 | THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY 2010 |
| THE TRANS-LABRADOR HIGHWAY 2010 |
THE LABRADOR COASTAL DRIVE PART V
Having been for a saunter down to Charlottetown and Pinsent's Arm, I returned to the Labrador Coastal Drive with Casey's tripmeter reading 283.3 kilometres. However when I turned off the highway I had calculated that I had driven about 85 kilometres since rejoining the highway after visiting Cartwright. Consequently I'll be calculating the kilometres of the attractions along the next length of highway as (Casey's tripmeter - (- 283.3 + 85) 198.3) if that makes sense.
And I am not alone as I rejoin the highway. Out of nowhere, the sun has burst onto the scene and we are at the moment bathed in something of a blue sky. You have no idea just how pleased I am to see this. It seems like a year ago that I left Manic 5, the paved road and the sunshine behind.
Almost immediately I encounter a road sign. Port Hope Simpson is just 20 kilometres away and L'Anse au Loup is 208 kilometres. Forteau is also mentioned on this sign, and that is 220 kilometres away.
A mere cockstride, you might think, given some of the distances that I have been travelling this last few days but in fact I have several more deviations to make before I'm safely at the end of my journey.
Some parts of this road are awful. Round about 90.7 kilometres I am driving across lumps of bare rock - not even a pretence of surface. But about 2 kilometres or so further on I encounter all of the paraphernalia suggesting that there might be construction work just ahead, although I con't see what work they might be doing.
All around just here, and a little further on as well, this is not a road for going flat out on. It's merely solid lumps of rock protruding from the surface with sand or mud filling in between them, if you know what I mean
At kilometre 94.2 I encounter a loose gravel surface and shortly after I find the construction work. I had a suspicion that it might be a grader up here and I wasn't disappointed.
That lorry has just tipped a pile of gravel or whatever out onto the road and the grader is spreading it out. Not before time either because although this part of the Trans-Labrador Highway is nothing like as bad as it was up over the top on the Labrador plateau, nevertheless when you consider that I've been ... errr ... increasing my average speed considerably down some stretches of the highway, around here this is pretty poor.
And I don't really think that just spreading loose gravel around is going to be much good either. The first heavy rains and the first heavy snowplough will wash it all away. They really need to have a compacter up here to flatten it all in, and it's been days since I've seen a compacter working on this highway. Since leaving Baie Comeau, maybe 1500 kilometres ago, I've seen just TWO.
Strangely enough, as I was writing this up in the comfort and safety of my office at home, I was listening to "Tam Lin" from Liege and Lief
At least the weather has now cleared up eve if there is a biting wind outside. Here at 96.7 kilometres I crest the brow of a ridge and there is this nice huge rocky cliff face with a nice bay at the foot of it. This is also pretty spectacular.
There's a useful parking place just here too. It would make a really nice spot to park up for the night if you have come around here in a mobile home (although you will need to work out your fuel stops very carefully if you were to do that), or else to stop and eat your butty and brew up, if you are like me and on the economy package. Well, we were talking about biting, weren't we?
A little further along, I see the water on the other side of the road. Apparently that isn't a bay - it's a wide river. And it may well be the Alexis River too.
The Alexis is the river that flows by Port Hope Simpson and I can't be all that far from there right now. In fact it might even be that the town is right down there - what looks like some kind of white buildings on the far bank more-or-less dead centre in shot
I was right about the Alexis River. I was also right about Port Hope Simpson too - that's the town just across the river from the beautiful iron bridge in the foreground of this rather over-exposed photograph - I would have to get the sun right in the centre just above the object that I am trying to photograph, wouldn't I?
Not that I'm complaining, though. It's been a while since I've seen the sun and I am really happy that it's there.
And a steel bridge too - not a concrete one. This might suggest that the road around here may be older than the ones further north along the coast, although I have no evidence for that.
I went for a little perambulation out onto the bridge to look upstream to where I took luch a short while earlier. You can see the large hill just there, with the cliff sloping down to the water. I was somewhere away in the distance to the right of the river.
You can also tell by the differing shading of the colours that in the middle distance is some kind of promontory pushing out into the river. I had to drive around that, and so you can gather that I was somewhat mistaken with my idea of the water being "on the other side of the road".
And as if I don't have enough to worry about, you can see that my presence in Labrador has been noticed by the Kreigsmarine, and a passing U-boat has tried to torpedo the bridge with me standing on it. That's not so strange an idea either. During World War II a number of U-boats operated off the coast of North America with considerable success and it is known that landing parties put ashore on the coast of Labrador. There were even stories of torpedoes, having been fired at ships just off the coast but missing their targets, coming to rest on the beaches on the coast.
Seeing as the sun interrupted my shot of the Alexis River bridge here, I stopped at the top of the hill to take a reverse angle shot. There's a much better idea of the perspective from up here even though there isn't the same close-up view.
Once again, loads of deciduous scrub at the roadside. Now that I'm travelling south the climatic conditions seem to be ameliorating. Mind you, there are still a couple more mountain ranges to climb over yet but it's still encouraging.
I went for a little drive around the town to see what there was to see. And a little drive it was too, because it is only a little place. There are 500 or so inhabitants
Of course the sea is an important form of activity as you can imagine, but it wasn't always so. Although some kind of settlement has been here since at least the end of the 18th Century, judging by some artefacts that have been discovered, the town itself was created by the Labrador Development Company in 1934 to house workers engaged in the company's lumber activities, and named for Sir John Hope Simpson, who was Newfoundland's Commissioner for Natural Resources and Acting Commissioner for Justice.
Some scandalous things have been written about Sir John, the company, its owner John Osborn Williams, and Keith Yonge who was the company's manager, in respect of affairs at Port Hope Simpson. The fact that those comments remain in print even today after 75 years shows that the authors of those remarks and their publishers are not afraid to confront head-on any court action that might follow, and that those named persons have never seen fit to launch any such court action in order to defend their own reputations. Nevertheless, you must make up your own mind as to how much truth is contained in any such remarks.
There's still some kind of paper industry here - Bowaters hold the logging rights apparently and send timber from here to their pulp mill at Corner Brook, just across the Straits on Newfoundland's south-east coast.
There is also some shipbuilding here too, so I am told. although I imagine that these boats are a long way from being new. With cod being abundant on the Grand Banks in the old days, anyone who could handle an oar and any boat that could put to sea would be out at the merest hint of a favourable wind.
But in 1992 the cod fisheries collapsed and it's whelks and scallops now that are the attraction for the local mariners.
There's a hotel here too, and a Variety Store, which is the nearest thing to a village's grocery shop. Maybe that was the significance of the variety place that I saw earlier in Charlottetown - it could well have been the local shop.
What else there is here is also a garage and petrol station. And bearing in mind my experiences yesterday, I took the opportunity to fill the tank with as much fuel as would fit, even though I'm on 298.2 kilometres since I fuelled up in Cartwright this morning (which is 99.9 kilometres along the Labrador Coastal Drive from the turn-off to Cartwright, if you haven't been paying attention). I still haven't dropped as low as I was yesterday with only 193 kilometres on the clock. That was weird in Goose Bay, that fuel situation.
I also fuelled up myself with coffee and seeing as there was an air line I checked the tyres. I reduced the pressure in the front offside ftom ... errr ... 90psi to 30 psi, and reduced the pressure in the front nearside to 30psi from 50 psi - yes, I'm no judge of air pressures without a gauge and I've been worrying needlessly, so it seems.
Tyre pressure in psi while fuel is in litres? Canada is a very confusing country.
And so that was that. Port Hope Simpson is an extremely pretty place to come to visit, although the bright sunshine certainly helps. But the road around the town is diabolical. I don't know what they spend the property taxes on but it isn't on that, I'll tell you. And with having reduced the pressures in the tyres I can feel all of the bumps a little more.
Still, only 48 kilometres to Mary's Harbour, so I am reliably informed by this road sign.
I reset the tripmeter to zero at the petrol station at Port Hope Simpson and so from now on for the next while I'll be giving the kilometres from there. And so for that reason I can safely say
that this is the view
from kilometre 3.2
I'm a poet, and don't I know it?
And is it not a stunning view from here? This definitely has to be one of the contenders for the best photo of the 2500 or so that I took during my 7-week stay in Canada and the USA.
And as I go round the bend at kilometre 4.0 I can see my bridge and the river again. It's certainly beautiful from up here.
While I'm on the subject of the Alexis River, it's recently been the subject of several studies by a company called Monroe Minerals. One of the things that are being considered is the question of whether there might be gold here. I also understand that uranium is another mineral that has been mentioned around here.
The benefit of having a good high-quality telephoto zoon lens on the Nikon
And so here is a close-up of the bridge, hacked out of the previous image. There's also another torpedo passing under the bridge, and you'll notice that the deciduous trees are now definitely losing their foliage. Winter is acumen in. Lhude sing Rudolph.
At 17.5 kilometres south of Port Hope Simpson I burst over the brow of yet another hill and this is the view that is presented to me. I'm not talking about the road surface, which is in surprisingly good condition, but the bay and the scenery in the background. It's all getting to be rather spellbounding.
1 kilometre down the road may well be a hidden cave but it's also the turning onto Highway 513, the St Lewis Access Road. St Lewis is one of the places that I'm planning to visit and so we will be leaving the highway just here.
Before we turn off though, there's another beautiful view here over this huge lake or estuary on the right that we have been following for a little while.
Even though the clouds are now closing in again it is still quite beautiful as I catch occasional glimpses of it through the trees, but there isn't a single photograph that I can take from any one spot that would do it any kind of justice at all. But isn't photography just like that?
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