 | THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY 2010 |
| THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY 2010 |
ICEBERG ALLEY and ST LEWIS
I turned off the main highway at about 18.5 kilometres from my latest fuel stop which was at Port Hope Simpson. And so my recorded distances along Iceberg Alley will be (Casey's tripmeter - 18.5), to give you some idea of where the attractions are.
Whales and icebergs seem to be the thing to look out for along here, but if I encounter any of them along the highway I'll know that I am having serious problems.
I probably won't see any in the sea either. It's the wrong time of year for icebergs and I'll be lucky to see a whale, even though up to now along the Trans-Labrador Highway I have already seen porcupines, moose and a bear.
I had a quick glance in the rear view mirror as I was leaving the car to photograph the road sign. That was well-worth a photograph as well, even though it doesn't have quite the same rugged splendour as the Upper Labrador plateau.
It's clouding in now unfortunately, after the hour or so of beautiful sunshine, but it's still beautiful. And so is the enormous isthmus or loch or fjord or whatever it is. I shall be intrigued to see how I'm going to cross over that.
And look at the road surface. I've travelled along much worse roads than this as well.
The first object of interest is a sign telling me that the St Lewis Coastal Fisheries are just 15 kilometres away. That might mean that the sea is only 15 kilometres away from here, but I reckon that the town of St Lewis is a good way further on than that.
And indeed it is. I'm at kilometre 26.6 here and I haven't even seen the sea, let alone anything else worth photographing up to now. But I have found this.
Why I have singled this out for a photo in preference to any one of a million lakes that I have already encountered on my travels is that it isn't a lake. It is, would you believe, a pond. Round Hill Pond in fact. And if it really is a pond, then I would dearly like to see what a lake looks like from this close up.
So just in case you do not believe me, here's a close-up of the sign that says Round Hill Pond. You will of course notice that it mentions on the sign the possibility of swimming. Now who on earth would go swimming for pleasure in this pond? In fact, who at all would go swimming for pleasure anywhere in Labrador? It has however warmed up quite dramatically from the other day when I was up on the Labrador plateau and it is now a handsome 5°C.
It is I suppose all part of Canadian bragging, like having stickers that say "do not push" on the back of their lorries that are crossing over to the USA. Something along the same lines as advertising Grizzly Bear wrestling tournaments.
I've been observing a radio mast ahead of me for a little while and at 27.5 kilometres along the road I finally have a clear view of it. It's the biggest radio mast that I have seen for some considerable number of years. Now that is clearly significant and its obviously indicative of something although I'm not quite sure what.
There's a couple more dead ahead of me too. You can see them in the photo, the smaller ones, and this is all clearly significant. It can only mean one thing, and that is that I am approaching the Atlantic Ocean and the shipping lanes. I can't think of anything else that they might be here for.
It won't have escaped your notice that the road has deteriorated pretty badly too.
So round the bend and around the ridge in the centre of the previous image, and here's a parking place with a tourist information noticeboard and a fine view over the settlement of St Lewis.
It's a shame that the image hasn't worked out due to the gathering gloom but I was completely captivated by this small village. It had the most beautiful setting of anywhere that I had encountered to date.
Next stop, just a short way down, is the radio station with the big mast. Looking more closely at it, I reckon that it's a LORAN C station. That's some kind of radio navigation system that by using a grid of interlocking stations dotted about the coast an aeroplane or ship can pinpoint its position to within a quarter of a mile.
It's obsolete now, its accuracy having been superseded by what is on offer with GPS systems. The network covering the USA ceased operations in February 2010 and the Canadian system was on the point of closing down as I was here, that is in October 2010. But when it was developed, it certainly was exciting.
LORAN, or LOng Range Aid to Navigation, is another one of these by-products of the war and was originally developed from the need of merchant shipping to give pinpoint accuracy of the position of U-boats that were attacking them so that the protecting forces could hunt them down, and also of course for the merchant vessels themselves to be located by the destroyers that were coming to escort them.
Originally a British proposal, the idea was developed by an American scientist, Alfred Loomis, in October 1940, and in less than a year a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Melville Eastham produced a working model. Once it had been finely tuned it could provide an accurate navigational fix at a range of 700 miles during the day and 1400 miles at night, no matter what the weather was doing. Such was the speed of development that it followed the USA into World War II by a matter of just weeks.
There are the other radio masts that I saw from a few kilometres back. I'm not quite sure what they might be. I did have a suspicion of some kind that they might be something related to the Cold War and the NATO (read "American" air defence system). We're too far south for it to be the DEW line just here.
Yes, racking my brains for a minute or two, it's PINETREE - that's what it's called. A bit of a rush-job radar line that was outdated almost as soon as it was built because its World War II technology could not cope with the advent of low-flying jet bombers and nuclear missiles. It couldn't pick up anything flying close to the ground and its range was such that even if it did manage to pick up something it could never give out a warning and have a positive reaction quickly enough to prevent an enemy incursion over the populated zones of the USA.
..Errr... and Canada of course. Mustn't forget Canada. It was to protect Canada too.
Of course.
It was quite a feat to build these stations in these out-of-the-way places back in the early 1950s - look at the steepness of the construction road going up there - and so it must have been disappointing that the system was dismantled so quickly.
The actual working life of PINETREE was probably not even 10 years although some of the stations remained operational for a longer period, mainly for reasons other than detecting hostile Russian atom-bombers. This one here, opened in 1954, bit the dust pretty quickly.
Anyway, let's forget depressing thoughts of military sabre-rattling and so on and admire the scenery. It is without any doubt the most spectacular part of the most spectacular day that I have ever had for scenery and the like.
I remember sitting here for a good ten minutes totally spellbound by the view and the atmosphere of the place. It was as if I had actually found a home here. I have never ever seen a place more beautiful than this or a place in which I would be happy to spend much more time.
I bet that that remark has just made house prices plummet along the Labrador coast.
To snap me out of my reverie, for reverie it really was, the wind suddenly changed direction, blew a few clouds out of the way, and produced a blue sky.
With the wind and the sky changing like this, the sun suddenly put in a dramatic appearance. And just as it was about to come out of the cloud right in front of me, I managed to snap, at exactly the right moment, a photograph that even I thought was stunning, even though it was me who took it!
I was quite proud of this.
So while you are admiring the absolutely stunning scenery of St Lewis and its surroundings, what can I tell you about the place? Actually, quite a lot because St Lewis is one of the oldest settlements along the Labrador coast. And when you look at the beautiful sheltered harbour just here, it isn't any wonder why that might be so.
It was first depicted on a map of 1502, and that dates it to just a couple of years after the epic voyages of discovery by John Cabot. But this dating, early though it is, might not be telling the whole story either. There is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that this area may well have been known to European fishermen and the like long before the voyages of Columbus.
One such example of this that is often quoted concerns beaver pelts. Back in the old days, all of the beaver pelts in Europe came from Russia or that part of the world and were treated in a particular fashion. There is however said to be some record of a 13th century Spaniard or Basque person selling pelts in Spain that were treated differently. When these pelts were examined more closely in more recent times, it was observed that these pelts were not Russian at all, and furthermore they had been treated in exactly the same fashion that the Iroquois of North America treated their beaver pelts.
Mind you, in my opinion the evidence assumed from the beaver pelts should be treated with caution. We are only a short day's sailing from the Viking communities on Newfoundland and they certainly came to exploit the raw materials of the mainland and to trade with the Skraelings. They stated quite clearly that in some of their voyages from Vinland they travelled northwards in search of trade. A site such as this so close to their settlements would have held a great attraction for them.
Furthermore, there is unquestionable evidence that the Greenlanders were still visiting the coast of Labrador as late as 1347 (in that year a Greenland ship, loaded with timber said by the crew to have been brought from Markland and which could only possibly have come from Labrador was blown off-course in a gale and struggled into a harbour in Iceland), and there is also unquestionable evidence that there was European trade and even piracy raids into Greenland in this era.
Therefore these beaver pelts could have found their way into Europe from North America in the ordinary course of trade, or as gains of pillage. If the latter, then the edict of Pope Nicholas V forbidding slave raids and piracy into Greenland would probably have made any vendor of these beaver pelts extremely reluctant to disclose their origins.
It has been suggested that the fishermen from the early 16th Century created some kind of fishing centre here. There are claims that boat construction was carried out here at that time and that some ships left crew members here throughout the winter to deal with certain maintenance issues that might arise on whatever facilities were here. No question of wasting valuable fishing time during the season.
The next important group of visitors to the area were the missionaries. They reported on the inhabitants of whatever settlement there might have been here, describing them as "industrious" - quite an important consideration back in the 16th and 17th Century where one's pathway to heaven depended upon how hard one worked at creating wealth for the rich financial sponsors of the church in those days.
Of course, the only hope of salvation for the evil exploiters of the hard-done-by labouring classes was to buy absolution or to make enormous bequests to the church.
But what all of the foregoing has to do with the history of St Lewis I haven't the slightest idea.
St Lewis is the farthest easternmost permanent mainland settlement in Canada and so until the arrival of the military personnel the community depended upon the harvest of the sea. A family called the Loders ran a fishing station here for many years and built quite a bit of infrastructure. After they closed down, the premises fell into some kind of decay but they have now been restored as something of a local museum.
It goes without saying that it was closed when I was here. I never have much luck with my museum-visiting activities this was written of course before I visited Red Bay just down the coast.
So with the decline of the post-war military activity the population is in slow but steady decline. The local technology expert has clearly headed for the hills long ago as the village website hasn't been updated since 2006, when I checked in February 2011.
I'm not sure why it ought to be in decline, though. I would have thought that with attractions such as the annual Ronald Strugnell Memorial Dog Team Race, surely a rival to the Grizzly Bear Wrestling tournaments or the Ice-Floe Skipping tournaments elsewhere in Labrador, potential residents would be beating a path to the door of the local estate office.
And quite right too, if you ask me. Whether it is that the sun is now shining - even glowing - brightly and looking like a real summer day just now or whether it's simply a question of the atmosphere or of the marvellous scenery, this is the most attractive place that I have ever visited and I could see myself quite easily settled in a place like this.
And so with 53.7 kilometres (a real figure of 35.2 kilometres along the road) on Casey's tripmeter, we turned back towards the Labrador Coastal Drive.
Almost immediately on leaving the village there was a sign telling me that Port Hope Simpson is 51 kilometres away (I'm not going to argue too much with that) and Mary's Harbour is 59 kilometres away. That latter is where I'm heading next. That could well be my next overnight stop.
On my way back to the Coastal Drive a tiny little critter ran across the road just in front of me. It was very short, no more than 5 or so inches of body but its tail was long and extremely bushy, just like a squirrels, and it was really quick as it ran.
It was much smaller than a squirrel and of course there are no big trees around here for it to hide in. And so, natural history not being my forte, and not even my thirtynine either, I've no idea what it might have been. If you have any ideas, please
©