Oh Canada! June 8th - Port Hope Simpson, Labrador to Blanc Sablon, Quebec

Day 11 Friday, June 8^th – Blanc Sablon

We drove today down a part of Labrador known as the Labrador Straights.  Most of the people in Labrador live in this 80K stretch, and most of the places ‘normal’ tourists visit are in this section.

A portend of what lay ahead of us this day.
Actually kind of funny, because ANY turns off this road, left or right, were extremely few and far between.

Here and below, more examples of the wood and wood sleds we saw along the way.  Nobody messes with anyone else's wood.

Junco in the treetop

There was a nice little place called Round Hill Pond Heritage Park where we stopped to stretch our legs and use the facilities.  Facilities were locked - remember, this is a little earlier than their normal tourist season - but we did manage to stretch our legs.  

That little building in the background is where Chris was hoping there would be an indoor facility.

There was a very nicely maintained boardwalk that allowed us to access the pond without sinking into the tundra.  Though we did have fun finding a suitable 'step off' spot when we saw that the facilities were locked.

Round Hill Pond

Farther on down the road we saw this great Inukshuk family built on a cliff top.  Couldn't help snapping a few pictures of it.

Shortly after our start this morning we ended the gravel road portion of the trip and hit pavement again.  I must say I was not sorry to lose the dust. 

As we drove along, all of a sudden we looked at the ocean and…. ICEBERGS!  YEA!!  Just like the sign said!  There they were, all ghostly and spooky looking out on the waters.  We were pretty psyched!

Our first stop along the way was the small village of St. Louis where we read there was a trail to the top of a hill called Fisherman’s Point and a 360 view of the area. This village wasn’t written up in either the official Newfoundland/Labrador Tourist book or in Fodor’s book , but we did find it written up in a small brochure about the Labrador Coastal Drive. 

The quintessential picturesque fishing village of St. Lewis, Labrador

And he shall go no more arovin'

I tell you, it was a wonderful place to go!  The view from the top was spectacular – cold, raw and windy – but beautiful!  We saw several icebergs.  Again, we were blessed with a beautifully clear day, so the view was perfect!

There was a wonderful long boardwalk all the way to the top and beyond.  It both helps with walking on the uneven and boggy terrain, and keeps folks from trampling the fragile tundra environment.

The waves thundered up through this narrow trough in the rocky shore

A picturesque scene, I thought

Bergs and bergy bits

A good shot of the boardwalk all along the beautiful windswept landscape

As in Cartwright, we had to head back to the car for more outer gear before we took the walk to the top

That's John out on the platform

The wind does wonders for ones 'do'.

There is so much fresh water trapped in ponds on the low bedrock bluffs above the ocean here, It amazes us.  It is very similar to the landscape we’d encounter the next day in L’Anse aux Meadows which is considered sub-arctic tundra.  Very interesting!

Do you see the Inukshuk someone buit in the pond?  And look at that erratic on top of the far bluff.

An example of the many many many inland ponds all along the area we walked.

As we were sitting on a rock enjoying the view a weathered looking local fellow stopped to sit and visit for a while.  I just love to listen to the locals talk - love the accent and love the turns of a phrase.   I wish I’d have been able to record him. 

He said he’d lived there all his life and hunted.  I asked him what he hunted, he said mostly partridge, rabbit, porcupine and so on.  Of course, he said, you had to be very careful when you skin a porcupine, cuz of the spines.  I asked how he prepares porcupine and he said mostly baked but sometimes fried up.  He said it’s better eatin’ than rabbit.

(For those who might be interested, here's a recipe I found on-line for Porcupine Stew)

http://www.recipe4all.com/recipe/Porcupine-Stew-1320/  

He told us that one night this past winter his dog started barking, but didn’t want to go outside when he opened the door to let him out.  When the fellow looked out the screen door he came face to face with a polar bear who was looking back at him!  He said he was stuttering trying to tell his wife what was going on, went into the living room and there was the bear again, looking at him through the living room window.  He ended up shooting his gun off to scare the bear, and the bear did finally take off.

Turns out polar bear encounters aren’t too uncommon along the straits and even into the island of Newfoundland.  As the winter pan ice breaks up and moves south, the seals move south with it.  Seals are the bears’ main food source, so the bears follow the seals south along the coastline.  When the ice finally melts the bears migrate back north via a combination of swimming and across land.  As beautiful as polar bears are, I surely wouldn’t want to meet one in the wild.  I’d end up as a quick snack for sure.

On the way back down the path we passed a young couple heading up the path and nodded our hellos.  John noticed he didn’t see another car parked by ours and wondered how they got to the path.  I suggested their car might not have been able to make the steep rutty drive to the trail head from the ‘main’ road, and sure enough, we saw a small Toyota Yaris hybrid parked at the bottom of the steep trail head access road.  More about the Yaris later.

Our next stop was the small village of Lodge Bay, listed in the Labrador Coastal Drive brochure as one of the most picturesque villages on the drive.  Well….. not exactly.  

However, John drove up one lonely dirt road at the edge of town that climbed to a hilltop and ended at an old cemetery.  We decided to eat lunch, Chris grumbling that it wasn’t a very pretty setting and there was no water view, wah wah wah.  When we rolled down our windows though, we clearly heard the sound of rushing water.  ‘Aha!’, we both inferred when we looked at each other – John with a bit of an ‘I told you so’ look in his eye, and Chris with a bit of an ‘ok, you were right’ look in her eye. 

We went to check it out and saw a couple of footbridges.  As we were heading toward them, a fellow with a pole and hand held fish net came past us and nodded a hello.  We followed, and saw a beautiful roaring mountain stream thundering down to the Bay. 

(John describes it as high discharge, supercritical flow, with a Reynolds number greater than 500 in some places, the flow perturbed by cubic yard sized well rounded boulders.)

(Chris describes it as a beautiful roaring stream.)

Chris was sorry the pictures wouldn't capture the sound, so decided to take a video of it. As good fortune would have it, just at the time she was filming, the fisherman got a catch, and we were able to film him landing a beauty of a trout!  So it was a nice little unexpected celebration party right there on the footbridge in Lodge Bay, Labrador. 

You can watch the video on my YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huiryvOdlEU&feature=plcp

I guess is the moral of the story is, always go for the road less traveled.

Notice he's standing OUTSIDE the railing above this really thundering stream.  

Getting down that bank with the water flowing as fast as it was is not for the faint of heart.  

The prize!
(uh, that would be the trout, not me)

In this stretch of Labrador known as the Labrador Straits, the villages are much closer together.  Hence our ability to stop several times throughout the day.  I guess we’re officially out of the wilderness now.  Sigh….

Red Bay was our next stop.

We got there just in time to get a quick but reasonably adequate look at the whaling museum there.  John was particularly fascinated by it.  

Red Bay had been a whaling port as early as the 16^th century when Basque sailors used it seasonally to hunt whale for oil and baleen.  It earned its name by the amount of whaling blood in the bay – so much that it turned the water red.  Pretty grisly and shameful by today’s social mores, but at that time, whale oil was a main source of oil used for lamps.  Baleen was used for a variety of things as well.  

Can you imagine this beautiful bay running red with the blood of whales?  It's a tragedy we still haven't recovered from.  The primary targets were the right whales, members of the bowhead family, called right whales because it was the 'right whale' to catch - easy pickins - and they still are endangered.

Closer up shot - notice the ship wreck just before the rocky promontory and the ice berg at sea.

More shameful to my mind is the 15 years that the museum guide told us about when the baleen became more valuable than the oil - primarily due to women’s fashions – corsets and such that used baleen to make stays.  During those years, sailors would kill the whales, cut out the throats and leave the rest of the animal to rot.  It’s just like today when poachers kill elephants only for their tusks, or rhinos only for their horns or sharks only for their fins, or bear only for their glands, etc etc. 

Bowhead whale flipper skeleton and model of basque whaler from the 1500s.  The museum has some actual clothing worn by these men, and it was interesting to see how small they were.  Much smaller than average men today.

Reconstructed 400 year old 'chaloupe' whaling boat alongside a 17.5 foot bowhead mandible from an individual they believe was about 50' long.

Interior of the chaloupe

This beautiful and wonderfully detailed model shows the cross section (below) of a typical basque whaling ship of the time

We stayed till the museum closed at 6:00 and then walked across the parking lot to have dinner at the Whaler’s Restaurant where we split an order of their specialty, fish and chips.  Good stuff.

On the way to Blanc Sablon, we crossed the Pinware river.  Pinware Provincial Park was an area I had hoped to visit, but that will have to be another trip.  We just didn't have enough time to do everything we wanted to.

Looking upstream of the Pinware River from the bridge.  Notice that the banks on both sides are smoothed solid bedrock.  Way cool!

And soon it was goodbye to Labrador.  We crossed the border back into Quebec at Blanc Sablon and waved goodbye to the Big Land in our rear view mirror.  Hopefully we’ll get just a touch more of it on our way back from Newfoundland, and explore a bit of L’Anse Amour and L’Anse au Clare. 

Our room this night was at the Quatre Saisons, or Four Seasons B&B in Blanc Sablon, Quebec.  We’ll stay there again when we come back from Newfoundland.  The room was nice and the breakfast good and filling.  Our host is part Newfie, part aboriginal and part French, I think it was. 

Point of interest:

Everywhere we stayed, even in the most remote parts of Labrador, we had access to wireless high speed internet, but no cell phone service along the entire route so far.  Hmmm.