Chapter 4: Greetings from West St. Modeste, Labrador, Canada
August 17 - August 19, 1997
I stepped out of our cabin this morning and saw icebergs straight offshore. One is quite large - looks like a small mountain several miles out, with a cluster of smaller stuff around the base. The other is closer in and smaller. A much smaller one is grounded just offshore with waves breaking over it. It's cloudy, 44 degrees, with a breeze blowing in off the water, so the icebergs don't seem out of place.
When we arrived in Labrador, yesterday afternoon (8/17), everything was hidden in dense wet fog, with temperatures in the low 50's and dropping. The forecast was for three days of the same. We had left the trailer in a parking lot at the ferry in Newfoundland and had intended to camp - sleeping either in our tent or in the back of the truck), but we chickened out. Instead, we rented a cozy log cabin in West St. Modeste. As an unexpected bonus, we found a working modular phone outlet on the cabin wall (no phone - just the outlet), so I'm having an Internet Orgy.
The ferry from Newfoundland was relatively small and had a loading ramp only at the stern. I had visions of having to back a large vehicle the entire length of the ship. But when we unloaded, we discovered that there is a 20' turntable in the vehicle deck near the bow of the ship. We drove onto the turntable, were rotated 180 degrees by a deck hand, and then drove off the other direction. The busses and tractor trailers (and, I presume, large RV's although there weren't any on this trip) were left till last and indeed had to turn around in the parking lot and back onto the ship. The Straits of Labrador are only about 18 miles wide at this point, so actual time on the water was a little over an hour.
On the morning of the 18th, the weather was unchanged and miserable, so we spent most of the morning in the visitors center and museum at the Basque Whaling Site at Red Bay. At this site is the earliest known shipwreck in North America, a Basque ship that sank in shallow water in the harbor in about 1580, and is remarkably well preserved. Archaeologists have taken the ship apart plank by plank, copying the pieces and building an exact scale model, and then returning the pieces to the bottom of the bay for storage. The model is still in use for active research, and is unfortunately not on display. The sites on shore where the whale oil was rendered in stone tryworks with huge copper vats, and where the oak casks were built, have also been uncovered, revealing a lot of detail. A burial ground has yielded 60 skeletons, and well preserved clothing. The museum is small but fascinating - well worth a visit.
At breakfast this morning, the meat choice with my pancakes was bacon, ham, or Newfie steak. I had to ask: Newfie steak is fried bologna.
A storm front came through in early afternoon. The wind got very strong and shifted into the north, clearing out the fog but getting even colder. But the dryer and clearer air allowed us to go hiking and enjoy the scenery. We hiked the Battery trail - which runs nearly level from the highway along a high plateau which runs east to the water, ending in sheer cliffs. The foliage here is noticeably less varied than Newfoundland, even though we can see the mountains of Newfoundland just across the Straits of Labrador. These high bogs had practically no flowering plants - the laurels, orchids, and pitcher plants are gone. The tuckamore is almost pure spruce, with an occasional birch.
Alongside the trail, where the tuckamore had been cut away, it was possible to see the underlying structure. Tuckamore is the local name for the dense mat of spruce or tamarack which covers much of the ground in these regions. It varies in height with wind and soil conditions - anything from a few inches high up to real trees. I examined one gently rolling area where the height varied from two feet on top to 4 feet in the hollows. I saw stumps up to a foot thick - these little bushes may be hundreds of years old. I followed the branches of one specimen. It started with a 10" trunk at the upwind end, and extended downwind for about 15', never getting over about 3' tall. It could be thought of as a complete 15' high tree, but growing horizontally instead of vertically.
In early evening, we drove out Point Amour to a 109' limestone lighthouse and sat for a while enjoying the view while the wind rocked the truck on its springs. We were high enough off the water so that through the binoculars, we could make out white buildings on the Newfoundland shore. The binoculars also showed what appeared to be icebergs on the horizon to the north. They are probably the ones that were off our cabin this morning.
We've been watching for RV accommodations, wondering if we should have brought the big trailer with us. There is exactly one formal campground - Pinware Provincial Park. We drove through it. It's in tuckamore tall enough to shield the individual sites from each other - and to block any view of the ocean (and more importantly, to block the wind). No services - pit toilets and a few water spigots, at a price of $16/night. The cabins we are staying at advertise RV hookups - by which they mean water and electric - no sewers. I didn't ask the price. One other motel had similar advertisements. The Labrador Straits Museum, near L'Anse Amour, offers unserviced RV parking on their grounds. Just beyond the Point Amour lighthouse, we saw large level gravel areas on both sides of the access road, big enough for any number of RV's . Several trailers were parked there, with no signs of life around them - I suspect that these trailers are kept there by relatively local people who use them on weekends. At Red Bay, the northern end of the road, there is a parking lot in the village just beyond the museum/visitor's center which had one motorhome which appeared to have spent the night there. We also saw unoccupied trailers parked in fields at several points along the highways (usually near trout streams). We have the impression that it's legal to park a RV just about anywhere in Newfoundland/Labrador, although nobody we've asked seems to know for sure. The main road (essentially the only road) is paved, and quite good by Canadian standards, so no one need hesitate to bring a large RV across.
We're planning on heading back to Newfoundland this afternoon after another hike.