A road-trip adventure on Canada’s wild Atlantic coast
https://www.ft.com/content/c3f492de-55d0-4016-a3a0-aa1354214635?segmentId=3f81fe28-ba5d-8a93-616e-4859191fabd8
A road-trip adventure on Canada’s wild Atlantic coast
September 24 2024
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The forest feels mesmeric and claustrophobic as I drive. The road crests and for a moment I can see it snaking ahead through an ocean of black spruce. It feels like hubris in such a wilderness, and alder is already pushing back from the verges.
"Take me with you south where the fruit ripens," sing a local band on the stereo, and I laugh.
I am in Labrador, a Canadian region that is bigger than the UK but has fewer than 27,000 residents. Only one road crosses its vast wilderness, the Trans-Labrador Highway, running for 1,149km from the mining town of Labrador City in the west to the fishing town of L’Anse-au-Clair in the south-east. Paving of the road was only completed in 2022; it remains so remote that the provincial government offers anyone driving it the free loan of a satellite phone.
Now, Newfoundland and Labrador’s tourist board is promoting it as a road trip adventure called Expedition 51º and I have come to try it out. A couple I meet who have driven their big BMW bike up from Quebec City tell me it’s "the best road in Canada".
It’s also a sort of self-drive safari. A fox casually crosses the road after a panicked squirrel, flocks of crossbills make late dashes away from the bonnet, and a family of groundhogs seem irritated to be disturbed from their play under the alder. I look at the forest and wonder if a tree falling out there would make a sound. My gaze returns to the road: if a moose appears, it could well be the last sound I hear.
A stretch of the Trans-Labrador Highway between Cartwright and Mary’s Harbour © Alamy
The Arctic fox is a native of the Labrador region
A cloudberry, or bakeapple, as it’s locally known © Getty Images
I had landed in Goose Bay, for most people a dot on an airline map. A military town of 8,000, it was built in the 1940s on a sandy plain at the mouth of the mighty Churchill river as a refuelling station for aircraft being ferried to Europe during the second world war.
Today, around 30 airliners a year that have run into trouble crossing the Atlantic visit Goose Bay. My sister dropped in once because someone had written "there’s a bomb on board" on the loo mirror, and she recalls it as an "icy place".
Thankfully, my flight is scheduled, arriving from Halifax in Nova Scotia. The summer air is warm and pine-scented. I explore. There’s a pretty riverside boardwalk with kids fishing from bridges and unnerving warnings to be "bear aware". There’s Northern Lights, a camping store that sells guns, fishing tackle and lingerie; locals have nicknamed it "Bras and Bullets". And there’s the Royal Inn, a good hotel run by an indigenous-owned company that also has Mamattuk, a superb restaurant serving Arctic char and caribou, as well as decent Negronis.
The region’s history is told through relics in the Labrador Heritage Museum, an old Hudson Bay office in nearby North West River. Here, in 1743, a Frenchman called Louis Fornel set up a trading post, employing trappers from the two main indigenous groups — the Innu, a First Nations mountain people, and the Inuit, the famed sea-facing descendants of the Thule.
I climb a hill and gaze up Grand Lake into the interior and then out over Lake Melville towards the Atlantic. The precariousness of life feels overwhelming, a sensation that will return repeatedly. Labradorians lean into 16th-century French explorer Jacques Cartier’s description that this is "the land God gave Cain".
Come morning, after breakfast at Mamattuk, I climb into my rental truck and ensure it’s full of gas. I cross the Churchill and let the forest envelop me. I’m heading east and if I stay on the road it will be five hours to the next house. However, four hours in I turn left and drive for a further 90 minutes on gravel, reaching Cartwright (population 439), a classic Labrador community.
Battle Harbour, a historic fishing settlement where many of the houses have been restored and turned into accommodation for visitors © Mathieu Dupuis
Colourful houses lie low and hunched around a bay, centred on the main employer, the fish-processing plant. John Cabot, when he sailed this coast in 1497, said the press of cod was so thick "they stayed the progress of our ship".
Sadly, we ate them. In 1992, Canada’s government had to put a moratorium on fishing cod in the hope of preserving the last of the species, devastating the economy of places like Cartwright. (Although the moratorium was finally lifted this summer, stringent quotas remain and the processing plant today produces mainly snow crab.)
The road is supposed to bring a new prosperity and Cartwright should be drawing more visitors. In 2015, the Akami-Uapishkᵁ-KakKasuak-Mealy Mountains national park was established, the biggest reserve in eastern Canada. It includes the Wonderstrands, an 80km beach that locals believe, on patchy evidence, is the stretch of coastline mentioned in the Viking sagas of Erik the Red.
But according to Peyton "Pete" Barrett, an energetic woman in her eighties who owns the Mealy Mountain Gallery, it hasn’t been so simple. The government’s trade-off for investing close to C$1bn ($740mn) in the road has been to heavily cut the subsidised ferry and air schedules, and "many drivers don’t like Cartwright’s final 87km of gravel road," she says.
She tells me this over a lunch of broth and bannock (a sort of flatbread) at the gallery. She and her husband George used to have a tour company called Experience Labrador, taking guests by boat to the far end of the Wonderstrands so they could walk back over several days.
"They used to fly in from Europe [via Halifax]," Pete says. "But numbers went down." Also, Pete and George have grown too old and now it’s hard to find someone to take visitors out. And, as the park’s name suggests, local stakeholders can’t agree on how to promote it.
An exhibit in the museum at Battle Harbour © Mathieu Dupuis
I refuel at a gas station by the harbour that has a spot on the forecourt for helicopters, and take a last look at the low-slung fingers of land reaching into the cold sea. If I’d been dropped here blindfolded, I’d have guessed I was in my native Scottish Highlands, a feeling reinforced by Pete’s bannocks.
After overnighting at Penney’s Pitstop by the paved highway in Port Hope Simpson, I drive an hour on to Mary’s Harbour. I park the car and board the little ferry to take me out to Battle Harbour, once the unofficial capital of southern Labrador.
The sea is awash with islands on whose flanks stand the weathered bones of houses. These were places killed by the collapse of the cod fishery, the stories of their abandonment sometimes told in the famous images of entire houses being floated across the sea to new locations.
Battle Harbour was founded in the mid-18th century, home to the "floater fleet" that moved along the coast catching and salting fish. In the 1960s, the 200-strong population resettled to the mainland, but some of the residents kept summer homes here.
In 1990, Battle Harbour Historic Trust was set up to preserve the small Anglican church. Since then it has taken over 20 of the island’s 40 buildings, restoring them and inviting visitors to stay. Locals who still had summer houses saw the opportunity, with some retraining as master carpenters, and others improving their cooking or piloting guide boats.
It’s become both a living museum and a sort of Atlantic albergo diffuso, with multiple guest rooms in some of the larger buildings and some smaller cottages that sleep just two. We pull into the "tickle" — the excellent local word for a narrow channel — and tie up at a pine-board wharf as a mink legs it with a capelin. An Arctic fox watches on from the island’s summit, sitting under a Marconi tower which, in 1909, Robert Peary used to announce he had just returned from the North Pole (a claim now in doubt).
The ‘tickle’, or narrow channel, that separates Battle Island from its neighbour, Great Caribou Island © Mathieu Dupuis
Walking the island takes about an hour © Mathieu Dupuis
Looking out at one of the restored buildings © Mathieu Dupuis
The offices and warehouses seem steeped in salt. There are exhibitions, a communal restaurant and a snug bar above the store. My room is in one of the larger wooden houses, its quilted bed giving way to pastel walls and a view of the tickle.
At dawn, I walk the island, the work of an hour. I don’t see a whale or an iceberg, but it’s so beautiful it doesn’t matter. The sea mist lifts on small boats heading into the archipelago. The previous evening I’d asked Janet Trimm, the head chef, about fisherman’s brewis, a traditional meal of cod and hard tack (seafarer’s biscuit) and I return to find she’s made me some for breakfast.
Peter Bull, the Trust’s executive director, takes me across the tickle to walk the far larger Caribou Island. The rolling slopes lie orange under the weight of bakeapple, the local name for cloudberries. We collect a bucketful as we walk and that night Peter turns it into jam for me to take home (it goes so well with porridge).
Come evening, over perfect halibut, I start talking to Jamie Jackman, a guest from Goose Bay. He says he’s a musician and I tell him the lyric about heading south where fruit ripens. "I wrote that," he says. He’s the lead singer of the Silver Wolf Band and he agrees to perform an impromptu gig in the bar.
Afterwards, I slip away with a borrowed fishing rod and a pint of Labrador City-made Iron Rock beer. The tickle is boiling with fish and, under a star-laden sky, I catch 20 herring.
After the boat trip back to Mary’s Harbour, I drive an hour south to Red Bay, putting up at Whaler’s Station, a restaurant with rooms. I have the Loft, its picture windows looking on to Saddle Island, where, in the 16th century, Basque visitors flensed whales they’d hunted in the waters between here and Newfoundland, the other part of the province, and which residents call "the island".
The Pinware river . . . © Shutterstock/vagabond54
. . . a perfect spot for fly-fishing © Shutterstock/vagabond54
Wanita Stone, from the Red Bay National Historic Site, takes me across the tickle to see the remains of the rendering pots and the spot where, in 1978, the wreck of the San Juan, a Basque whaler, was found. A stocky vessel, it had sunk in a storm in 1565 as it loaded oil for the return.
The day is perfect, so I climb the hill opposite. Lichen, birch, mylonite and berry glow in the hazeless air. The surface of the strait is placid and I look down at the water’s edge, the so-called "boney shore", on account of the whitish-grey whale bones that lie among the driftwood. The Basques came for only 70 summers, by the end of which they’d all but wiped out the local population of right and bowhead whales.
Labrador seems a precarious place for all species. Over the following days, I fly-fish for salmon on the Pinware river with an exuberant guide, Todd Wellman, and sail into the strait with Shena Fowler on the Whaler’s Quest. Both are young and are starting businesses, hoping the highway will provide in this, Canada’s most rapidly ageing province. Yvonne Jones, the provincial MP for Labrador, had been another guest at Battle Harbour. "We really haven’t begun to tap into the highway’s potential," she’d told me.
I keep driving, the road’s smooth surface turning to potholes as I cross into Quebec. An hour further and it peters out entirely. Quebec’s government plans to drive the road 300km along the edge of the St Lawrence, meeting the existing road network at Kegashka. With that link in place, you’d be able to drive a circuit, south to Baie-Comeau, then north all the way to Labrador City — some 2,800km and one of the world’s great round trips. But that’s a huge, and distant, undertaking.
Cheesecake with bakeapple at the Bakeapple Folk Festival in Forteau © Ruaridh Nicoll
Local group Silver Wolf Band performing © Tom Cochrane
Instead, at Blanc-Sablon, I watch the ferry leave for Newfoundland. If I were to take it, I could get another ferry to Nova Scotia then drive to New Brunswick, a multi-week trip increasingly beloved by RV-ers. Or else I could spend several thousand dollars and put the car in a container and sail it up the St Lawrence to Sept-Îles.
Instead I turn back, pulling into the town of Forteau under a sign for the Bakeapple Folk Festival. A band called Borderline is playing Steve Earle’s "Galway Girl" with a verve that has people on their feet.
At the end of their set, the guitarist sits next to me. I say how good they are and he shrugs. "We’ve got to find something to do in the winter," he says. Like the others, he turns out to be a fisherman.
"You staying for the fish fry?" he asks. "We caught them ourselves this morning." Sadly, I say I have to start the long drive back to Goose Bay. Still, I have some bakeapple cheesecake before I go, because it turns out Jamie is wrong about the fruit failing to ripen.
Details
Ruaridh Nicoll was a guest of Destination Labrador (newfoundlandlabrador.com) and Destination Canada (explore-canada.co.uk). Battle Harbour (battleharbour.com) offers a two-night stay for two people, including meals and ferry, from C$1,300 (£720). Royal Inn and Suites (nunacor.com) has rooms in Goose Bay from C$200 per night. Car rental starts from about £50 per day (budget.co.uk). Return flights to Goose Bay from London Heathrow on Air Canada start at £650 (aircanada.com)
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
____________________________________________________________________________________