Tag Archives: labrador city

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!

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!

Friday 30th September 2016 – THEY CALL ME TRINITY

Well, Baie Trinité actually, but never mind – it’s near enough.

We’ve been here before – in 2012on our mega-ramble down Highway 138 to be precise, but I’d only driven through the place without having the time to have a real poke around, and so seeing as it’s quite close to where I’m staying (a mere 37 kilometres – which is “right next door” over here on the North Shore of the St Lawrence River) I reckoned that I would come for a nosy around.

On the way out there, though, I encountered quite a beautiful lake. It’s at round about kilometre 831 and it’s called le Lac au Rat Musqué – Muskrat Lake – and I’d love to know how it is that some of these lakes and other natural landmarks earned their European names.

I didn’t take a photo of it in 2012 and I don’t know why. But there are lakes just about everywhere and I suppose that I was spoiled for choice.

First thing that you notice as you arrive in Baie Trinité is a rest area, right in the centre of what passes for the village and right by the shore. There are all of the usual facilities here, but it goes without saying that they are all closed up for the winter.

But anyway, it’s gone lunchtime, my stomach thinks that my throat has been cut and I have my butties to eat. I’ve run out of hummus but I do have some vegan cheese that I picked up in the Atlantic Superstore in Woodstock.

Baie Trinité’s claim to fame is that it is the home of the Centre National des Naufrages du Saint Laurent – the National Centre for Shipwrecks on the Saint Lawrence. This is a place that I would love to visit, but as you probably realise, it’s closed now until next season.

But one thing about it is that here you can “experience several major tragedies that have marked the history of Nouvelle France” but if anyone thinks that I’m going to experience a shipwreck at first hand just to satisfy my curiosity they are mistaken.

There have been plenty of shipwrecks along the coast as you probably know, and we’ve visited the sites of a few of them. And without any explanatory panel (which wouldn’t do you lot much good anyway because here in Quebec the Tourist Information is written in French only, just to spite the Anglophone tourists), I would say that this cannon is from a real shipwreck.

In 1690 a mariner by the name of Admiral Phips sailed up the St Lawrence in an attempt to capture Quebec from the French. He was unsuccessful, not the least of the reasons being that he lost several ships on the way up. And on Christmas Eve 1994 the remains of one of them – the Elizabeth and Mary – were found just off the headland at Baie Trinité.

And as you might also expect, just like every other village in Quebec, we have a church here, built in 1939.

I forgot to go over and see to whom it was dedicated (I’m really forgetting myself these days) but as this place is called Baie Trinité, apparently because Jacques Cartier is supposed to have visited the bay on Trinity Sunday in 1536, it’s quite possible that this could be the Church of the Holy Trinity – l’église Sainte-Trinité.

As we have said before, the beaches around here are magnificent, with all of the sand that has been deposited by glaciers as they receded at the end of the various ice ages.

I’m not a big fan of the beach here at Baie Trinité though. It’s right by the main highway and while it’s hardly the M25, you’d be surprised at the number of heavy lorries that go past here. It’s too noisy for me.

Instead, I’m going to head up the beach westwards. That’s far more sheltered behind the Tourist Information Centre and the church and where I’m less likely to be disturbed.

Except, it has to be said, by someone on a quad who decides to come for a ride out here as I’m walking along. Still, I do my best to avoid him and think pleasant thoughts instead as I take advantage of the beautiful sunshine.

All of the beaches, shores and river mouths along here are littered with rocks as you have probably noticed, and they too have been brought down here by glaciers (and latterly by rivers) from their places of origin.

Geologists can and do have hours of endless fun tracing rocks back to their original source and thus plotting the paths of glaciers and rivers during prehistory. It’s a fascinating hobby, so I’m told.

But this lump of rock on the beach is quite interesting. It caught my attention because it was glistening in the sunlight so I went over to photograph it. Unfortunately, the glistening hasn’t come out at all.

The rock is totally different from most of the others along here and to me (not that I would know very much about it) it closely resembles a lump of iron ore similar to what we saw when we tracked down the old iron mine at Gagnon last year.

There are many deposits of iron ore in the interior – Gagnon, Fire Lake, Mont Wright, Labrador and Wabush to name just five out of dozens, and it’s interesting to think that this rock might have come all the way down from there.

This river is called, rather unsurprisingly, the rivière Trinité and apparently it’s quite famous for the quality – and quantity – of the salmon that was caught in it.

It was quite popular with some first-Nation Canadians who used to live off the salmon from the river in the summer and off whales and the like from the St Lawrence during the winter. There was no reason for them to live a nomadic lifestyle.

Like most rivers out here along the North Shore, Quebec Hydro has become involved in it and has installed a little hydro-electric generating plant to serve the town and its neighbourhood.

There wasn’t very much by the way of detail to tell me anything about it but although it’s not a very big drop the force of the water makes it quite powerful so I imagine that there’s enough power here to run the village and its surroundings.

“But what about the salmon?” I hear you say. After all, it’s quite a famous salmon fishing river and one time the fishing rights were owned by a club in Quebec, although control was soon wrestled back by the villagers.

In fact, when they built the barrage they also built a kind of fish ladder at the side of it so that the salmon could move upstream and downstream . I haven’t heard whether or not it’s as successful and whether the fish are a snumerous as before.

Meanwhile, I’m back on the beach again heading east. Right over there is the fish-processing plant that we visited when we were here in 2012.

Formerly, it was the forest products that provided the major source of employment in the village. It was quite a hive of industry, with a log flume and even a small railway network, but the 1960s put an end to all of that and the economy collapsed.

Nowadays, it’s fishing and the fish processing plant that provide most of the employment opportunities around here.

One thing that Baie Trinité does have going for it is that it has a fuel station and convenience store, and you can see it peering through the trees over there, left of centre.

I went in there for a wander around and to my great surprise they sold bread. Baguettes too, albeit frozen ones that need to be thawed out before I can use them. But it’s good news for me – it’s a round trip of just 78 kms for the bread instead of 116 kms.

Out on the western side of the village is the Pointe-à-Poulin. I tried to reach there in 2012 as you may remember but was blocked by the snow.

No such problems this year though. In fact I made it all the way down to the Anse de Sable – Sandy Cove – and not only that, I was chased all the way down the road by three Dodge Caravans full of people and that made me wonder what on earth was going on. It seems to be a popular spot this year and so I shall have to make enquiries as to why they are here.

They all went over there to have a play on that big rock, that looked as if it might have been a plaque of volcanic lava. I went over to have a chat to them to see what was going on.

It appears that they were High-School students who were out on a field trip along the North Shore of the St Lawrence – and that made me wonder whether the young archaeologists whom I had seen at Godbout the other day excavating part of that cache of seashells were from the same group.

But anyway, I left them all to it and went for a wander right out to the farthest extremity of the Point.

Or at least, what I thought was the farthest extremity of the Point because each time that I came to what I thought was the farthest extremity of the Point, there was another Point around the corner. I’d heard of a similar phenomenon in mountaineering when people climbed up to what they considered to be the summit, only to find another summit further on.

having realised that I was likely to be out here all night at this rate, I turned round and retraced my steps somewhat, turning my attention to the rocks just offshore.

I went for a clamber about and a closer inspection thereof. I noticed that the rocks were not rocks at all but nice, black, smooth and shiny, so it seemed to me that these might also be plaques of lava.

You might be wondering about the likelihood of volcanic activity around the St Lawrence, but it does appear to be a recorded fact.

The St Lawrence River valley is situated more-or-less along a geological fault line and there is evidence of techtonic plate movement along here as well as some evidence of prehistoric volcanic eruptions. Coming across outcrops of lava, and even lava fused into airgaps in other rocks, is by no means unusual.

But talking of techtonic plate movement, there have been several earthquakes recorded along the St Lawrence in recent years – a score of 5 on the Richter Scale is not unknown. But this pales into insignificance when considered against the events of 1663

Many of you will remember the discussion that we had when we were at Les Eboulements. We mentioned that in that year there had been as many as 33 earthquakes along the St Lawrence, the largest of which caused an entire mountainside to slide into the river.

So leaving the lava beds for now and greeting the students, who seemed to be having endless amounts of fun, I walked right back around the bay to the other end – the end closest to Baie Trinité.

I was hoping to see a shipwreck or two, or the remains of a shipwreck maybe, but I was completely out of luck.But it really was a beautiful beach and I had quite enjoyed my time out here. Given a few more degrees of temperature and bit less wind, I could quite happily have stretched out on one of the lava beds.

Anyway, I called it a day and leapt into Strider to take me back home.

But halfway down the road before I reached Highway 138, I came to a shuddering halt along the side of the road. That was because the view of the bay that I saw as I rounded a bend was quite stunning. Now this is the kind of beach upon which I could quite happily recline in the evening sun, except of course that the sun is setting behind the trees on the left.
And in any case, I was feeling quite tired by now so I was quite keen to return home to my little room.

I made myself a coffee and retired to my room for a repose and relax before I made tea. Baked potatoes, beans and hotdogs with mustard as usual (it was a good idea to buy that bag of spuds and those tins of beans) was on the menu. And then having done the washing-up, I retired foe the night.

I was pretty exhausted after my long walk around the beach. But at least I have my bread for tomorrow.

And you have 2105 words to read tonight. Serves you all right.

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.

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.

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.

-1

Friday 28th January 2011 – We finally made it to the shops today …

… after many vicissitudes.

The first issue was going to the tip to dump the rubbish. Much to everyone’s surprise the tip was open today but the guy took one look at the stuff that we had and told us that we couldn’t tip it there. He sent us on somewhere else instead – not too far away, and that was a commercial dumping facility where we had to pay a … errr … significant amount to use their facilities. even more depressing, it was open from 06:00 until 17:30 and so had we been told about it yesterday we could have done it then and there without messing around this morning.

Next port of call was to my solicitor’s where I gave him the deeds to this apartment so that I won’t lose or mislay them – after all, anything is possible around here – and then I needed to go to the bank for a new bank card – regular followers of this drivel will recall the cash machine in Labrador City swallowing the old one back in October.

Hunting for tiles was the next major issue and that didn’t work out. The big place where they have all the ends of range tiles had nothing suitable at a price that we could afford to pay and we ran out of time to go anywhere else. And so to IKEA where we lunched and did some shopping.

Brico turned up a nice floor for the third bedroom but Terry and Liz didn’t take much notice. They are still recovering from the shock of seeing a tub of Dulux ceiling paint on sale for €115. I did warn them about the cost of living in Brussels but that kind of price is verging on the ludicrous, never mind the ridiculous.

On the way home, picking our way through the traffic and travelling down the back streets we came across a Moroccan tile warehouse with a very amiable proprietor who had plenty of time to spare for us, which makes a pleasant change here in Brussels. We only really went in to shelter from the rush-hour traffic and yet we came away with all of the tiles for the bathroom and the balcony, and at a most reasonable price to boot (although at this stage we haven’t yet examined them closely so our opinion might change yet about this). And so tomorrow we’ll carry on working and see how far we can progress.

Sunday is of course a day of rest.

-2

Monday 8th November 2010 – I DID OK …

… with last night’s motel here on the edge of Orangeville. 58 dollars it was, and no-one waking me up in the middle of the night. But I was up early and gone by 08:45.

However, you will have noticed the frost on the roof. Yes, winter is following me around now.

The drive down to Windsor was absolutely uneventful – I can’t think of anything at all to say about it, even if it was a rather circuitous route that I was obliged to follow.

I was back in Windsor by 15:00 and I found yet another cheap motel- 39 dollars a night and with internet too. I worked out that staying for three nights here (which is what I’m doing) is costing me less than one night in Labrador City.

Mind you the paintwork in here could do with a really good clean and there one or two channels on the TV that are what might be described as … errr … interesting but there’s no Monday Night Football which is rather annoying.

I met up with Katherine and we went for a coffee and a chat. And Strawberry Moose is now making up for lost time, recounting all his adventures to his big sister. And now I only have the SatNav to talk to.

Tomorrow I’ll be emptying out Casey and giving him a thoroughly good clean, and that will take a good while. Then I’ll be posting off all my purchases back to France.

I’m shuddering at the thought of the cost of that.

-1

Friday 15th October 2010 – THIS ALL STARTED AS AN ARGUMENT, YOU KNOW.

Someone had said something about the first white child born in North America being Virginia Dare in 1587. I replied that that was nonsense as there is evidence in the Norse Sagas to show that at least one child was born to the Viking settlers in Vinland.

The counter argument to that was that Newfoundland is an island – to which led the next and most logical question “and Roanoke Island is what?”.

So then we degenerated into some other discussion that terminated with “well, you can’t see the mainland from Newfoundland”.

The distance across the Straits of Belle Isle is only 18 miles at its narrowest part – less than the English Channel between the UK and France – and so that statement sounded like absolute nonsense and so I was determined to go along and see for myself, and this is how all of this started. I’ve spent 5 years planning for this

And so here I am at sea level in Red Bay on the southern shore of Labrador and in the distance are the hills of Newfoundland way across the Strait of Belle Isle.

And if you don’t believe me, just click on the image and see for yourself.

The … errrr … ship on the right of the image is the MV Bernier, a collier delivering coal to the bay in 1966 that slipped from its moorings in a November gale and ran aground on the rocks.

But I had a most amazing stroke of good fortune at Red Bay.

Red Bay was the site of a Basque whaling station in the 16th Century (and there is strong evidence to suggest that it was operational long before then – maybe even before Columbus sailed the Atlantic). Not only are there the ruins of a whale-oil distillery, but 4 sunken galleons and several small whalers, one of which has been recovered and put on display

They also rediscovered a cemetery containing the graves of basque whalers who had lost their lives jn the 16th Century, and this can be seen to the left of the Bernier.

Of course it is all closed up at this time of year but the Canadian Government has submitted it as a potential UNESCO World Heritage site and today there were some visitors from this being shown around. Of course, Yours Truly blagged his way onto the guided tour and was given the full VIP treatment.

It was truly remarkable

I forgot to take a photo of my hotel last night but this is the town in which is is situated – Mary’s Harbour.

This is a “new” town, being officially founded in the 1930s. Prior to that, everyone lived on an island called Battle Harbour but the settlement burnt down in 1930, so it was decided to create a new community for the inhabitants here on the mainland.

From here, it was to my startling discoveries at Red Bay.

And that wasn’t all either. Down the road at Point Amour is Canada’s second highest lighthouse.

It was of course closed when I got there but a lady was loading up her car and so she took some time out to explain things to me. She even told me where to go to see the remains of two ships stranded on the coast just down here.

So off I went for a wander along the coast to see for myself.

These are probably bits of HMS Raleigh, a British light cruiser that ran aground here in 1922, having swerved to avoid an iceberg in the Strait of Belle Isle. It was so well aground that it was impossible to move it and so they decided to dynamite it.

They calculated precisely the amount of explosive that they needed to split the ship into manageable portions, but totally forgot to take into account the quantity of ammunition that remained on board.

Consequently, huge portions of the ship were hurled many hundreds of yards inland where they remain to this day.

But some of the remains that you see relate to HMS Lily, a British man-o-war that had gone aground 50 years earlier. However the remains are so mixed up due to the explosion that it’s hard to tell which is which.

So that was my day really – and what a day it was.

And coming into Blanc Sablon there was a ferry moored in the harbour with steam up. Further enquiries revealed that it was the MV Apollo – the Newfoundland ferry, and it was leaving in half an hour so I had to get a move on if I wanted to catch it.

And so here I am in St Anthony, Newfoundland just 20 minutes away from L’Anse au Meadows and the Viking remains. Yes, I had a quick thrash through the dark right the way up Newfoundland to get here.

But what a cheesy place this B&B is – it’s furnished in the worst possible taste – all chintz and lace and nothing practical and all gone to ridiculous extremes.

It’s like something out of a bad 1920s novel and I can’t think what must have gone through the minds of the people who fitted this out. There are 7 pillows on the bed, for heaven’s sake, all laid out with military precision. One look at this place and the phrase “obsessive behaviour” sprang straight away to mind.

Still I’ll be gone tomorrow, I hope.

But that’s not definitive. There are some ominous rumblings in the distance. It seems that the ferry to Sydney, Cape Breton, may well have broken down. And the only other way off the island is back the way I came, and then to retrace my steps all the way over the Trans-Labrador Highway. And the weather has broken!

The road from Blanc-Sablon to some weirdly-named town beginning with N … "Natashquan" – ed … has not yet been built so I can’t get round to Sept Iles and then Baie-Comeau that way.

One other possibility is to have Casey shipped in a container by sea freight to wherever it is that Highway 138 begins – and when they told me how much that might cost (STARTING AT $400 – heaven alone knows what price it will finish at) I nearly fell through the floor.

But on reflection, if you think about it – the hotel at Labrador City, the one at Goose Bay, the one at Cartwright and the one at Mary’s Harbour came to almost twice that – and then there was the fuel and so on.

I shall have to look carefully into this. There’s a freighter leaving for there from Blanc Sablon next Friday.

-2

Tuesday 12th October 2010 – I’M IN GOOSE BAY THIS EVENING …

… the town, that is, not the bay itself, and I’m goosed.

This morning got off to a rather bad start. I was walking down a street somewhere in small-town America in a howling gale. I don’t remember who I was with, and we were watching this 8-storey brick-built rooming house which was swaying alarmingly in the wind. Suddenly the top four storeys were blown right off the building and crashed to the street with an almighty bang. The two of us dashed over to start to rescue the survivors and suddenly in the middle of all of this I sat bolt upright in my bed.

It’s been ages since I’ve had such a realistic dream as this.

So this morning I was up long before dawn and took piles of photos of Labrador City, only to find that I had the ISO on the wrong setting after last night’s photos, and I had forgotten to change it back. Hence, not a one came out, and was I upset?

Well, not quite. It wasn’t quite light when I took the photo of my motel this morning so I managed to salvage that.

And I’m not going to say anything about the motel at all – I’ll wait for another occasion after I’ve recovered. I was expecting the prices out here to be different than in most other places – 500 kms of dirt road to bring stuff out here will be responsible for that – but I wasn’t prepared for this.

If it wasn’t for the huge iron-ore mines out here, there wouldn’t be anything at all. But what we do have is, apart from the mine of course, a huge railway network for hauling away the output and that was one of the things that I had wanted to see.

Having grown up on The Land God Gave to Cain and similar books, to come out to Labrador to see the iron ore mines, the railway lines and the dams has been my main lifetime ambition ever since my childhood.

But back to the story of my drive over the trail. Today I drove about as far as yesterday, but the roads were a different thing altogether. Leaving Labrador City we had a paved road for all of about 50 kms and then that was about that.

Seeing an enormous snowplough coming towards me with its front all thoroughly plastered with snow gave me a little inkling of what the weather was likely to be, and as we climbed up onto the Labrador Plateau it started to snow.

The more the road deteriorated, the more snow we had and it started to become quite an adventure. The higher I climbed brought me up into the clouds and it became a question of not even being able to see what the weather was doing, and that was probably the best idea.

But Casey, Strawberry and I pressed on relentlessly along the worst road that I have ever driven, deep into the wilderness.

And Strawberry was well-rewarded because at a certain moment right up on top of the plateau with the wind whistling around from everywhere, one of his Canadian cousins slowly ambled across the road as if he owned it, which he probably did.

Strawberry was ever so excited as you can imagine and it brought me to a standstill for a good few minutes as the two of them exchanged pleasantries. Eventually cousin managed to manoeuvre himself into a good spot between a couple of trees where I could get a really good shot of him, and once he was sure that he had made his entry onto these pages, he made his excuses and left

We arrived at Churchill Falls and had a good hunt around to find the petrol station – it wasn’t easy to spot.

Churchill Falls is not on the main Trans Labrador Highway – it’s way off to one side and you need to drive down this road in order to find it. Fuel was $1.15 at Fermont but here it was $1.22 and that’s quite acceptable for where we are – after all there is no train hauling it up into the mountains just here and from the railhead it’s quite a way.

The falls though were a little disappointing, and for two reasons too. Firstly, at this time of the year it’s probably all frozen up high up in the mountains.

Secondly, the river has had part of its course diverted to feed the huge hydro-electric power station on the other side of town. But there isn’t too much to see – everything is inside a hollowed-out mountain, rather like Doctor Evil’s lair.

After Churchill Falls as we climbed back out of the river valley onto the plateau the little bit of paved road immediately petered out and from then on I can safely say that I was on the worst road that I have ever driven in my life as you can tell from the photo.

One stretch of 122 kms took over 4 hours to drive, and I don’t hang about as you know

At another point we were held up by a construction team (there were about 20 teams working up here and they could have done with 200 I reckon) for 10 minutes while they dynamited a huge rock.

And then we were held up for another hour or so while they shovelled it up from off the road as they had miscalculated the amount of dynamite to use. It certainly was spectacular watching lumps of rock the size of giant pumpkins flying down the road just a hundred yards from where I was parked.

And by the time they had finished, quite a little queue had built up

But the road really was awful – at times it was just like a sea of mud in places and I didn’t dare stop because I would never have started again.

After 3 hours of driving from Churchill Falls with just 87 kms on the clock it all became a little depressing. But eventually, after 122 kms we passed onto an area where the construction crews had finished and we could roll along at a much more relaxed 60 kph – even though the roads were nothing like anything that you would get anywhere else. Ruts and potholes, lakes of water, huge stones, these were all commonplace

.But that being the case, every so often you would catch a glimpse of the old road – the one that they used before they had the idea to make the Highway about 10 years ago.

Just imagine driving on that surface -you wouldn’t even manage 60 kilometres in a week on that. There just aren’t any words in the dictionary to describe that road

But all of a sudden, at exactly 191 kms from Churchill Falls there was a huge steep climb up over the mountains and Casey struggled up that, I can tell you, and as we dropped down the other side we found ourselves in a deciduous forest.

Yes, the deliniation of the climatic zone was as dramatic as that – you could draw a line to represent it. And as we drove through a steep-sided valley it was curious to note that in the valley floor and the north-facing slopes there were conifer trees, mosses and lichens yet on the south-facing slopes there were deciduous trees and grass. This kind of area is a real marginal climatic zone that’s for sure.

But who is this “we” that I’ve been talking about?

Well, in fact long before Churchill Falls when I had stopped to take a photo of something I was passed by a Ford F150 pickup followed by a Pontiac 7-seater MPV. Half an hour later I caught up with them again, and then lost them as I stopped again to take another pic or so.

And we continued like this all the way over the Labrador Plateau and right until we hit the paved road a few miles from Goose Bay, when they piddled off into the sunset. It really was quite strange continually catching them up at roadworks and so on. We must have made quite a strange convoy along that road.

Now if last night’s hotel was the most expensive in which I have ever stayed, today’s is the second. And not by much either. I reckon that I could have stayed for a night with a lady of ill-repute in each of these places and still been ahead of the game. I shall be looking into this.

Anyway, these are only a selection of photos and a short resumé of the journey. To see more, you need to go to this page, start at the beginning, and read on until the end.

-1

Monday 11th October 2010 – I’M IN LABRADOR CITY RIGHT NOW …

… in probably the most expensive hotel in which I’ve ever stayed in all my life, even when someone else was paying the bill. But that’s what everything is like around here. To give you an example, the petrol in Baie-Comeau is 108.4 cents per litre – at Manic 5 (the intermediate stop on Highway 389) just 213kms north, it was all of 132.4 cents. And a small mug of coffee cost me $1:50 instead ot the usual 50 cents.

So what I decided to do was that instead of spending three or four nights on the trail I’m going to do it in just two.

So today, I’ve driven 604 kms over some of the worst roads I’ve ever driven in the mud, rain and snow (it’s snowing outside) and a 12-hour day with 68 photos included, and here I am halfway round. And I’m exhausted too.

But the road is an adventure. The first 213 kms up to the immense barrage at the hydro-electric dam at Manic 5 (short for the Manicouagan River Dam no5) is a surfaced road and to drive this far was quite easy.

And the dam is certainly impressive too – it’s enormous and the photo can’t possibly do it any kind of justice.

As for the rest of the road, it is as you find it.

Generally speaking it’s compacted dirt but in the weather we are having just now it’s mostly mud and there are places along the trail where lorries have sunk in. It’s slippery too in the wet and I’ve had Casey across the road a couple of times when I’ve not been concentrating.

For a distance of several kilomtres through where the ghost town of Gagnon and its iron ore mine used to be, not only is the road surfaced but we even have a stretch of dual carriageway.

However, it’s not been maintained for probably 30 years since the mine closed and as a result it’s worse than parts of the dirt trail. And then once you cross the Cartier Railway line further along there just isn’t anything really – rail traffic has put paid to any pretext at keeping up the road and you have to pick your way between the potholes

But once you climb onto the Labrador Plateau you find yourself in the sub-arctic tundra. It’s totally wild up here, but beautiful and spell-binding

There are no grasses, just mosses and lichens and stunted fir trees.

And I’ve spent so much time up here admiring the view that I’ve lost the light and it’s snowing heavily again up there. I grope my way down in the dark and snow to the valley and Labrador City, and here, it’s teeming down with rain and there’s a biting wind.

Tomorrow I’m going to catch up on a couple of things I missed and then I’m going to do the second half – to Goose Bay.

A mere 520 kms.

-1

Saturday 10th October 2010 – RIGHT NOW…

… I’m sitting in a dingy motel room in Baie Comeau, a town that was built in the 1930s to handle the timber and subsequently the paper trade relating to all of the forests and so on around here.

At that time it was effectively the farthest north-eastern town (as opposed to “settlement”, of which there were plenty) in Quebec. They hadn’t yet discovered the iron ore and aluminium that led to the creation of Sept-Iles further up the coast.

>What’s interesting is that they have a rail link from here to Quebec City, would you believe?

There’s just about 10 kilometres of track on this side of the river to handle all of the paper traffic from the mill and then a rail ferry takes it across to Matane on the south shore of the St Lawrence from where it’s shipped by rail to Quebec City.

There’s quite a bit of sea traffic too. There are two huge freighters, of which this is one, anchored in the bay waiting to get in while a third one, the Australiaborg, owned by a Dutch shipping company, is currently being loaded at the dockside.

And of course there is the ferry over the St Lawrence to Matane. I’ve made a note of that for the return.

And don’t think that I’m complaining about my motel room either because I’m not. I’m on the economy budget plan as you know and a room here has only cost me $49 so I’m happy with that.

And not only that, it’s on the main road and nicely positioned for tomorrow when I head off into the interior. The Labrador Trail, Highway 389, starts just about 1km from my door and I’ll be on that tomorrow.

Talking of railways, sometime tomorrow I’ll be encountering the railway line that runs from Sept Iles up to Labrador City and all of the iron and aluminium lines in the interior. It might mean nothing to you at the moment but if you have ever read The Land God Gave to Cain by Hammond Egges, then this is the line that they were building all throughout the story, so it has some kind of literary interest.

My motel last night at St Simeon, despite being expensive, was quite comfortable and I was up and about quite early going for a little walk.

From here there’s a ferry across the St Lawrence that I sailed on in 2001, but I’m not going that way – I’m going much further along the river from here and then heading into the interior

But I’m not to be denied my ferry trip.

Back in 2001 I passed over the Saguenay River on the ferry that crosses here and I took it again this year.

But when I arrived here in 2001 it was dark and in the morning it was freezing cold so I didn’t gat to hang around too much and photograph the scenery. One of the things I had always planned to do was to come back and photograph it properly in the daylight, and here I am today.

And Strawberry Moose had a good photo opportunity today. Master Bates, Seaman Staines and Roger the cabin Boy, the crew of the Felix-Antoine Savard, did the honours as His Nibs posed for the camera. Luckily the ferry was comparatively empty.

And as for the weather, it might be freezing but at least we have bright sunlight. It could quite easily be raining.

I’m really off the beaten track now though. As well as the St Lawrence River and the scenery, I’ve encountered my first serious waterfall.

I think that this is the Riviere Sault aux Moutons – the River Leap-Sheep ad if the sheep were leaping over that waterfall they must have been pretty good. We have a parking place and a sign, but that’s our lot. Had this been in civilisation, we would have had a fanfare and a marching band, together with coloured lights.

There are several other ferries across the St Lawrence and I went to check them out. At Forestville, where there’s a ferry over to Rimouski, I was distracted by this.

Forestville was formerly an important logging town and to move the logs down to the river, they had a log flume. This was a wooden trough filled with water and they floated the logs down to the shore in it.

If you’ve ever been on the log flume ride at any adventure park, then you’ll be pleased to know that that attraction has been based upon this idea.

So here I am at Baie Comeau. I arrived at about 14:30 today so you are probably wondering why I didn’t press on. The fact is that the next motel once I hit the Labrador Highway is 213km away at Manic 5 and the route planner that I downloaded before I went says that it ought to take me all of 8 hours to do it.

It’s an unpaved dirt road with many bends apparently and with three long single-track bridges. I reckon that I ought to plan a full day to do that and if I do get ahead of myself I can drive on to Fermont, just another 250 or so kms further on.

There’s a few places to stop there as well.

-2

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: labrador city

Friday 15th September 2017 – I’M BACK …

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

Friday 8th September 2017 – I HAD A …

Friday 30th September 2016 – THEY CALL ME TRINITY

Tuesday 29th September 2015 – THAT WAS A NICE …

Monday 28th September 2015 – WHAT A GOOD NIGHT …

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

Thursday 25th September 2014 – A NATIONAL DISGRACE

Friday 28th January 2011 – We finally made it to the shops today …

Monday 8th November 2010 – I DID OK …

Friday 15th October 2010 – THIS ALL STARTED AS AN ARGUMENT, YOU KNOW.

Tuesday 12th October 2010 – I’M IN GOOSE BAY THIS EVENING …

Monday 11th October 2010 – I’M IN LABRADOR CITY RIGHT NOW …

Saturday 10th October 2010 – RIGHT NOW…

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