of legal documents from the 16th Century relating to a dispute between a whaling captain and his financial backer over the loss of a couple of whaling ships.

The losses were described in such detail that she reckoned that it would be possible to identify the site of the whaling station from aerial photography.

Accordingly, she pored over thousands of photographs and maps, until she came across one covering Red Bay – and then the light went on.

She came over here to do fieldwork and found, in the spot where she reckoned one of the buildings to be, some red roofing tiles of a type unknown in North America but quite common in 16th Century Northern Spain.

She even rediscovered the cemetery where several sailors and other workers had been buried.

But the best was yet to come;

The story told how one of the ships had been gripped by a sudden storm in November, driven across the bay and wrecked on Saddle Island;

This sounded so much like the story of the Bernier that she went and looked where the Bernierhad come to rest. And sure enough – the Bernier was sitting on top of a 16th Century Basque whaling vessel.

All in all, several Basque ships were lost in the Bay and most have been identified.

Furthermore, they even discovered a Basque rowing boat that had sunk at the shore and because of the cold peaty water that was still in a surprisingly good condition.

That has been recovered and is on display in the museum here.

The road north from Red Bay is in my opinion one of the worst sections of the Trans-Labrador Highway – and that’s saying something.

It wasn’t opened until 1992 – prior to that, access was only by ship – and it looked at one time as if the road had never ever been maintained since the day that it was built.

But it won’t be like that for much longer because they are making headway with the road improvements that they had started in 2014 are well advanced.

And so our drive north is punctuated by sights such as these.

Diggers and graders, and lorry-loads of gravel being brought to the site.

And compactors too. We mustn’t forget tham. When I was on the Trans-Labrador Highway in 2010 I saw a grand total of two. There were two compactors working on this little stretch of highway.

But it’s not all like that. There are sections of the Labrador Coastal Drive that bring back many happy memories. So much so that on two occasions I had Strider going sideways.

He’s rear-wheel drive and relatively lightly-loaded and so the rear end hops around everywhere. So hit a bump or a pothole at the wrong angle and off you go, and you have to struggle to regain control.

I bet that the driver of the car coming towards me on one occasion had to stop and change his underwear;

But just look at this!

This is why they are carrying out all of the groundwork here. The aim is to asphalt all of the highway from Red Bay to Goose Bay. Such are the “benefits” that the Muskrat Falls and the power of Valard Construction have brought to the Coasts of Labrador.

And before anyone says anything, I do realise that i’m a tourist looking at things from my own perspective. I don’t have to live here in the depths of winter.

After acouple of mileswe have the double-tracked asphalt and I can set the cruise control accordingly.

But we can also see that they are realigning the road. Where the road runs through a cutting, it’s often impassible in winter because the snow drifts in and packs tight. It becomes a real engineering job to move it.

Going over the top means that the snow will be loose and blowy, and thus easier to move with a snowplough.

We don’t stay on the asphalt for long though. We’re soon back in the gravel.

And I’m soon driving over Lodge Bay too. I’ve been past here several times as you know but for some reason or other i’ve never ever stopped to take a photograph of the place.

Not that there’s too much to see of course, because it’s only a small place. In fact, had it not been on the direct route of the Labrador Coastal Drive, it’s likely that it too would have fallen victim to the Province’s resettlement programme.

But this is what you are faced with around here. In severe weather they simply close the road and that’s that.

If you are a traveller and are confronted with the closed gate, you simply park up, build yourself an igloo and go off hunting seal until the Spring.

After all, if you are the kind of person who is in a hurry, you shouldn’t be out around here in Labrador anyway. It’s not for the type of person who has a timetable or an agenda.

Another place that was high on my list of places to visit was Mary’s Harbour.

I’d been here before in 2010 but had been sidetracked by the fact that I had forgotten the change of time zone just up the road so I had lost half an hour.

Not a good plan when you have a ferry to catch and plenty of other things to do, so I couldn’t hang around too much.

Mary’s Harbour is another one of these “resettlement points” but its history goes back much farther than Joey Smallwood.

Outside just off the coast is the island of Battle Harbour and at one time this was the most important place on the whole of the Labrador coast.

However, almost 90 years ago, like most places in Canada, Battle Harbour was the victim of fire, and almost everything on the island was destroyed.

Seeing which way the wind was likely to blow in the future (which comes as quite a surprise to most people) it was decided to abandon the island and settle somewhere else, but on the mainland close by.

Mary’s Harbour seemed like the ideal place to be, seeing as it was close by, had a deep natural harbour that stretched a good way inland and was thus sheltered from the bad weather.

And over the course of time, the inhabitants of many other coastal communities have been resettled here, often quite controversially.

But then, this is not the place to discuss the Resettlement Policy. We’ll be doing enough of that when we arrive in North West River.

Abandoning a good rant before we even start, I make tracks northwards. I’m heading for Port Hope Simpson where I hope to be able to find a bed for the night.

And sure enough, I do. Campbell’s Place is home to home-made bread, home made jams from local ingredients and,like everywhere else in the town, home to the slowest internet connection on the planet.

But there’s a single room at what passes these days for a resonable price, and the bed seems quite comfortable too. First thing is to plug in the slow cooker while I have a shower and wash my undies.

Tea is pasta, mushrooms and vegetable soup, and aren’t I glad that I spent this $14:00 on the slow cooker? Yes, i’ve just seen the prices of the takeaway food.

No internet worth talking about of course, and so I can crack on with the … good grief! … 127 photographs that I took today.

And then a lie down while I listen to the Navy Lark on the radio – and promptly fall asleep. It’s been a long day today.

and I’ve just written a new record of 3027 words too – so there!

Wednesday 30th September 2015 – DRIVING THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY …

… is not for everyone, that’s for sure. We mentioned yesterday, strangely enough and by pure coincidence, the subject of road accidents along the highway and the subject of lorries driven carelessly cropped up in the conversation.

Now of course I have no evidence and make no suggestion that this lorry was being driven carelessly but this is what can happen when it all goes horribly wrong. You’ll notice the route sinueuse sign of course – the road is like this for about 15 kilometres – and this is suggestive

We’ve seen some pretty good stretches of the highway of course, but there are also some sections that are thoroughly dreadful. This section is about 40 miles of mud. When the weather is really dry, like today, it’s a pile of dust after dust after dust.

But I’ve been here in the wet winter weather too, and it’s nothing but a sea of mud up to the axles. You mustn’t stop moving forward because if you were to stop, you wouldn’t be able to set off again.

This is what you need to contend with up here.

But let’s go back to last night.

And it was bound to happen. After several nights of really good sleep I had a nuit blanche last night. Mind you, I must have gone to sleep at some time because I was off on my travels again. I was driving a bus with passengers and I needed to leave the bus urgently at a certain moment. However, one of the passengers, who bore a very strong resemblance to Didier from FC Pionsat St Hilaire was having an attack of catalepsy right at the top of the stairs and I couldn’t go past him.

But what with a howling wolf that started up at about midnight, followed by a searing attack of cramp in my leg that went on for hours, and then some other species of sub-arctic mammal trying to claw its way into the back of Strider to, presumably, cuddle up next to me in bed, all of that put paid to any idea that I had of having a decent comfortable sleep.

And it was cold too. All of Strider was iced up outside and inside (although not on the roof – there’s no condensation on there again so this insulation idea is working in spades).

I wasn’t uncomfortably cold like this but what was uncomfortable was that the little butane gas cylinders had frozen up. I had to roll one round and round in my hands for 20 minutes before it was warm enough to light up and I could have a very welcome coffee

The weather wasn’t very good at first though. Just to prove that hanging clouds are not a phenomenon unique to the Auvergne, here’s a fine example in Northern Quebec.

You can’t see anything very much and vehicles here don’t have rear fog lights and so you can’t tell that they are there until they come looming up out of the gloom like this one. But luckily it didn’t last too long and we could put our feet down.

I stopped for a really long while in Gagnon.

We’ve been here a few times before and so most of you will know that it’s a ghost town. There’s a huge iron ore mine up here and the purpose of the town was to house the workers. The mine was exhausted and so the people moved away and the houses dismantled.

There’s almost nothing (read on, MacDuff!) here now to remind you that at one time it was a thriving metropolis but it’s interesting to drive around some of the old abandoned streets even though the forest has reclaimed it all.

And this is one of the reasons why I bought Strider – so that we could go for a wander off around roads like this without any worries about what hire companies might have to say about it.

There’s only one thing more sad than an abandoned and deserted ghost town, and that’s an abandoned and deserted cemetery in an abandoned and deserted ghost town.

If you read anything that has ever been written about the town, you’ll note that every single author writes that the only remains in the town are the drops on the kerbs of the pavements in the main street, where the houses used to be, and the airstrip that we have all seen before.

But that’s because one person drove through here without stopping and without going for a good prowl around, and wrote down what he observed in a brief moment, and everyone else (many of whom haven’t even been to the place) who have written about the place have repeated his comments parrot-fashion.

There is not (to date) a single mention of the cemetery. It’s being totally ignored and as far as I can tell, I’m the first person ever to photograph it and write about it.

The cemetery is in two parts. There’s the actual cemetery proper, and then these graves, on the northern side of the cemetery.

Not one of these wooden crosses (there are one or two proper headstones in here) bears a name but interestingly, the angels on them seem to have at one time been coloured either blue or pink – perhaps to indicate male or female graves

There’s a panel with a series of grave plaques showing who is in here and when they died. It seems that the cemetery (and probably the town) was in operation between 1961 and 1982

Many of the people interred here have their given names listed as anonyme. This implies to me at least that these people are young children who have died before being christened – hence the unidentified crosses in what might be unconsecrated ground and also the blue and pink angels.

An exhausted and abandoned iron ore mine, I said. I’d had brief look at it before but with Strider, I could boldly go where no man has gone before for probably 30 years – good old Strider.

To give you an idea of scale, that little track right down there is wide enough for two vehicles to pass and we’ve driven all the way along from there, past the gigantic mine holes and the mile after mile of mine tailings to perch upon this rocky crag

Right down there in the distance (zoom lenses are good) is an abandoned Chevrolet pickup and a pile of industrial wheels and tyres, but there aren’t very many physical relics of the mine left.

The Chevrolet is more modern than that but I have included it in here to give you an idea of the scale of everything, because the site of the mine is immense. It covers quite a few square miles of ground.

You can’t see it clearly in this photo but there is a reason why the rock in the centre of this photo is important.

Before I came here, I wouldn’t have known a piece of iron ore from any other piece of rock but there is no mistaking this one. In the bright sunlight it was glistening and sparkling and was visible from quite a distance away.

In fact, the whole area was glistening and sparkling where the crushed stone had released grains of iron. It didn’t occur to me at the time to pass over here with a magnet and to see what might happen.

While you admire (if that is the right word to use) the only real vestige that remains of the giant mine workings that were here, let me just conclude my story of the iron ore mine by saying that it’s just nothing but a huge environmental disaster.

The rape of the countryside here has been encouraged by the Canadian Government due to it being “out of sight, out of mind”. No-one (except intrepid, adventurous … "and self-effacing" – ed … explorers and so most people are totally unaware of what is happening in the darkest depths of their country.

There’s been no attempt been made to clean up the site and restore it to its previous condition. It’s been left as a huge open wound – a symbol of man’s greed. I shudder to think what might happen up in the high Arctic, which is even more inaccessible to people like me.

If the Canadian Government can’t make the big companies clean up their act here, then there is no hope at all for the High Arctic, is there? It’s shameful.

And it’s not just that either.

Look at those graves. These are, presumably, children. But they have no names, no plaques, no nothing. But they do have parents. Why don’t the parents look after their babies, long-dead though they might be? The cemetery is abandoned too and so are its inmates.

People are even prepared to forget their “loved” ones and leave them lying cold and stiff in this inhospitable environment as they move on elsewhere in the search for material wealth.

This just sums up modern Canada if you ask me. They should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Leaving behind yet another really good rant, we head off to Lake Manicouagan and our lunch stop.

This is a beautiful place to stop and the view is really astonishing, but I didn’t have much time to enjoy it. I was eating my lunch and reading a good book and the next thing that I remember, it was 14:41.

Yes, crashed out again, and it’s hardly surprising seeing what a night that I had had last night.

I went on down the road to the Refuge des Prospecteurs after my little doze.

This is the nearest thing that you will find out here to a holiday camp. There are chalets (this is a photo of just part of it) and activities going on here. Walking trails, sailing, fishing and all that kind of thing. I reckon that it must be a great place to come and spend a relaxing week and I shall be looking to check it out some time or other.

I’m more interested in the lake, though. Lake Manicouagan is an artificial lake formed by the barrage of the hydro-electric dam at Manic 5. It’s a circular lake with several big islands in the centre, some of which are nature reserves and strictly out of bounds to visitors.

What is really interesting is that the depression that is now the lake is said to be a crater formed by the impact many thousands of years ago of a meteorite, and that must have been something really impressive. It makes me wonder about all of the iron ore around here – is this part of the fall-out from the meteorite?

Back on the road again in the beautiful weather and the lovely autumn colours, and the roadworks are still continuing.

They are currently demolishing an overhanging rock using a hydraulic breaker, and as I drove past, a huge lump fell off it and bounced across the road right in front of me. I almost ended up with a new vehicle out of this.

I stopped at Vallant for another coffee. This was formerly a ghost town but has dramatically sprung back to life just recently. Two years ago in fact, according to the woman who served me. Everything was abandoned but the fuel station is back up and working, so is the cafe and shop, and there are these residential trailers everywhere.

There are a few major construction projects going on in the vicinity and even though it’s not exactly central, Vallant seemed to be the best place to create a workers’ village seeing as all of the infrastructure was already in place

As the evening wore on, I arrived in Baie Comeau and my journey around the wilderness is finished. As is customary, I found a motel here (but not the one I always used to use – we had a disagreement) and while it’s basic, so is the price. But I need a good wash, a shower, a change of clothes and to sort out everything – and for all of that I need the space.

In 2 weeks time I’ll be going home. I’m amazed how quickly time has gone, and I’m rather sad about that. But apart from my night at North-West River (and that was for special circumstances), I’ve fulfilled my ambition of spending every night on the Trans-Labrador Highway sleeping out in the wilderness. It wasn’t too difficult either, although insulation and a ply lining on the truck cap would have helped and a small electric heater of some kind would have been luxury – I’m sure that I could invent something out of s100 watts of halogen light bulbs.

In fact, I’ll do it again too, but I do need to sort out the truck cap.

-2

Tuesday 29th September 2015 – THAT WAS A NICE …

… night too. despite the rainstorm that we had, and despite having to leave my stinking pit twice due to reasons that any man of my age will know, and despite me having a neighbour arrive at some point, I was really comfortable in my little bed. So much so that I was awake and out of the bed long before the alarm went off.

And it was warm (well, comparatively warm), to such an extent that I stood outside Strider, lowered down the tailgate and made myself a coffee in the open air. And it was here that I engaged my neighbour in conversation.

He and his wife were from Newfoundland and had a 1999 Chevy pick-up with a camper back. They’d come round from Baie Comeau and were telling me about the road. We discussed fuel consumption too, and he dismayed me by saying that he could do from Goose Bay to Blanc Sablon on just one tank of fuel. Mind you, it cheered me up to a certain degree when he said that he had a 135-litre tank. That compares to Strider’s 70 litres or something. And how I wish I had that size of fuel tank. But of course I will settle for an improved fuel consumption.

He knows the area here quite well and he drew my attention to the structure under which Strider was parked.

According to him, these are the remains of a cable car. Before the highway – and the bridge – were built, they still needed to pass stuff over the river to whatever settlement was over on the other side and to start the construction of the plant and cabins that formed the basis of the town of Churchill Falls.

if what he says is true, then it can’t be true about the cable car at North West River being the only one in Labrador. But we shall see what they mean by all of this.

Another thing that he knew was the footpath that led to the best view possible of the falls, although it’s not possible to see the falls in all their glory – the best views are just inaccessible.

It’s quite a hike, although not a difficult one, but it’s well-worth the effort. I was pleased to reach the end pf the path because there’s a splendid view of the gorge itself from there. I’ve never seen a view quite like this – the Grand Canyon excepted, of course Apparently, I’m 240 feet up just here, according to the Neighbour from Newfoundland.

He was right about the view of the falls not being spectacular. The falls themselves are spectacular, of course, but you just can’t reach the immediate vicinity of them, or found a spec directly opposite to take a good photo.

In any case, the falls themselves aren’t anything like as spectacular as they used to be. They really were impressive back years ago but the river was diverted to provided the drop for the hydro-electric power plant and so only a small fraction of the water falls over the waterfalls today.

My neighbour also told me of a crashed vehicle that was lying on its roof further on down the road.

And so I kept my eyes peeled, and I found this one here. It’s not on its roof of course but it hasn’t half been knocked about. This gives you yet another clue about the state of the road around here. As for the yellow tape that’s around it, that’s Police marking tape. It shows that the Police have inspected the vehicle, and that it’s sealed off to warn people not to enter.

But it’s not by any means the state of the road that’s responsible for may of the accidents – it’s the state of the drivers.

The speed limit along the Trans-Labrador Highway is 80 kph and I have the speed limiter on Strider set at just 80 kph. But everything on the Highway is going past me like I’m standing still, including these two lorries. And these aren’t just simple artics either, these are two of those road-trains pulling two trailers and these road trains are notoriously unstable at the best of times on the best of roads.

And talking of unusual loads on the road (although road trains aren’t by any means unusual) how about this one? We started off with a police car in front flagging down the traffic and telling us to move right off the edge of the road. And then this came along.

This is some kind of huge electrical unit, and it has two lorries in charge of it. There’s one pulling it, and the one behind it is pushing it along. The purpose of the pick-up in front is to clear the road because with the configuration that this unit has, it can’t even take a bend like this and keep on its own side of the road. It took up most of the road.

I’ve been noticing, as I’m sure that I have already told you, that there’s some kind of urbanisation taking place along the Trans-Labrador Highway. This is the lake that we’ve all seen before, about 40 kms out of Labrador City, when we came by here on previous occasions.

There was a cottage there previously, but now we seem to have a couple of other cottage down by the lakeshore. And this is the kind of place where I would like to live, with this really gorgeous backdrop and a really beaautiful view of the lake in front.

Last year when we were in Wabush, we heard all kinds of sories about the iron ore mine closing down and how people were going to desert the town in droves.

I made a diversion into the town to see what was going on in here, and as you can see, the buildings of the iron ore mine are still there standing. And furthermore, I didn’t see anything that suggested to me that people were deserting in droves. There were no more houses up for sale or to let than you would expect to see anywhere else.

But of course, that’s not to say that things won’t be different in another year’s time.

I stopped off at Tim Horton’s for the internet and a coffee, and then I went on to Fermont, in Quebec, for fuel as it’s the last station before the Northern Quebec wilderness.

I also went to look in the “boomerang”. We saw a photo of it last year – it’s the big, high, long building that has a huge shopping gallery on the ground floor and a pile of apartments up above. I’ve never been in there before (except to sound out the hotel in 2010) and so I was curious to see what it was like.

It’s certainly a labyrinth on the ground floor, but what surprised me was that a good proportion – probably 30% or 40% – of the shops were closed down and empty. At least the Co-op food store was open, which is more than can be said for the one in Labrador City which seems to have closed down since last year.

The road out of Fermont into the Wilderness goes past Mont Wright and the Arcelor Mittal iron mine, what is said to be the largest iron ore mine in the world, and it’s the reason for the town of Fermont being built – to house the workers. Mont Wright was once a mountain, but so much iron ore has been extracted that it’s fast becoming a hole in the ground.

The mine tailings stretch for miles, and from here up on a ridge at the back you can see some of the workings. And I do mean “some” because they also stretch for miles. It’s really impressive from that point of view, but we saw last year what has happened at Gagnon, another huge iron ore mine. When that was exhausted, it was simply abandoned and is now an environmental disaster.

And now, from the beautiful morning that we had today, we have now descended into a dreadful and miserably wet evening up here.

We’re having wind, fog and squalls of rain and although you can’t see it, we are back on the dirt road. And a miserable wet and muddy dirt road it is too, with very little sign (if anything) of any improvement to match the major work that has taken place on the Labrador side of the border.

I’ve found a place to park for tonight. It’s in a lay-by and I’ve dug myself in in behind one of the emergency telephones, with a lorry to keep me company through the night – although he didn’t stay for long.

And the weather seems at last to be improving. There’s a beautiful red sky right now, and so that might promise well for the morning (at least I hope so) but it’s cold, so I’m going to snuggle myself down in my sleeping bag and keep warm like that.

-3

Monday 28th September 2015 – WHAT A GOOD NIGHT …

… that was last night in Wood Cottage. I had had a good shower and shave, done a machine-load of washing, had a nice tea (rice and vegetables seasoned with a packet of dried onion soup), spent some time on the internet, and then flat-out upstairs in a nice heated bedroom.

And you can tell how good a sleep I had had, for I was on my travels again. I’d been playing for a Welsh Premier League football team in a European competition and we were so unprepared that we had been playing for just 18 minutes and we were already 3-0 down. And then there was a call on the public address system for the stadium electrician, and so Terry had to leave the field to go to deal with the issue and so we were down to 10 men already.

But that did bring back memories of a match at Pionsat. We were in mid-game and the siren at the fire station sounded, so two of the players ran from the field (they were volunteer firemen) and went down to the station. And they came back later when the emergency was over and rejoined the game.

And while you admire the view of the Innu community’s settlement at Sheshatshiu across the river, let me tell you about the internet here at North West River.

North West River is a small settlement, the farthest north that it is possible to go by road in Labrador (and then only since about 1982), and across the river is a First Nation settlement. An outpost of civilisation it most certainly is, and yet the internet speed here is a good ten (and I do mean 10) times faster than the speed that I have at home.

I said that North West River has only been connected to the national highway system since about 1982 when the road bridge was built. Prior to that, we had the coastal boat that called here once a week.

But North West River is actually on the north side of the river, and civilisation (in the name of Goose Bay and Happy Valley) is on the south. To cross the river to civilisation, you had your canoe in the summer and your ice-skates in winter but in the very early 1960s a cable-car from the UK was installed here and this was luxury!

When the bridge was opened, the chair lift became redundant. The town bought it for the symbolic dollar and it’s here on display on the site from which it used to operate.

The site is next-door to the Labrador Heritage Museum, and that’s my next port of call.

The museum is situated in the old Hudsons Bay Trading Post and part of the exhibition is a fully-restored store inside, complete with many period products. The museum is officially closed as it’s now out of season but I’ve managed to blag my way in for a private tour. It wasn’t the Trading Post that interested me (although it did) but there was quite an exhibition about the boats that plied the coast here but also a big exhibition of artefacts from the Leonidas Hubbard and Mina Hubbard expeditions, including photos that Dillon Wallace had taken on his travels with Leonidas.

And I was right about the Labrador flag. The blue is the sea, the green is the forest and the white is the snow.

I spent a good couple of hours in the museum and then I went off for another wander around the town.

I’d noticed on an old map that I had seen that by the side of the dirt track out to the north, there was an airstrip indicated. It’s no longer used since the town has a road connection with the airport at Goose Bay, but I still thought it might be an interesting thing to try to find.

And here we are. This is the airstrip – now built-on in places and with some light industry in what I imagine would have been the airstrip building

That wasn’t all the excitement out here either.

I’d seen some people way out in the distance looking as if they were working in a field, and so I walked right over there to talk to them. They are indeed working in the field, pulling up their crop of potatoes, and here’s the evidence. They reckon that this is a bad year for their spuds but I’d be happy with a crop like this.

They told me that carrots, cabbages, lettuce and a few other crops are grown here but people keep them near to their houses as they need quite a lot of tending. Potatoes don’t need much tending at all and so they can grow them out in what passes around here for fields. I reckon that it’s just sand but at least that will warm up quickly once the sun comes out, as anyone who has sat on a beach will tell you.

From here, I went for a drive around the Innu settlement at Sheshatshiu but I won’t be posting any photos of it here. In fact, I didn’t take any at all.

There’s a reason for that. Sheshatshiu is an artificial settlement built under the extremely controversial Government plan of regrouping all of the outlying Innu settlements into larger centres of population with a concentration of services. But unfortunately it’s destroyed the lifestyle of the Innu and given them nothing to replace it. Just like the settlement out at the Davis Inlet, Sheshatshiu is a hotbed of despair, destitution, alcoholism and drug abuse, and you can see the hopelessness everywhere.

This is something that I’ve seen in other First Nation and Native American settlements – the hopelessness.I would have thought that Europeans would have learnt to leave the native communities alone and let their way of life evolve at their own pace.

By Europeans, by the way, I mean people of European origin, whether or not they are 10th Generation Canadians.

Talking of First Nation settlements, there is about half a dozen of them further up the northern Labrador coast (and that’s a lot less that there used to be before the Government’s controversial compulsory resettlement policy) and the only access that they have is by sea.

The Northern Ranger is the ship that carries out the service and calls at each of the settlements, making the tour once a week. And here she is, at the quayside in Goose Bay loading up for – I imagine – Cartwright and the enigmatically-named Black Tickle.

There was a great deal of activity at the Goose Bay airport too. A couple of helicopters were taking off and landing, there was a whole stream of light aircraft coming in to land, and there was a cargo plane over there at the terminal.

It’s all go since Valard began all of the work on the hydro plant at the Muskrat Falls – it’s brought piles of changes to the area, but it’s still a far cry from the days when this was an important port-of-call on the Atlantic Ferry in World War II and subsequently a major NATO base during the Cold War.

I came here in 2010 and the place really was derelict in those days but now it’s being tidied up a bit.

The hangars were in a desperate state in those days but now they seem to be in use for light industry. And talking of Valard and the construction works here, in one of the hangars is a company that specialises in buying, selling and repairing heavy plant and machinery. And I bet that there’s a great deal of that needing repair too, seeing the amount of work that they do and the conditions in which they are doing it.

I fuelled up Strider again (you need to fuel up at every opportunity out here) and set off for Labrador City after that.

And while you can no longer go to visit the Muskrat Falls due to all of the construction, the construction work has opened up some astonishing vistas that were no longer visible previously. This is one of them – you wouldn’t have seen this a few years ago. And it’s not the only one either. There are plenty of them and the whole scenery is changing.

It’s not only the Muskrat Falls that is undergoing major construction work. I’ve been noticing dozens and dozens of new cabins and homes springing up all along the Trans Labrador Highway that were certainly not there previously.

Some of them are quite banal as you might expect, but one or two of them have been built by people with a sense of the unusual and the eccentric. This home has quite fascinated me and I could quite happily live in a house like this – especially the tower bit. I love that.

One thing that I do like about Labrador at this time of the year is the beautiful autumn colours.

The northern side of the valley catches the sun and is quite sheltered from the wind and so there are plenty of deciduous trees that grow up there. And here, there’s a spectacular view of a deciduous forest and as the colours change for the autumn, they are magnificent. I could sit and look at these colours for ever.

When I came by up here in 2010 the road was thoroughly dreadful and it took hours to cover just 150 kilometres. Today though, it’s all different and we have a really modern and quick black-top highway so that we can cover the ground as fast as we like (subject to the 80 kph speed limit of course).

Just here, you can see a sample of the old road along which we used to have to travel and you won’t be surprised that it took so long to cover the ground. However, I am glad that I did the route when it was still a challenge and a struggle. It’s nothing like that now of course.

By economising on the performance of Strider, I’m managing to stretch out the fuel consumption a little. And so I didn’t call at Churchill Falls to fuel up. Strider won’t do the 550 kilometres to Labrador City of course, but I still have 40 litres in cans in the back. And so I’m heading to the sheltered little rest area by the Churchill Falls to spend the night

But talking of Valard and construction and the like, this is Churchill Falls airport and it never ever looked like this.

There’s been a considerable amount of rebuilding and expansion that’s gone on here this last year or so, and you can see who are the major customers here, judging by the amount of Valard vehicles parked in the car park.

And Valard vehicles are everywhere – at one point a stream of 5 Valard pick-ups passed me in the opposite direction and at almost every track off into the forest there are one or two parked up.

Now, I’m on the rest area. I’ve put my 20 litres of fuel in and I’ve settled down in the back of Strider, listening to the pouring rain beating down upon the insulation on the roof. I’m going to crawl into my sleeping bag in a minute and watch a film. And if I fall asleep during the film, then ask me if I care.

Sunday 27th September 2015 – I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS.

Tonight, I’ll be sleeping in a real bed, in a real room, with full central heating too.

And what’s more, I’ve just stood for half an hour under a nice hot shower and I’ve changed my clothes and had a shave too. I even look human now, and you know how difficult that can be.

So how did all of this arise? The answer is that it’s a very long story.

This morning, I awoke to a torrential downpour of rain and the black sacks with the insulation in were sopping wet (although the insulation itself was dry).

And we had a small amount of condensation inside the truck cap, but considering how wet it was outside and the fact that I’d been cooking inside last night, I’m not surprised by this. The small amount of condensation was quite acceptable.

I hadn’t gone 5 kilometres when the metalled road ended. And while I was on the dirt road, the heavens opened and we were drenched in snow. It had been warmer in my little bolt-hole, but it wasn’t like that just here. This looked quite ominous for the rest of the journey. I wasn’t very optimistic.

Anyway, the dirt road only lasted for 15 kms or so and then we were back on the metalled road again. And I do have to say that in the dirt bit, there were men and machines, including an asphalt layer, all lined up. It looked as if today’s task (had the weather been better) would be to finish the gap.

And hats off to Strider too. I’ve been moaning about his excessive fuel consumption too (and to be fair, it is excessive) and I’d loaded up with 40 litres of extra fuel just in case I needed it. But we pulled in to the Ultramar petrol station in Happy Valley with the gauge just going into the final quarter. Not even the orange warning light, never mind having to refuel.

But I do have to say that the benefits of the new road are readily apparent. Whereas in 2010 when I was here, the difference between a litre of fuel here and a litre of fuel in a more-populated area was $0:34. Today, the difference is just $0:06. That says a lot.

After a coffee and an internet session at Tim Horton’s, I went for a good wander around.

First stop was to see what was happening with my old car – the one that I saw last year. It’s still here, looking definitely the worse for wear and it doesn’t look as if it is going to last for too long if no-one gives it any attention.

It really is sad

I went as far eastward as it was possible to go by road, and then went off for a wander into the bush to see what I could see in there.

This is the bay of Goose Bay, at the head of the Hamilton Inlet, and there’s a lovely sand bar just here in the bay. The beaches really are nice in Labrador. And in the background are the mountains over which I’ve driven this last couple of days.

This wasn’t all that there was to see either. There’s also a tent here in the woods.

There’s a really big Innu community around here and there are casual encampments all over the place. Although the First Nation people have adopted more modern building materials (I saw a hut made of OSB draped with a tarpaulin) the traditional itinerant lifestyle is quite important – and quite right too.

There was nothing doing at the quayside at Goose Bay and so I went on to North West River for a good look around. North West River is the farthest north town in Labrador that is possible to reach by road.

I was here late one evening last year and so this time I intended to have a better look around, even though the weather was dreadful.

And this is where our story begins.

I found a museum – the Labrador Interpretation Centre – and much to my surprise, it was open. That doesn’t happen very often.

I spent hours there chatting to the very friendly woman in charge, and we talked quite a lot about the interaction between the First Nation people and the Europeans.

“It’s a shame that the other museum in the town has closed for the season” she said. That has everything that you would like to see, including all of the papers from Mina and Leonidas Hubbard” … "he set out from here to explore the interior of Labrador 100 years ago and died of starvation – his wife set out 2 years later and completed his work" – ed …
“I’d love to see that” I said. “What a tragedy that it’s closed”.
And so after another long chat, I wandered off to look at the museum, and she came hurrying after me “I’ve spoken to the curator on the phone. If you can be there at 09:00 he’ll let you in for a private showing”.
Well, badger me!
“I don’t suppose that you know anywhere where I can stay for the night?” I said rather optimistically. My last night around here had cost me a King’s ransom, and that was 5 years ago.
She wandered off and came back again 5 minutes later.
“The B&B is full unfortunately, you won’t want to pay $115 at the motel here, but there’s a room free, with communal facilities including washing machine, in the old Grenfell Building. That’s $45 a night”.
Do bears have picnics in the wood?

She said that the best views around here were from the top of Sunday Hill, and so Strider and I went off-roading up the mountain.

It was worth the effort because the view from here was stunning as you can see. And it would have been even better had the weather been kinder to me. It was a really excellent place to eat my butties.

And hats off once more to Strider because he made short work of our little excursion up the mountain, even in just 2-wheel drive. If only I could seriously improve his fuel consumption!

So here I am. In Wood Cottage, or Woods Cottage as I’ve seen it sometimes described. Built in the 1920s, it was first the boarding house for schoolkids at the High School who had come from the outlying settlements, and was later an Old People’s Home. I’m warm and comfortable, I’ve had a hot shower, a nice mug of coffee and all of my washing is now in the tumble drier. I’m going to make some food in a minute and then I’ll be off to a nice comfortable bed.

You just watch the house burn down!

-1

Saturday 26th September 2015 – BRRRRR – THAT WAS COLD!

Here I am at 06:30, just before dawn. The alarm went off at 06:00 and again at 06:15 and it was so cold that I wasn’t going to hang about.You can see the ice all over the truck cap and the pile of snow that is on the side of the road that fell off the insulation when I moved it. I froze in the 5 minutes that I was outside.

Mind you, inside the truck cap there was no condensation or ice on the roof, and only a little on the sides. That insulation and the sun visor seem to have done their job and I’m pleased with that.

In fact, I had a good night’s sleep all in all and the lorry that pulled up alongside me at 03:00 didn’t really disturb me too much at all.

Now I can see why it is that ancient man worshipped the sun. I’d been on the road for half an hour in the freezing cold when suddenly the sun put in an appearance over the horizon.

This sunrise was one of the most magnificent sights that I have ever seen and you’ve no idea how warm this made me feel and just how welcome it was. It made me feel so much better.

And so we pushed on – or, rather, pushed off – through old familiar territory that you have seen many times before and so I’m not going to bore you with photos.

Nevertheless, I will show you some which might be of significance here, such as the amount of roadworks going on up here. If you read my earlier notes, you’ll recall me saying how bad the road was back in those days. Now, while it’s not quite a black-top highway,it soon will be, given all of this work.

This view is reinforced by the amount of construction equipment up here.

In 2010 we drove 1800kms of some of the worst roads in the world and I counted just a handful of compactors. Here, in this two-mile length of roadworks, there were two of them. You can see that they really mean business out here.

And while that’s bad news for me and any other adventurer, it has to be good news for the inhabitants.

And while I once famously said that the only time that you would ever see a photo of a flower on my pages would be if there were to be an old car parked upon it, I couldn’t resist a photo of these plants.

I don’t know what they are – add the names into the comments if you do know the answer – but they are very symbolic of the sub-arctic vegetation that you encounter up here because this is really a part of the tundra out here.

We always stop and take a photo at this spot whenever we are in the area. It’s far from being the most isolated spot along the trail, but it’s quite symbolic as being the first place where Labrador City appears on the road signs.

Before 2010, the road turned right just behind me and went down to Cartwright (well, it still does of course) but this road that we are taking didn’t exist. If you wanted to go west from here, you would have to go east down to Cartwright and wait for one of the weekly coastal boats that went up to Goose Bay, and then drive from there over to Labrador City.

This is one of the things against which you have to guard yourself along the trail.

You can see that he has a flat tyre and by the look of things, he’s driven quite a way on it, because the tyre is off the rim. Why he hasn’t put the spare on, I really don’t know (and it’s none of my business anyway) but if you do have to abandon your vehicle to go and seek help, you should take your tyre with you. It won’t be fixed while it’s still on the vehicle.

And about 100kms further on, I found a loaded trailer with the same issues

There’s a photo of me and a Dodge Grand Caravan stopped here for lunch last year in brilliant sunshine and I remember saying how I would love to stay here and settle down.

Today, though, we have lunch in a snowstorm, although you can’t see the snow very clearly. It’s not looking too good out there along the Eagle Plateau but at least this year I have the right kind of vehicle to make the trip.

Furthermore, further along the Labrador Coastal Drive they are gravelling the road – and doing it seriously too. There’s tons of stuff being spread out here.

With the compactors that I’ve seen, I wonder if they are preparing this for tarmac? They were building an asphalt plant when I was here last year and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if we are going to end up with a black-top highway.

But this gravel is impossible. everywhere there are clouds of dust and stones being thrown up and Strider’s windscreen has taken a few heavy knocks.

And not only that, Strider is rear-wheel drive when he’s not in 4×4 mode, and the rear end is quite light. I don’t have much grip on the gravel and when I try to swerve to avoid a pot-hole, Strider goes everywhere across the road and we’ll be doing pirouettes soon.

But Strider is definitely the right vehicle to do this trip. Even in rear-wheel drive, his high ground clearance, larger non-standard wheels and heavy off-road tyres has meant that I’ve done all of this road with the cruise control set at 70kph and we haven’t missed a beat. Whenever the road has been rough, Strider has taken it all in his … errr … Stride.

Contrast that with the Dodge Grand Caravan and its rubbish tyres, and Casey, the PT Cruiser with his town tyres and low ground clearance. We really struggled on parts of this road.

I just wish that Strider had a tank that was 20 litres bigger, or that I could do something about his miserable fuel consumption.

Yes, and here we are, folks.

I’m listening to Counting Crows and “Pave Paradise, Put Up A Parking Lot” – and right at that very moment, look what we have here. The highway is paved at this point and there is a parking lot by the side.

How depressing is that? The end of my adventures along this road are in site and in about 5 years time, the whole of the route will be just another black-top highway.

But anyway, this is where I’m stopping for the night. It’s not as cold as last night anyway and I do have to say that it’s a comfortable spec. I even cook a meal inside Strider’s truck cap and the condensation is minimal with the insulation on the roof, even though the windows aren’t open that much.

But it’s cramped in here and this truck cap is not going to work in the long term – that I have realised.

I really do have to think of a Plan B.

Friday 25th September 2015 – WHAT A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP!

Having done everything that I needed to do last night, I crawled into my sleeping back and settled down to watch a film. But it wasn’t for long. After about 15 minutes, I switched off the laptop and that was the last thing that I remembered.

I must have had a good nine hours when I didn’t feel a thing. And when I awoke, it was reasonably warm inside the truck cap, there was no condensation at all on the roof and only a few minimal traces on the walls. It seems that this idea of putting the insulation on top of the roof of the truck cap is doing its job. I’m well-impressed with this. But I’ll need some more tape though. If the plastic sacks become torn or damaged, I have plenty to replace them but I’ve run out of tape to hold everything together.

I didn’t stop for breakfast though. There’s a sailing across to Labrador at 10:30 and I want to be on it if possible and so I hit the road.

But I did take a minute or two out to take a photo of my spec for last night and Strider with his exterior insulation. You can see just what a good spec this is.

And now, a weird idea is running through my mind that if I could find a plastic sheet that is 6 feet by 4 feet, I could fit that over the top, hold it down with ratchet straps and that would make a very permanent arrangement while I’m on my travels. Something like a corrugated roofing sheet would be ideal for this.

An hour on the road found me at St Barbe and there was an enormous queue waiting for tickets to sail. I was given ticket 16 – which meant that I would be the 16th casual voyager to be added after the reserved places are loaded. And to my surprise, with the senior discount to which I’m now entitled, a 90-minute crossing with Strider costs me all of just $18:58 – eat your hearts out, you European ferry travellers!

Having fuelled up Strider (I keep telling you that out here you need to fuel up when you can) I lined up on the quayside watching the antics of the artics loading up the trailers, and then I was squeezed on board into a little corner of the ship.

And poor Apollo. As she steamed in, I couldn’t help noticing that she’s looking every day now of her almost 50 years and she can’t be long for this world now. The inside is pretty rough too, and I’d have taken a photo of what I meant, except that Bane of Britain here seems to have forgotten to bring his camera with him up into the lounge.

But now, after a heary breakfast of coffee, four rounds of toast and a plate of hash browns, I’m ready for anything. Including a couple of chats that I had had, one with a German guy in an ancient New-Brunswick-registered Dodge Caravan from Woodstock (the Caravan, not the German) with a spare wheel strapped to the top, and another older guy heading out to Goose Bay.

In May 2012 I’d done a tour of Quebec Highway 138 from Montreal all the way to the end at Natashquan where the road comes to a shuddering halt in the middle of nowhere.

It’s not actually the end of Highway 138, theoretically at least, because there’s part of the Quebec coast accessible from Blanc Sablon,and the road along there is also called Highway 138. I’d driven down here last year but there was that much fog and rain that we hardly saw a thing

No such complaints today though. I was really lucky with the weather and couldn’t have wished for better. I’ve managed to retake all of the photographs that I took last year.

And you can see just how beautiful the road is. It doesn’t quite have the grandeur that the Trans Labrador Highway has, of course … "nothing can quite manage that" – ed … but it was a journey that I wanted to make, just to complete my Highway 138 adenture

And so we arrive at Vieux Fort, known to the locals as Old Fort Bay because this is an Anglophone area, as I discovered a few years ago.

The Highway terminates at the harbour and here, right in front of us is an old quay. It’s closed off and marked “danger” so it’s clearly unused, but in view of its substantial construction, I wonder if the coastal boat that plies along the Lower North Shore used to call in here before the road through to here was opened.

It’s not quite the end of the Highway though. If the Highway ever is extended, which won’t be in the lifetime of anyone reading this rubbish, it’ll come round the head of the bay and head west.

At the moment there’s a dirt highway that takes that road, and this eventually brings you down to this beautiful sheltered bay just here. When I arrive, a couple of fishermen … "fisherPERSONS" – ed … were launching a boat and setting off. This really IS the end of the road as far as I can tell, and it was a convenient place for me to stop for lunch.

There are a few of the villages along the highway too and I took hundreds of photos of them. This is just one of them, Middle Bay.

This is said to be the site of a Basque whaling station back in the 16th Century. There were a couple of dozen along here and the most well-known example, Red Bay in Labrador has been excavated and there’s a museum there. However, I don’t know what, if anything, has been discovered here from that period

From here, I retraced my steps to Blanc Sablon and beyond towards L’Anse Aux Loups in Labrador.

We had to stop though, in order to take a photograph at the border just to prove that Strider was here. This is the border today, of course, but it might not be in the future because the mayor of Blanc Sablon has said that he would like to apply to the Canadian Government to secede from the Province of Quebec and join up with Labrador. Whether the Province of Quebec will agree to releasing some of its prisoners however remains to be seen.

There are many French names just here. Some of them relate to the exploration of Jacques Cartier, others to the French fishing boats that came along here in the 18th Century, but many others relate to inhabitants of the Channel Islands who colonised this area.

The old road along the coast prior to the construction of the new highway is called the Jersey Trail today, and there are all kinds of remnants and relics of the previous inhabitants along here. Excavations have taken place and many artefacts have been uncovered.

There are a dozen or so villages along here too. I missed out photographing them in 2010 because I was rushing for the ferry (I hadn’t realised that it ran on Newfoundland time, which is 90 minutes ahead of Quebec) and in 2014 I had the weather against me.

But never mind. Today, even though it was now going dark quite rapidly, I still had time to take all of the photos that I wanted to take.

When I was here in 2010, the Labrador Coastal Drive followed the narrow valley of the Pinware River, but I did notice a considerable amount of roadworks in the area round by the County Cat Pond.

This is what they have been doing. The old road goes off to the right, but there’s a new road now going up the hill just there.

I can’t think why they have done it, though. The route along the Pinware River is beautiful, but this new route is all straight up and straight down. In 2014 I watched a huge lorry struggle up the hill in the rain and I bet he wasn’t amused.

I had planned to stop at a Guest House in Red Bay for a wash and a change of clothes, but there was no-one there when I called, and so I’ll be spending another couple of nights sleeping along the road. I found a very basic rest area and even though it was early, it was freezing cold and so I went to bed. But not before putting the big insulated sunshield across the rear window of the truck cap and wrapping the rest around the head of my bed. I’ve a feeling that I’m going to need it tonight.

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Thursday 25th September 2014 – A NATIONAL DISGRACE

I settled down last night in a comfortable little spot in an old abandoned sand quarry on the shore of the lake, but I wasn’t there for long. An hour or so after I had gone to sleep we had a torrential downpour that awoke me, and of course a sodden sand quarry is no place to be in a vehicle like a Dodge.

I promptly removed myself and set up camp on the car park at the back of the mall – the only covered mall in the whome of Labrador, apparently.

It seems that this car park is however the hang-out for the local youths and so there was some noise going on for a while, but once they all went home to mummy, that was that. I don’t remember a thing, except for the occasional squalls of rain

I was awake before the alarm too, 06:20, having had a really good night’s sleep, and then I went off to find an internet connection.

But it has struck me while I’m here at this shopping mall that places like Tim Horton’s are a huge environmental disaster. There’s a queue of about 50 vehicles at the drive-in (and not just cars and vans – there’s a couple of lorries in this one), engines all idling away pumping who knows what into the atmosphere, and then everyone receives a throwaway fibre cup that ends up in landfill or the local stream or on the side of the road.

Big fan that I am, especially as they now offer free wi-fi to all their customers and I am an eager subscriber (it’s how all of this rubbish gets onto the net when I’m on the road), I always take a reusable thermal mug with me when I go in.

What there needs to be is a couple of severe environmental taxes on issuing a throwaway packaging and for using the drive-in.

After the coffee, I went to the grocery shop to buy a few food supplies for the next leg of the journey and wandered off around the city to take a few selected photos. We’ll start the day as we mean to go on and to make up for all of the photos that I took but were lost were lost last time that I was here.

And then after that it was time to hit the road.

Crossing into the Province of Quebec I paid a visit to Fermont. This is a company town owned by Arcelor Mittal and services the astonishing iron-ore mine at Mont Wright.

The showpiece of Fermont, well, for me at any rate, is the world’s biggest dumper. To give you an idea of the size, my mouth is level with the centre hub of the wheel, and the tyres are 37:00×57 and there aren’t too many any tyres bigger than that.

This is just a small part of the iron ore mine at Mont Wright. Its size renders one speechless, and if it can render me speechless then it really must be something, as any of my friends will tell you.

But as far as I am aware, there is nothing like this mine anywhere else on earth. Its scale is staggering and its proportions are breathtaking. The heap of mine tailings stretches for mile upon mile upon mile.

The Trans-Labrador Highway becomes quite simply Highway 389 once we have passed the border between Quebec and Labrador, and this is what you can expect from the highway. And in places it’s far, far worse than this.

And to prove that a lack of skill and ability in Maths will never ever hold you back in the Quebec Government, we are told on the Quebec Tourist Information Service’s daily road reports that one can travel the 67kms between Mont Wright and Fire Lake in 1 hour at an average speed of 50kph.

Talking of Fire Lake, the old iron mine that was mothballed years ago has been resurrected and now working full-tilt.

So much so that out here at Fire Lake in the wilderness miles from anywhere we have a connection with the Cartier Railway that runs between Mont Wright and Port Cartier and not only that, there’s a marshalling yard here for the freight trains taking away the ore and this was certainly not here in 2010.

There is no sadder place anywhere on earth than in an abandoned cemetery, except an abandoned cemetery in a ghost town. And here at Gagnon we have a real ghost town complete with the aforesaid.

Being a mining community, it was abandoned when the ore at Gagnon Mine gave out (sometime in the late 1980s) and many of these graves relate to comparatively young people as you might expect, being a mining community. There are people whose date of birth is later than mine so they would all have family and friends, but I do wonder how many of these still have visitors and whether the Catholic Church sends a priest up here every so often to say mass over the departed souls.

Or are these people abandoned too?

I made the effort to hunt down the old mine workings and eventually, after much binding in the marsh and scraping the underside of the Dodge (missing the sump by millimetres) I found them.

The mine is just a huge scar in the land that is now filled with water and is nothing but a huge lake now. But I was horrified to find that the mine tailings are piled up everywhere all over the place and absolutely no effort has been made to clean up and restore the land.

This is a shocking indictment of the Canadian Government’s laissez-faire attitude towards the rape of the countryside and there is an environmental catastrophe up here. But because it’s out of the public view and no-one ever comes up here except intrepid … "and modest" – ed … adventurers such as Yours Truly, it’s quite okay.

I am ashamed to report this, and the Canadian Government should be thoroughly ashamed of itself for having allowed it. The abandonment of the victims of man’s greed and the desolation of the countryside just goes to show to what depths humans will sink. That hole must be hundreds of feet deep.

On a brighter note, they were clearing away the edge of the road when I was up here in 2010
to improve the visibility and to give the local fauna a sporting chance of motorists seeing them before crashing into them, but they seem not to have kept up the work.

It’s all deciduous trees that have thus grown back and the autumn colours here are stunning. It really is the most beautiful place on earth and autumn really is the most beautiful time to see it, especially when the sun is out.

From here though, it was a thrash (such as one can do around here) down the highway to Baie Comeau and a motel for the night. It’s a week since I’ve had a shower and even I’m starting to notice it. Tomorrow I’ll be crossing the St Lawrence to the southern shore, New Brunswick and civilisation.

And as I go, I’ll leave you with this photo that I took along the route, and let you make up your own caption for it.

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Wednesday 24th September 2014 – THE GREAT DECEPTION

Yes, I’m going to be talking rubbish … "well, there’s a novelty!" – ed … in a minute.

But before I do that, let me show you my nice and comfy little spec on the harbour at Goose Bay this morning.

Last night, I finished off my notes, made a good tea and then went to bed. Thoroughly painless until the alarm went off at about 06:50. I didn’t feel a thing.

And even though the temperature had dropped to zero by the time I awoke, with ice on the puddles outside and ice even on the inside of the windscreen, that didn’t inconvenience me for a minute. It was the sleep of the dead last night.

By 07:04 I’m on the road. I need to warm up the car, defrost the ice and charge up the laptop so I’m not going to hang about until all of that has been done. I’ve fuelled up half from the fuel can too, saving half of it for later. It has to be emptied before it can go back into storage anyway and it has served its purpose, easing my mind around these enormously long stretches of fuel-less highways. For the next few sections of the highway, it’s a more-realistic 300 kilometres.

While the car is warming and the laptop is charging, I go for a drive around Happy Valley to see what there is to see.

We find a grass lawn – yes, real grass growing here. It’s not quite the High Arctic here. And we also find an old early-1950s car. However have they managed to protect this from the elements?

The queue for Tim Horton’s is enormous. The longest one yet. I upset everyone by driving in through the out door as Idon’t want the drive-in services, and the queue inside is just as long. I have a little smile thinking to myself about what might happen if I were to imitate Charles Hawtrey in Carry on Cowboy and shout “Gold Strike at Bear Creek”. But not only would the customers immediately shoot off like lightning, so would the personnel and so I would be no better off. Old Frontier traditions die hard in Labrador.

and coffee at Tim Horton’s was first money (apart from fuel) that I have spent since Deer Lake and how many years ago was that?

But how times have changed here over the last four years.It’s like the M6 down here too this morning. There are 5 or 6 vehicles in front of meand one or two behind. And we are in the flaming sub-arctic. This place isn’t anything like what it was four years ago at all. In those days you were lucky to see one car per hour.

Now, this is how I always pictured Labrador to be. Log cabins by the side of rapids in fast-flowing rivers, and I’m glad to see that at least there is some of it left.

No dog sleds though. I’m told that the last working dog team in the region was retired in 1994. Everyone has snowmobiles these days, but where do you find fuel for them in the wilderness? And you can’t eat them if your supplies run out.

This is Gull Island, or as it is known by the local First Nation Innu community, Tshiashkueish. And I can’t even pronounce that with my own teeth in.

I’ve arrived during the Innu celebration gathering, which is taking place from 22-26 September and once more I’m disappointed by everyone arriving in 4×4 pickups rather than dogsleds. Whatever happened to native traditions? But still, it shouldn’t be overlooked that it’s these tribal gatherings are what is keeping the Nation together and I’m glad about that. These days, it seems that the emphasis is on supressing minority customs and traditions.

But I’m having a huge disappointment on this road. When I came by here in 2010 I struggled for hours and hours over some of the worst roads in the world. Not today, though. With the exception of 30 kms in the middle, the entire highway has been re-aligned and surfaced with asphalt as you can see. There’s a bit of the old road over which I desperately struggled, and you can see what it looks like today.

A length that took me five hours to drive, I’ve just done it in 50 minutes at … well, 80kph is the official speed limit here but the road is so much better than that.

Of course, I’m the first to realise that I don’t have to live here and drive it every day, so who am I to complain? But the solitude for which I’m craving has gone for ever here. Now, it’s like any black-top highway anywhere else in the world and the adventure has gone.

Anther advantage of the road is that prices have now normalised. Fuel at Goose Bay was just 140.1 per litre – only 6 or 7 cents higher than in the urbanised areas of Canada. That’s something for the locals to cheer.

This is the current ohm of some local type of sub-arctic bird. It’s done well to build its nest up there.

But it needs to be careful. It would be shocking if it were to fall out of its nest – quite revolting in fact.

And this is the only hint of wildlife that I saw. I was chatting to a couple of maintenance men here and they were telling me that the new road and all of the traffic has driven away everything that I saw when I came over here.

But this is good to see. About 70 kms from Labrador City I come across someone with a similar lifestyle to mine.

Here we have an Air 403 wind turbine going round like I wish that mine would, and solar panels. And he’s had to shin up a ladder to clear the snow away from them.

So bully to him. I’m glad to see that he’s doing it and making it work. We need more people like this.

THis is the town of Wabush in Labrador. And this could be mistaken for any suburb in any town that you might care to mention. Not a dog sled in sight

But make the most of this photo because in 5 years time it will be nothing like this. It’s a mining town and talking to the local security guards there, they tell me that the mine is exhausted and a new mining project in the vicinity has been cancelled.

People are being laid off and many have already left the community to seek work elsewhere. If nothing is done about the new mining project, then this place will be a ghost town.

And on that depressing note, I went to find somewhere to lay my weary head. I’ve driven 520 kilometres and not even broken sweat. Ohh, how times have changed.

Tuesday 23rd September 2014 – I SPENT LAST NIGHT …

… sleeping in an esker.

I mean, I don’t mean sleeping IN an esker like that arctic explorer and fellow former Nantwich-dweller Jack Hornby and his companion James Critchell Bullock back 90-odd years ago.

They actually burrowed in like rabbits and built themselves a cave. I actually spent the night sleeping in an old quarry that has been formed where a load of sand had been removed from an esker.

And an esker? It’s like a sandbank but has been deposited by a glacier rather than a river or a sea and the whole of northern Labrador is covered in them. This one is about 10 miles north of Lodge Bay.

And I was up even as dawn was breaking, and on my way. It was quite cold and damp and so I needed to warm up the Dodge before I could do much. A good drive for half an hour would sort that out

A sign of the times is how the raffic is on the roads around here. Back in 2010 you could drive for hours and not see another vehicle. Here on Iceberg Alley at the moment, at just 07:20 it’s like the M6. There’s a car coming towards me and there’s a car coming behind me too

At the end of Iceberg Alley is a small town called St Lewis and as I have said before
it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth, and this is where I’ve come for breakfast.

But they were quite right about the storm worsening today. I’ve tried to open the door to go out and take a photo but I physically can’t open the door against the wind. I had to turn the Dodge around. And the coffee that I made went down well too. I needed that.

Fuel is also 152.9 cents per litre at Port Hope Simpson so I fuel up again. Not that I desperately need it but as I have said before, you should never pass up a reasonable opportunity to fill up your tank when you are out here

The reason is that it this sign that you are up against in areas like this. And if I’m going to look at Paradise River, something that I overlooked to do in 2010, then I’ll need an extra 100 kms of fuel at least for all of that

So this is Paradise River. It’s another place that could qualify for one of the most beautiful places on earth.

I can see how it got its name but as for the village itself, there’s no focal point or hint of any urban node – It’s a linear village and just stretches along the road on the shore of the river with a house here, a house there.

It was once a very much larger village but 1918 flu epidemic swept away a good proportion of the inhabitants and others have slowly drifted away. That’s quite evident by empty lots and abandoned property and state of one or two of the houses. Then again, people living in Paradise River would have an 80km round trip to the shops and to get fuel. How isolated is that for a village?

There’s an area right by the junction where the road to Cartwright leaves the Labrador Coastal Drive that I’ve had my eye on ever since 2010. It would make a perfect motel, shop, cafe and fuel station.

However, it’s been usurped by the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourist Board as the principal tourist rest area for the trail. It weems that people have indeed been reading my notes but lack the capital to invest in the plot.

Now I’m heading right into the mountains. And the weather is fluctuating like no-one’s business. We’re having bright sunlight, then clouds, then torrential rain, and then back in the sunlight and it’s changing faster than it ever does in the Auvergne.

And if you want to kno the meaning of “intrepid”, have a look at this photo. These are two motorcyclists and they’ve come all the way round from Goose Bay, and probably from further round too.

A motorcycle doesn’t have the range to do this leg of the trail and these motorcyclists are stopping to fuel up their bikes out of cans. This is certainly adventurous.

This is sample shot of the road where I stopped on one occasion and look how much this road has deteriorated compared to how it was in 2010. And this is far from being the worst part of it either.

It was never ever like this 4 years ago and I’ve no idea what might be in their heads letting the road deteriorate like this in just 4 years. It doesn’t say much for the long-term future of the road if it’s ended up like this.

This is my lunch stop for this afternoon and isn’t it beautiful? The river doesn’t seem to be carrying a nameplate so I don’t know what it is, but the bridge is dated 2008 if that’s of any use. I could quite happily settle down here in this spot.

And just look at the poor Dodge. It’s looking as if it could do with a really good wash but it isn’t going to have one for a while yet.

This is the Valard Construction camp and there are enough mobile homes here to house a thousand people.

It seems that the Muskrat Falls at Goose Bay are to have a hydro-electric dam. The power is going to come this way on pylons and there will be side roads built to service the pylons. The power is togo all the way through to Forteau and then under the sea to Newfoundland and then under the sea again to Cape Breton and then Maine.

Its primary purpose is to provide electricity to the Province, earn revenue by exporting the surplus to Nova Scotia and the USA, and freeing themselves from Quebec Hydro’s oppressive grip.

And there’s talk of asphalting the whole length of this highway – in fact an asphalt plant has already been built.

Standing in the middle of the road, acting as if he owned it, which he probably did, is our old friend Mr Moose.

He stood there as if challenging me to a contest but he was no match for Strawberry Moose and so he slowly lumbered out of the way to leave me with a clear path to drive all of the way down to Goose Bay. That was very good of him

I didn’t stop in Goose Bay but went right through to North West River, the farthest northern point of the Province that it is feasible to reach by road.

This is a beautiful place to visit, especially in the setting sun. And it really did look this good too.

So now that I’ve accomplished this task, another one that I didn’t do in 2010, I retraced my steps to the docks at Goose Bay and I’ll settle down here for the night. This will do me

Monday 22nd September 2014 – STRANDED AGAIN

I was out like a light last night, long before it went dark even. I must have been tired last night.

And I was awake long before it was light too. This was an excellent place to choose for the night and I was impressed with this. I shall add this to my list of potential specs.

I was rather hoping that the weather would change today, and indeed it has. It’s changed for the worse. The fog is still here but the rain is now coming down like rain that I have never seen. It started at about 02:00 this morning.

Not only that, we have our howling gale back, and that is that.

This makes me decide that I don’t have much future in Labrador right now. If it’s raining like this here, what’s it doing in the interior up on the plateau? I know that snow has been forecast for today and tomorrow up there and if it’s coming down anything like this, we’ll all know about it.

I decide to make my way to the ferry and see about retracing my steps, but after a very long wait, I’m given more bad news. All ferries are cancelled until this hurricane blows itself out. Out there in the Strait it’s gusting at 120mph. Even the ferries to the mainland at Cape Breton Island have stopped running.

Braving the dreadful rain I pushed on up the road and across the border into Labrador.

The Labrador Tourist Information Board is a little more hopeful though. Snow is forecast for today and tomorrow in the mountains over to Goose Bay but there will be a dramatic improvement in the weather starting on Wednesday with temperatures reaching 16°C.

Giving the matter some considerable thought, I decide to head north this afternoon. I can travel part of the way up the road and stop for the night. If I have a reasonable start I should catch the road over the mountains on Tuesday afternoon when it’s been cleared but if there’s snow still lying about, I’ll just hole up and wait for the thaw.

I can’t think of another solution, but I do have a great amount of faith in the Labrador Highways Department.

But amongst the improvements along the highway since 2010, more of which anon, travellers on the Trans Labrador can now avail themselves, free of charge, of a satellite telephone to keep in touch with someone in case of emergency. Definitely a sign of the times and of progress. So armed with a satellite telephone, I head north.

First thing that I notice are signs telling me “rough road next 7kms”. Obviously the person who thought of this one has never ever been further north than the gate across the highway at Red Bay. This is nothing compared to what I’m going to encounter further along the road.

This is the harbour at L’Anse Au Loups, a photo of which I didn’t take in 2010 when I was on my mega-voyage around the Trans-Labrador Highway
.

At least there’s one good thing about coming round here taking photos in this kind of weather is that you don’t have to worry about where the sun is. You can stand anywhere and you aren’t bothered about the sun streaming into the lens at all.

I saw some kind of monument at the side of the road in 2010 and I didn’t have time to go to check it as I was rushing for my ferry.

Today though, I did have time for a look around.

It is in fact a war memorial and the plaque on there says something along the lines of “at the going down of the sun etc etc we will remember them” – the old Kipling line. However it seems that they haven’t been remembered because this is an overgrown, neglected and forgotten war memorial that hasn’t seen an ounce of attention since I don’t know when.

And on my way to see the memorial I was thoroughly drenched and soaked to the skin just walking the 50 yards there and back, even wearing a proper heavy-duty rain jacket. The weather here is grotesque.

This was what they must have been building in 2010 when I came here to the County Cat Pond and noticed them carrying out all of these road works.

I’m not quite sure why as there was nothing that appeared to be wrong to me about the picturesque little road around the shores of the Pinware River that I can see about 200 feet below me. It wasn’t a difficult stretch of road by any means and I enjoyed driving it.

I really don’t see the point of this construction at all. It really makes me wonder what on earth is going on because, beautiful and well-maintained though the surface of the road might be, it’s all up and down and watching a lorry struggle up here with an enormous amount of difficulty can’t have impressed the driver.

I arrived at the Whaling Centre at Red Bay just after 17:00. It has two days when it closes at 17:00 and you can guess what one of them is can’t you? And there’s no UNESCO delegation here today to help me out.

And outside here now the wind is howling. This is a wicked wind that I’m in. That forecasted 120mph wind might not have been an underestimation. What I find totally astonishing is that with this howling wind here blowing like dervishes, we still have all of this fog. It hasn’t moved an inch. Normally, the fog is the first to be blown away in the wind

The road however is completely different from how I remember it. Parts of the road are much wider and the surface vastly improved. They seem to be digging up the old road that we know and love and replacing it with the one along which I’m driving.

Talking to one of the road workers here while I was waiting at a stop sign, he tells me that they have been widening this road this summer ready to tarmac the surface. That’s good news for the locals and the tourists although it won’t do much for the environment, bringing so many people here

However, the road isn’t so good in certain places at the moment, is it? It’ll be interesting to see what it will be like this time next year.

Fuel at Lodge Bay is just 152.9 per litre. That’s not unreasonable for round here and while I’m not exactly desperate for fuel, fuel stations are few and far apart on the Trans Labrador Highway and you should never miss out on an opportunity to fill up the tank.

Now, night is falling and I’ll need to find somewhere to park up ready for the morning.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Category Archives: trans labrador highway

Friday 15th September 2017 – I’M BACK …

Tuesday 12th September 2017 – I’M IN GOOSE …

Saturday 9th September 2017 – I AWOKE WITH …

Friday 8th September 2017 – I HAD A …

Wednesday 30th September 2015 – DRIVING THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY …

Tuesday 29th September 2015 – THAT WAS A NICE …

Monday 28th September 2015 – WHAT A GOOD NIGHT …

Sunday 27th September 2015 – I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS.

Saturday 26th September 2015 – BRRRRR – THAT WAS COLD!

Friday 25th September 2015 – WHAT A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP!

Thursday 25th September 2014 – A NATIONAL DISGRACE

Wednesday 24th September 2014 – THE GREAT DECEPTION

Tuesday 23rd September 2014 – I SPENT LAST NIGHT …

Monday 22nd September 2014 – STRANDED AGAIN

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