The Furthest Point at the End of the Road
Red Bay Labrador
A wave of loneliness and sadness washed over me like a thunderstorm rolling over a sunny afternoon when I realize that I was moments away from reaching the furthest point on my east coast adventure. I didn’t want my trip to end and I didn’t want to reach this milestone but the winds carried me on and I knew there was no resisting the inevitable. Now I was quickly approaching the end of the road in a very literal sense.
Travelling up the length of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, I noticed that the sun was dropping lower in the sky with each noon and the nights were getting colder even though it was just the beginning of September. A cold wind blew constantly and I shrivered into my merino wool, sleeping in thermal layers and shrugging on multiple sweaters in the morning. The cold could be from the end of summer but it was more likely because I’d climbed further and further north. I’d started near the 42nd parallel, lower than the top border of California near Windsor Ontario and Point Pelee, the southern most point of Canada at the height of summer. Now I was past the 51st latitude and halfway to the 52nd.
The ferry from Newfoundland to Labrador begins in Saint Barbe and actually goes to Blanc-Sablon in Quebec. It takes about two hours and the time difference is half an hour as this part of Quebec and Labrador are on Atlantic Time (GMT -4 hours) where as Newfoundland is beyond Atlantic (GMT -3.30). Blanc-Sablon is at the border with Labrador and when exiting the ferry there are just two roads: East to Labrador and West to Old Fort 75km away. There is no coastal road through Quebec to Montreal and the only way to drive back would be to go through Labrador and take Expidition 51, a 1,700 km route through the Labrador to the Quebec interior.
I went East along the Trans-Labrador Hwy heading for Point Amour Lighthouse at the dying light of the setting sun. Point Amour is the closest point to Newfoundland where the Gulf of St. Lawrence narrows to roughly 150 kilometres. In the winter this funnels ice flows into a narrow constriction that requires an icebreaker to carve a path for the ferry back and forth across the straight. There was no ice but this point is home to the tallest tallest lighthouse in Atlantic Canada and second highest in the country. It is home to the earliest known funeral monument in the New World, created between 6,100 and 6,600 B.C. Interestingly, the burial had a well-preserved skeleton of a child with a number of tools and weapons. It is about 800m from the waters edge but that is because glacial rebound has moved the land up. When the person was burried, it would have been at the edge of the water.
Labrador is remote but there are some surprisingly nice beaches. The sand at Point Amour was granular but still very soft and a short distance away is Pinware River Provincial Park where a large sandbar sticks out at the mouth of the Pinware river. I don’t imagine the water is warm but I was somewhat surprised to find such beautiful beaches.
The furthest point of my East Coast trip would be Red Bay. It is a small community along the Labrador coast with a history of fishing and whaling. From the 1500s to the 1600s it was a major Basque whaling station leading to the designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Later it was important to the cod fishing industry but now it is mostly known because of Parks Canada and the Red Bay National Historic Site of Canada which recognizes the whaling history.
Along the way there I passed a pullout that looked inland with these large boulders on a rise that seemed significant. They marked the landscape, if not geographically then spiritually. It was easy to imagine how the First Nations might have stories for these rocks but I don’t know them. They seemed like monuments and in the distance was the Pinware river.
Right before Red Bay are two hikes: Tracy hill and Boney shore. The Tracy hill trail went up the side of a hill on boardwalks to spectacular views of Red Bay and the St. Lawrence. It climbed up and up in to the clear sky and the community in the bay got smaller and smaller. With each step the sky opened and the landscape became wider and vaster. Inland, I knew I was looking at lands that might never have been walked on and where no one existed well past the horizon.
At the top the panoramic view felt like the images I’d seen of the Skyline trail in Cape Breton and I hoped that trail would be equally as impressive when I got to it. For now though, I enjoyed the warmth of the sun and the empty expanse. This trail was so beautiful that it could be a top five hike of mine.
I didn’t want to leave and a local chatted with me about the history of the area as well as some places to check out on Cape Breton. When I went down I checked out Boney Shore and saw some whale bones. When Red Bay was an active whaling station the bones were discarded on the beach across from the community. They harvested so many whales that the beach became white with the bones of the whales. A lot of the bigger bones have since been removed, probably by trophy hunters but there are a lot of vertebrates still scattered among the tall grass and wild berries.
The Red bay interpretive centre was okay but nothing special. I wasn’t particularly interested in the whaling history but there was an hourly boat to the Saddle island that blocks the harbour entrance. While waiting I chatted with a woman who told me about a book that was written on St. John’s vernacular Architecture and Tilting on Fogo island. She was on a trip with her husband. They were retired and lived in Montreal but had a summer home in St. John’s. This was their second trip to Red Bay, the first having taken place 40 years ago.
Saddle Island has an interpretive walk that takes about an hour. The most interesting piece is an inter-war period ship wreak that was along the shore.
After, I drove out of town to mark the furthest point in my trip. From here, the Trans-Labrador Highway, Expidition 51 becomes a gravel road for 100km to Battle Bay on an island off the coast. I didn’t think it was prudent with the street-bias tires I had because if I had a flat tire or a breakdown I had no way to get help. There would be no cell service and I’d need to flag down a passing car.
The suddenness of going away to coming back was abrupt and somewhat unsettling. I’ve spent so much time looking at destinations on the map and plodding along day by day that it was an uncomfortable reality that I now needed to reorient myself back to the west. Reaching this milestone and begining the return journey meant that the trip was half-over, more so, because the return trip wouldn’t be as long. I would have liked summer to last longer so that I could drive across Canada. I feel like I could travel for a year camping in my Element and cover the Americas. But I want to come home too. I want to have a break and rest, recoup, and maybe reflect on what I’ve accomplished.
But I cannot. I have no home. There’s nothing to return to — not physically. Like the anguishing month of July, to return to Toronto is to approach the unknown yet again. It means spending money on short term accommodations while I hunt down an apartment lease. It means becoming an adult again and starting a career. It means finding a job and working 9–5 at a desk. What comes first? The job or the apartment. It’s a chicken an egg problem that I’m not at all enthusiastic to solve.
Rather, I have dreams to have my own home that is a form of alternative living. Before, it was to renovate an abandoned warehouse but there are none in Toronto. Now it’s to take a small barge and build a home on it. Consistently, it is to have some way to have my own space, to live different, and not suffer the crushing pressure of high rent in condos not designed for livability. I have other dreams to continue my architectural research that began with my self-published book and so it comes down to figuring out how to accomplish all of my goals and in what sequence.
I wasn’t ready for this moment to end or to return so I went back to the trailhead and sat around for a bit, first listening to music and then editing some vlogs. I couldn’t get far through because I needed to transfer images from the computer to Dropbox and import them onto the phone. My phone is constantly out of space and I don’t have access to wifi very often. When I eventually left, it was to drive as far as I could into Quebec to Old Fort. Although it was only 75km, the winding road that begins at the water and enters the lands of the Canadian Shield gave me a reason to delay the trip back to Newfoundland — if only for a day.
But it should be said that the furthest point of a trip isn’t the end and there was still much to see on the return. For instance, I took a nap on the Ferry to Newfoundland and when I woke up I overhead a family talking about a whale. Off the port side was a juvenille whale that kept leaping into the air every minute or two as if it were a dolphin. I think it was a humpback but from a distance it was hard to tell. When the ferry docked I drove out to the point and spotted it traveling down the coast, still jumping but abit less frequently.
Now that I was back in Newfoundland on a different day the weather was also different and I was able to hike the areas of Gros Morne National Park that I’d skipped over on my first pass. This included the Western Brook Pond that was picturesque at sunset. There’s a boat cruise along the pond into the fjord and I considered staying an extra day for it but when I called Parks Canada to inquire, I found out that it was two hours, cost $66, and only ran twice aday. This call helped me appreciate that I don’t need to rush back and that it is okay to slow down and keep sightseeing.
In Gros Morne National Park there are several turnoffs to historic sites and other viewpoints. One in particular, Broom Point, is the former site of a family summer home where they fished the coast between 1941 and 1975. The point has some fantastic rock formations that make for an excellent place to see the sunset.
The next day instead of taking the boat cruise I hiked Gros Morne mountain. This isn’t an overly tall mountain, especially when I’m familiar with hiking the Rockies and the Cascades but it was nonetheless steep and challening. A large portion of the climb is along a boulder field and there were a lot of people that did not look prepared, with little water poor footware. It is also flat-topped with lots of loose rock so there was no prominent viewpoint. That said, it was good excercise.
Eventually I made my way down the coast past Corner Brook, where I had some fantastic thai takeout, to Port au Port and Cape Saint George. This Acadian region had some dramatic cliffs and long hiking trails. I once again felt like I was on the edge of the world and was grateful that I’d been able to reach this place in my travels. It wasn’t somewhere I’d researched before but a place that looked interesting geographically on the map that I drove to.
One attration I did want to see was some folded sedimentary layers that I’d seen a photo of in the St. John’s Geo museum. I didn’t know exactly where it was so it took a stop at Timmy’s to do a google search but then I was able to find it. It’s not marked by any signage and is just part of an erroding bank below a road and above a rocky beach. You’d never know it was there if you were driving through, as I’d done earlier in the day. But once you stop and get out to find it, it is impressively cool.
The ferry back to Cape Breton departs from Channel-Port aux Basques and I didn’t think it would be busy but to get a reservation required waiting a day and all other sailings (twice a day) were full. This was probably a good thing because I really enjoyed Cape St. George and I made sure that I enjoyed relaxing on Newfoundland just a little longer before I left.
The ferry left at 11:45PM so I had an entire day to hang around on a few beaches and read. The best was near Port aux Basques where I was treated to one last fantastical sunset before sailing, further establishing my affection for Newfoundland and making me optimistic for the Cabot trail on Cape Breton. Newfoundland was my favourite place in during the trip for it’s rugged and remote landscape that felt like the edge of the world. This edge condition reminded me how much I enjoy being beside the sea and especially being on islands. Newfoundland is a place I would be happy to return to and would even consider having a summer home. As well, it gave me lots of think about with my self-guided architectural research and how we experience the landscape.
