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The entrance to the Trans Labrador Highway
in Happy Valley-Goose Bay is a strange sight: at a bend on the main street,
a narrow gravel road dives abruptly into the Labrador wilderness, looking
more like a minor logging road than a highway. Known to Labradorians as
the Freedom Road, it was completed in 1992, linking communities that had
previously had no highway connections to the outside world. From here it was
288 kilometers to Churchill Falls, with no towns or services of any kind
in between.
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On the TLH I was constantly aware of the road
itself, of the process of its construction and its impact on the land.
The first photo at left shows an unimproved section
of the road; the second photo shows a stretch of
the highway that had recently been improved
from the original tote road to a Class "A" maintenance road. Enormous quantities
of earth must be excavated and/or built up to make the road straighter
and more level, and because the soil here is poor and the growing season
is short, the scars will show for a very long time, perhaps indefinitely.
Much of the road was built along gravelly glacial eskers, which accounts
for both the winding route and the rough surface.
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As this sign warns, central Labrador's
pristine boreal forest is regularly disturbed by low-level flight exercises
conducted by the Canadian, British, German, and Dutch air forces at the
Goose Bay air base. The Europeans are here because there is no suitably
unpopulated territory in their own lands. The Innu and Inuit (Eskimo) nations
protest this disturbance of their ancestral hunting lands, but so far to
no avail.
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About 36 miles outside of Goose Bay we encountered this group of cyclists
en route from Churchill Falls, accompanied by two support vehicles. As
impressive as such a ride may seem, in 1996 Robert and Veronika Matzinger
cycled the entire route, from Quebec City to St. John's, Newfoundland,
with no support.
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The highway between Goose Bay and Churchill Falls is under heavy construction.
Unlike construction zones I've seen in the U.S. and elsewhere in Canada,
these areas have no flag men or detours; you simply have to figure out
how to get around the heavy equipment, rocks, and loose earth. |
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Here is the essence of Labrador: spruce
trees, bogs, and lots of water everywhere. Snowfall is heavy, winters are
long (the ground is snow-covered for six months or more) and drainage is
poor. Scenes like this are common throughout northern Canada. |
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The scenery along the TLH can't be called spectacular for the most
part, but this view of one of the many rivers we saw between Goose Bay
and Churchill Falls (possibly the Churchill River)
was stunning. The drop-off from the road was steep and very abrupt, with
no guard rails. Perils like this are very common along the route. |
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It's perfectly legal to pull off and camp anywhere along the TLH, and
many people do it, as this campsite attests.
We planned to camp for a night by the road and try our hands at fishing,
but the weather turned against us - braving the black flies was bad enough
without having to put up with rain, too. We put on headnets to walk around
this area, but still couldn't handle the swarms. Most people camp in trailers
here, not in tents, and it was pretty obvious why. |
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Instead we spent the night at the Black Spruce Lodge in Churchill
Falls, a town of around 600 people that exists solely to support the
massive Churchill Falls power generation facility. The whole town is owned
by the Hydro company, which provides plenty of services, including stores,
hotel, school, library, and excellent indoor recreation facilities (the
kids don't go outside to play because of the bugs). The population has
dropped from over 6,000 during construction of the plant and continues
to fall as automation reduces staffing needs, so many of the town's houses
have been removed, leaving huge vacant areas. It's an eerie, treeless,
Soviet-looking place, but the friendly people we met made it a pleasant stop. |
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The free tour of the underground hydro facility
was a highlight of our trip. There were only seven of us on the tour (including
two people who were on the ferry to Goose Bay with us), so we could ask
plenty of questions. The Churchill River was diverted underground here
(leaving the natural Churchill Falls nearly bone dry) to create the largest
hydroelectric facility in North America, supplying power primarily to the
northeastern United States. Our photos failed to capture the site's awesome
scale. |
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West of Churchill Falls the landscape becomes flatter, with patches
of wet, boggy sub-arctic tundra, and the road is much better. Many areas
along the road show evidence of fire, and nature's
resilience as plant life returns. |
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This wolf was surprisingly unafraid
of us, trotting calmly alongside the Jeep for a couple minutes. Labrador's
wildlife includes large numbers of bears, moose, and a huge caribou herd
numbering around 600,000, but we saw no other mammals on our drive. Hunting
and fishing outfitters are a big industry here. |
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The Trans Labrador Highway ends at the iron mining towns of Labrador
City and Wabush, near the Quebec border, with
a combined population of around 10,000. The atmosphere here is surprisingly
normal (a far cry from Churchill Falls), marred only by the weird orange
smoke belched by the smokestacks at the mines. We spent some time at the
mall and hiking a short trail to a waterfall, but decided to push on into
Quebec instead of stopping at the rather dire provincial park outside of
town. |
Labrador,
Part 2: Trans Labrador Highway
