Further Down the Road

Aug.10
Driving further North East the road continues to wind along long stretches of emptiness and then down through small fishing villages until after about four hours we finally arrive in the small town of Natashquin. This has been officially referred to as the end of the highway. From here the highway goes another five kilometers to where it ends at the gates to a rather large native reserve of about 1600 people. I guess they don’t count. There are a few more miles of gravel of recently completed road and then it quits completely. They keep on pushing the road along further down the coast each year, but there are dozens of bridges to build and thousands of tons of rock to blast so the building doesn’t move along very fast. From here to Blanc Sablon in Labrador it looks to be about another thousand K or so. Along that stretch of coast there are 14 villages. The first four are Francophone, and the remaining ten are English speaking. For now they are connected by the cargo ferry “The Relais Nordic “ . About thirty kilometers West of Natashquin is the little town of Anglinish. After supper in Natashquin we headed back there and set up on another lovely campsite on the beach. Earlier travelers had encouraged us to take in a canyon tour there through some very rough red granite saw tooth rock formations. We did so the next day and it was truly worth our while. Here a river with a lot of water comes together and is forced through a very narrow canyon flanked by tall walls of polished red granite. To get there we had to take two small motor boats from one lake to the next and then portage into the next. The trip there reminded me a lot of my fishing trips to Northern Ontario. The aluminum boats were the same, and the motors, the smell of the exhaust, the same rock cliffs along the shore, with the same white pine and spruce and very remote. It was a very nice sunny day, with a hot sun and cool air. A perfect Northern day. A distinguishing feature, besides the red granite in this gorge are the bore holes. These are created by the force of the water spinning large soccer ball size rocks round and round in one spot for hundreds of years till they wear a perfectly round hole in the rock sometimes a meter or two deep. The rocks also become perfectly round and just remain laying in the hole waiting for when the water rises and takes it for another spin again. One of these was on display in the local interpretation center.