Trans Labrador Highway Part 3

Monday

Getting three people’s gear around on two motorcycles was a bit of a challenge so it took us a while to ferry everything over to Frenchie’s from the hotel. One of the Dave’s needed a new tire and some other repairs so we set up shop with all of our stuff in their parking lot. We anxiously waited for them to check out my bike to see how serious the damage was. After waiting all morning we walked over to lunch and on the way back I heard my starter turning over so I went in to see what the deal was. It didn’t look good. The shop manager looked at me and basically said “yer fucked.” My bike wasn’t going anywhere on its own. When he hit the starter button you could see air getting blown out through the head gasket, and we didn’t know what else I might have been cooked inside the engine. Goose Bay is so far out in the middle of nowhere that it can take about ten days to get parts, and without knowing what else was broken staying and getting it fixed there wasn’t much of an option. I was going to have to find another way to get the bike and me home.

It totally sucked that the motorcycle part of the trip was over and the impending repairs were probably going to cost a shitload of money, but getting everything back to Vermont was going to be a real adventure, and that was the real reason for my trip, so I tried not to get too upset about the situation. The guys in the shop started helping me hash out some plans on how to get everything home. Their first thought was to have it shipped, but the last time someone had done that it ran about $1200, so that was a definite no go. Then the shop manager brought up a deal they had worked out a couple of times with JAG, a Quebec based shipping company that frequently had empty trucks driving back to Baie Comeau. He called the Goose Bay office and set up a deal for me, $300 in cash to the trucker and he would pick it up the next day and drive it to the Harley-Davidson dealership in Baie Comeau. No insurance, no paperwork, nothing official. At that point it was my only option so we set it in motion and hoped that the driver would let me ride shotgun, otherwise I might be hitchhiking home. I called my dad and asked if he felt like meeting me in Baie Comeau to get my bike the rest of the way home. He grumbled about it a bit, but he’s always looking for an excuse for some adventure so I didn't feel too bad about guilting him into it.

I walked outside into the late afternoon sun and found Dave and Dave talking to a mechanic who worked for the Goose Bay military base. He turned out to be a KLR rider and we chatted for a bit about my predicament. He kept joking that it was too bad I was on a beamer not a KLR, because he had three spare engines sitting in his garage that he would have sold me for cheap. As it started to get late it was time for me to meet up with my Couchsurfing host and the Dave’s were headed out of town to a campground. We wished each other good luck and parted ways. They had been extremely helpful in getting me into town and sorting out the whole mess. It was pretty incredible how two total strangers had invested so much of their time and energy in helping me get to Goose Bay safely. I guess that’s the way of the road… If you guys are ever in VT hit me up and I’ll buy you some beers.

The KLR rider gave me a ride up onto the military base to my Couchsurfing host’s house. Frank works in the Canadian military as a logistics coordinator for the local rangers, and has a sweet place up on the base. I was stoked to find out that he was a fellow climber and outdoor enthusiast, and we spent a while talking about the marginal climbing in the Goose Bay area, and an epic-sounding trip he took up to the Torngat Mountains in northern Labrador, a place I’ve always dreamed of exploring. After decompressing on the couch for a while he asked if I wanted to ride bikes (the pedaling kind) up to a hill above town where there was a good view. “Well fuck yeah!” There were some showers rolling in and it was almost dark but a hard bike ride is a great way let off some steam so we threw some headlamps in a backpack and headed for the hill. We rode a few kilometers on flat pavement then hit a steep dirt road up to the top of the hill. After suffering for a couple more kilometers of slick gravel and washboards we topped out as the last light was leaving the sky. It wasn’t the view we were hoping for but the lights of the Air Force base and the town below were rewarding enough. After catching our breath we blasted back down the sketchy road with dim headlamps and no helmets hoping we wouldn’t crash into the woods.

Tuesday

Frank gave me a ride down to Frenchie’s early and I started working with one of the mechanics to strap my bike onto a metal rack to keep it stable in the back of the truck. The JAG truck that was supposed to arrive at 10 am didn’t show up until 3 pm so I spent the day sitting on my bike and walking around the shop, agonizing over whether or not I would get a ride with the trucker. When he finally showed up I found out the driver was a French Canadian who spoke no English. It took a while for him to figure out that I was asking for a ride and even then he wasn’t sure. While we loaded my bike onto the truck he called his boss to see if it was cool for me to tag along. It turned out it wasn’t, so I watched him drive off with my bike and tried to figure out how I was going to make the seven hundred mile trek to Baie Comeau.

Flying out of Goose Bay is brutally expensive so the only realistic option was to hitch hike. Fortunately, there is only one road and it goes all the way to Baie Comeau, so I hoped it wouldn’t be too difficult. One of the guys in the shop gave me a ride a few miles outside of town to where I would be most likely to be picked up by someone going in my direction. I sat there with my helmet and dry bag for a few hours with no luck. Almost every vehicle was a work truck going to the Muskrat Falls project a few miles outside of town. A couple of people stopped, but they were only going out to their camps a few minutes down the road. It was starting to get dark so I gave Frank a call to see if he was cool with me crashing at his place another night. He said he would come out to pick me up as soon as he got off work. As I hung up the phone some riders on a KLR and two big 1300 cc street bikes rolled up. They had just ridden the 300 miles of gravel east of Goose Bay which was pretty impressive considering the bikes they were riding. We chatted for a bit before they headed into town for the night. A bit later Frank rolled up and headed back to town for what I hoped would be my last night in Goose Bay.

Wednesday

I woke up to a heavy downpour. Great weather for standing on the side of the road with your thumb out. Frank brought me back out to my spot on the side of the TLH and I spent the next couple of hours getting wet and cold. Just as I was starting to give up hope a big semi with a flatbed trailer pulled over next to me. I climbed up to the door and the French Canadian driver pointed at my little cardboard sign saying “I go der!” Perfect! It looked like I was going to get one ride all the way to Baie Comeau. The trucker introduced himself as Norman and told me to hop in. He spoke broken English but was fun to talk to, and I think he was excited to not have to make the sixteen hour trip alone. Norman told me he had been a trucker for almost twenty years, most of it as his own business, and had put over a million miles on each of the four trucks he has owned. Many of those miles he had spent driving between Goose Bay and Baie Comeau, so it was pretty hilarious how well he knew the road. He would point out spots saying “This is where the snow gets higher than my truck”, and “this is where two trucks went off the road into the lake last year,” and the best “Oh yah, this is where my buddy’s trailer got hit by a train last summer.”

A load of tires for the giant mining dump trucks at Fermont

Norman's rig

We drove on for the rest of the day and I got to revisit all the beautiful places I had been a couple days before. Just before dark we rolled into the bunkhouse at Relais-Gabriel. We had to be up the next morning at 5:30 to get back on the road and keep to Norman’s schedule, so I got a room, paid 16 bucks for a shitty pre-made sandwich and a Molson pounder, and went to bed.

The next morning we got an early breakfast and hit the road. A few hours later we were in Baie-Comeau, and we drove into the sawmill where Norman would pick up a load to bring south. He was in a hurry to get loaded up so we shook hands and parted ways. I really can’t thank him enough and I hope that wasn’t the only time we’ll cross paths.

I started walking down the road towards town and gave my dad a call so he could come pick me up. I dragged my heavy dry-bag in the dirt on the shoulder of the road until I finally saw my dad’s Ford crest over a hill with my bike loaded up in the back. He rolled up with the window down and we both laughed at the predicament I was in. He pretended to be upset about having to drive 10 hours to rescue my dumb ass, but I knew he enjoyed the mini-adventure and was stoked to have a good excuse to skip the in-service days before teaching started.

He seemed to be in a rush to get out of Quebec so I hopped in and we made tracks for home. He told me that getting my bike unloaded and on to his truck had been a shit show and he was convinced that every French-Canadian in town was out to get him. When we loaded my bike in Goose Bay the guys at Frenchies told the driver to just bring it to the Harley dealership in Baie-Comeau. I was more worried about how I was going to get there so I didn’t put much thought into it, and didn’t realize the nightmare it would create for my dad. He waited at the dealership (Where only one person spoke broken English) all day for the JAG truck to show up. Just as the dealership was closing and everyone was going home the JAG truck showed, and tried to back into the dealership, but screwed it up and ended up parking in some random driveway. My dad opened up the doors and realized that my bike was half way up the trailer and totally immobile because of the transport rack we had put it on. Back in Goose-Bay we had used a fork lift with 30 foot long forks to get my bike in and put a Polaris side by side bound for Lab City right behind it. It turns out the Harley shop in Baie-Comeau didn’t have a giant fork lift and the staff were already pissed off that my dad was keeping them from getting home. He couldn’t get help from any of them, or the fuming driver, so he grabbed some chains, hooked them up to the transport rack, and dragged the whole thing to the back of the truck. The angry French-Canadians pulled it off with a small forklift and parked it in their impound for a small fee of $120 because they didn’t want to deal with putting it in the back of my dad’s truck. He went back the next morning to get it loaded up and had just finished paying when he got the call from me.

In planning the trip I had known that some mechanical problem could happen, and that if it was anything more than a flat tire I’d probably be screwed because of my lack of any mechanical knowledge, but I really didn’t expect anything major to happen, especially not the way it did. It turns out the culprit was a small hole in the radiator, and the end result of my bone-headed decision to keep on riding that day was a melted cylinder head and about 3000 bucks worth of damage. Despite how much that totally blows I don’t regret the trip at all. I got to know some wonderful people who saved me from a situation that could have been a lot worse, and those relationships alone were worth the whole ordeal. I owe a huge thanks to Dave and Dave, all the staff at Frenchies, Norman, Frank, my dad, and everyone else who helped along the way. In the end it turned out to be a good experience for me. Shit happens and I think life is a bit stale without some crazy adventure. As Yvon Chouinard once said, “When everything goes wrong- that’s when the adventure starts.”

Trans Labrador Highway Part 2

Sunday

When I stepped out of my tent early in the morning it was drizzling again with a damp fog that made everything feel claustrophobic. The road was out of sight and silent, all I could see were the short pine trees and soft lichens and mosses surrounding my campsite. I felt like I was truly in the middle of nowhere, without another soul anywhere nearby. After standing in awe of my surroundings for a while I hopped back on the bike and rode on through the increasing rain, past the massive Fermont iron mine, and across the border into Labrador. I didn’t feel like walking around Lab City in the pouring rain so I stopped just long enough for breakfast at the Two Seasons Inn, and to pick up a free emergency satellite phone that the province gives to people travelling on the Trans-Labrador Highway. Just outside of town I turned onto the first leg of the TLH, an all paved ride through the wild Taiga to Churchill Falls, two hundred and fifty kilometers away.

After a few hours I rolled into Churchill Falls and started looking for the giant municipal building that houses the hotel, restaurant, grocery store, post office, swimming pool, and school. It wasn't hard to find, especially when I saw four other BMW GS’s parked out front. The riders were headed in the other direction, so we swapped stories about the road conditions ahead. They even gave me a free gas can for the three-hundred mile stretch of wilderness that I was planning on tackling the next day!

As I was talking to these guys I met two others who were heading in my direction. Dave and Dave were riding a couple of old BMW air-cooled bikes, and we agreed to ride together for the three hundred kilometer trip to Goose Bay/Happy Valley. It kept raining off and on and we made it safely through the short, but very loose and sketchy section of gravel on this part of the route. Just after finding the pavement again we hit a couple of heavy thunderstorms that tried to blow us off the road. Once those passed the sky got lighter and it looked like it might be smooth sailing all the way into Goose Bay, but as soon as I relaxed the shit started to hit the fan. My overheating light came on. “Well, fuck …” I pulled over immediately and sat there for a second thinking about how screwed I might be. Dave and Dave pulled up and we tried to figure out what might be wrong. Fluid levels were all good, the cylinder didn't feel too hot, nothing looked broken or disconnected, and nothing felt or sounded weird. I rode a couple more minutes down the road and the light came right back on. “Fuck me!” I pulled over again and we tried harder to diagnose the problem. We pulled off the seat and panels, checked fluids, unplugged things, plugged them back in, checked fuses… nothing seemed to be wrong. With no mechanical evidence for overheating I started to think it was a problem with a computer, not the engine. Since we were still a hundred miles from anything resembling civilization, it was cold and raining, and the road had next to no traffic, I made the decision to keep riding a little further. Being the not-so-mechanically-inclined person that I am, I made the mistake of thinking that things would probably turn out alright. I rode another ten minutes with the light on and pulled over to quickly check fluids and how hot the cylinder felt. I held my hand around it for several seconds and it didn't feel hot at all, so I reassured myself that it was just a computer problem. Stupid, stupid, stupid…

Just as the endorphins were beginning to subside and I thought I was in the clear my bike started to lose a little power going up hills. Then something below the handlebars started rattling when I rotated the throttle to between half and three-quarters of fully open. Then suddenly it started rapidly losing power and I hit the kill switch. Now when we tore it apart the coolant overflow tank was totally empty and something was clearly very wrong. It was time to flag down a truck and get a ride into town. Fortunately it had died just a few kilometers outside of Goose Bay and a friendly guy with his family stopped to give me a ride on their way back from a weekend out at their camp. The only hitch was that they didn't have any ramps to get my bike into the back of their truck. We started flagging down everybody passing through asking for ramps, but nobody had them. One truck that stopped happened to be a couple of Vermonters who know someone I know from work. They stayed to help and we joked at how random it was for us to have met up there. At this point the sun was starting to set and things were looking desperate. Finally, a truck full of guys working on a hydroelectric project nearby pulled over and brought us a ladder. Not the best ramp but it would have to do. By then there were probably eight of us and we all worked to muscle the four hundred and fifty pound bike into the back of the truck. Finally it was in and strapped down so we started making our way into town.

We dropped of my bike at an awesome shop called Frenchie’s, and bumped into the owner who helped us find a hotel room for the night. I rode around in the back of his pickup trying to find any hotel in town with some vacancy. It turns out just about every room in Goose Bay is full all the time now because of the Muskrat Falls Dam project. All of the construction workers live in the hotels on their days off so finding a room at 9 pm is almost impossible. We ended up squeezing into the last room available at Hotel North Two. The room was crazy expensive, even when it was split three ways. I had heard good things about the Couchsurfing website from some friends that had traveled through South America, so before bed I logged in and was lucky enough to find a good host for the next night.

Trans Labrador Highway Part 1

In February I bought a dual-sport motorcycle, a BMW F650 GS Dakar, with the intent on taking it on a big adventure. I wasn't planning anything in the near future, but as spring came I started riding, and as the odometer clicked steadily higher I became more comfortable with the thought of riding off to some remote part of the world. I decided that in August I would ride north to Labrador and Newfoundland to ride the Trans-Labrador Highway and visit the remote Taiga of Northeastern Canada.

The Trans-Labrador Highway is a well-known, but remote motorcycle trip that is close enough to Vermont that it could be ridden in the two short weeks I could get off from work. The TLH starts in Labrador City in Southwestern Labrador, and is the only road that crosses the province all the way to the coast, about 700 miles, several hundred of which are sketchy, loose gravel. Along the way are endless Taiga forests, bears, moose, iron mines, hydroelectric dams, and only 6 towns. It is one of the most desolate roads in eastern North America.

My plan was to ride north from Vermont to Quebec City and follow the northern coastline of the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Baie-Comeau, where I would turn onto Route 389, the only road to Labrador City, and in some ways more remote and wild than the Trans Labrador Highway. From Lab City I planned to follow the TLH past Churchill Falls and Goose Bay to Blanc Sablon, where the road ends just after the provincial line with Quebec, and hop on the ferry to Newfoundland. After exploring the island coastline for several days I planned to take the eight hour ferry to Nova Scotia, and from there ride home to Vermont for a total of almost 3,000 miles.

Friday

After staying up way too late the night before, taking turns drinking beer out of a two liter boot, I frantically tried to finish packing everything onto my bike. At 10 am, four hours late, everything had finally been loaded and strapped down. I fired up the single cylinder Rotax engine and almost dropped the bike on the way out of my sandy driveway. All this extra weight would take some getting used to. As I wound through the twists and turns of Route 100 the reality of the upcoming adventure finally started to sink in. I rolled on the throttle and pointed it towards Canada.

As I accelerated out of the border crossing in Stanstead the endorphins started pouring through my veins, I was out of the US on my way to the Canadian wilderness. But before it gets better, it gets worse. The green mountains and curvy roads of Vermont turn into the suburbs and three lane freeways of southern Quebec. My excitement subsided and the monotony of highway riding set in. After a few hours I made it to Quebec City and only got lost in the city traffic once before I found my way onto the road that parallels the Saint Lawrence Seaway all the way to Baie-Comeau. Gradually the road got smaller and mountains began to sprout up, and the chaos of the city and day-to-day life began to fade away.

I had originally planned on riding all the way to Baie Comeau, but by the time the sun started to set I was still three hours away. I saw a big sign for camping (Fortunately one of the few words that is spelled the same in French and English), and pulled over into the small oceanside town of Saint Simeon. The teenage kid staffing the campground spoke about as much English as I do French, so it took some improvised sign language to figure out the camping situation. Eventually we worked it out and I made my way to a beautiful, but expensive tent site right above the ocean.

Saturday

After breakfast and a beautiful sunrise on the beach I hopped on the bike and started a long day of riding. I had no plan for where I would stop at the end of the day, but hoped it would be pretty close to Labrador City. As the miles ticked by and Baie Comeau got closer the sky began to darken. By the time I got into town the sky had opened up, so I found my way to Route 389 and pinned it, hoping that the rain would let up farther north. From there on out it was essentially one long road all the way to Newfoundland. As soon as I was out of town my surroundings became a full-on wilderness. The road wove over and around rolling hills making for some great riding, only held back by the driving rain and slippery roads. As I rolled northward the downpour eased into scattered showers and soon my only company on the road was tractor trailers headed to the iron mines in Fermont and Labrador City.

A few hundred kilometers after leaving Baie Comeau I stopped at Manic Five, the first town on 389. And by town I mean two gas pumps, a tiny hotel and convenience store, and one big-ass hydroelectric dam. Seriously, this thing was huge, bigger than the Hoover Dam huge. The best part about it was that as soon as I rode up and over the dam the road changed from pavement to gravel! The next few hours consisted of more rolling hills and a windy road that was probably the most fun ride of the trip. About one hundred kilometers later the pavement reappeared in a town called Relais Gabriel, which is no more than a bunkhouse with a couple of gas pumps out front. I grabbed a couple of Coffee Crisp bars to snack on and filled up with some really expensive gas, and kept riding towards Labrador City a few hundred kilometers further north. The riding and scenery were incredible. As the road travels north you can see the forest change to a conifer dominated boreal forest with huge swaths burnt out by forest fires, and small lakes and rivers scattered around everywhere. At the Fire Lake iron mine the road switches back to gravel and starts to get wild. The road zig-zags across a railroad and around big lakes, making for excellent riding. Every now and then the trains carrying iron ore would force you to stop and wait at a crossing for the two mile long rolling thunder to pass by.

At this point it was getting late and I knew that hotels in Lab City liked to charge outrageous prices, so fifty kilometers before I got to town I started looking for places to camp. Along this stretch of road there are tons of little off-shoots that run down to old gravel pits or hunting and fishing camps. After a while I found an abandoned one that looked like it hadn't seen traffic in several years. I followed it down a hundred yards and hopped off to set up my tent. The ground there is tundra-like, and covered in mosses and lichen that make it feel like you’re walking on a sponge. My campsite was right above a big lake, so I walked down at last light to watch the sun set and listen to the loons call. Walking back to my tent I felt like all of the eyes in the forest were watching me. We all know that black bears are usually friendly and all my food was sealed in bags and locked in the cases on my bike, but it doesn't take much to keep you up at night when you’re alone in the middle of nowhere…