Remote, rugged, somewhat dangerous and definitely off the beaten path . . .
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To feel right at home on Canada’s loneliest highway, you’ll need a 9-foot-tall plastic pole on your vehicle with a red flag at the top.

Most of the traffic you’ll encounter on the Trans-Labrador Highway are wearing them – and most of those vehicles are pick-up trucks. You can easily go for an hour before meeting any traffic on this lonely route through dense wilderness.

The red flag on the pole should save your vehicle from being crushed by the bemouth trucks you might find on this highway, but mostly they’re confined to Labrador’s open pit mines and construction sites.

The drivers of these massive dump trucks climb a flight of 15 steps to reach their cabs. They get a great view up there – a distant view. But they can’t see the ground in front of them. That’s why smaller vehicles wear the poles with red flags – so the big truck drivers can see them and avoid crushing them.

The American Cat 797 dump trucks cost $5 million each, are pushed by a 20-cyclinder diesel engine with 4,000 horsepower and can hit 40 mph. They can carry a 400-ton payload and their six tires, nearly 14 feet tall, cost $50,000 each.

It’s unlikely you’ll encounter one on the Trans-Labrador, but when this 1,200-kilometre-long highway was under construction there were plenty.

Another behemoth you might share the road with is a bull moose. There are more than 120,000 of them in Newfoundland and Labrador. A bull can weigh 1,400 pounds and stand 6.6 feet tall at the shoulder and they like to spend time out on the pavement where there are fewer black flies.

Two roadside signs you’ll see often on this highway are

“Check your fuel gage”

and

“Watch for moose”

Gas stations can be hundreds of kilometres apart.

Lisa Dempster has encountered many moose in her travels along the Trans-Labrador Highway and many before it was built while growing up in Charlettowne – a village of 290 souls on the Strait of Belle Isle that separates Labrador from the island of Newfoundland.

One big bull moose held her captive for several hours late one night. Labrador gets a lot of snow each winter and Dempster was driving through a white canyon with walls of snow 15 feet high on both sides of the highway.

She soon came upon a bull moose trotting along the highway looking for an opening in the snow canyon to return to the bush.

Each time she tried to pass the moose it turned its big head to the left to take a look at Dempster and her car. Just turning its head took up enough space to prevent her from passing. This ritual went on for hours.

When Dempster’s husband woke at 3 a.m. to get ready for work (building the highway) he was surprised his wife was not yet at home. He went looking for her and found the two of them in the canyon of snow.

Several other travelers got caught behind the trapped moose and eventually the only solution was to kill the beast.

Dempster had a much more pleasant event on the Trans-Labrador near her home on July 5, 2022. As a minister in the Newfoundland Government she watched three feet of asphalt laid down to finally see the highway paved end-to-end.

Construction of the $1 billion highway started in 1998 when then premier Brian Tobin climbed onto a large bulldozer to push aside several evergreens. It was a 1,200-kilometre-long gravel road for many years.

The highway crosses over a dozen or so spectacular white-water rivers and with such little traffic you can often stop on the bridge to shoot photos of the raging rivers.

The mighty Churchill River was one of those raging rivers and used to plunge over one of Canada’s most spectacular waterfalls. The river dropped more than 300 metres over 32 kilometres, but today it is a mere trickle meandering through a canyon of huge boulders. The boulders were deposited by the powerful current, but that current is now diverted further upstream to power the huge Churchill Falls Hydroelectric generating station.

The $1 billion power station – the second largest in Canada – is 15 storeys tall and was built totally underground.

Minister Dempster says paving the highway end-to-end will trigger an economic boom for Labrador. “Our big land has many of Canada’s most cherished mineral resources. The paved highway across Labrador helps us bring in the best people and facilities to access and develop those resources,” she said.

There are no roads accessing Voisey’s Bay, 356 kilometres north of Happy Valley/Goose Bay where Inco has 2,500 employees digging out two new shafts for a nickel mine. It had been operating an open pit mine at the site.

All the employees are flown into the site and live in a construction camp.

“We now have a committee in our highways department looking at carving a new highway north from Happy Valley to Voisey’s Bay,” said Dempster.

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The Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway

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Ivvavik National Park and Herschel Island Territorial Park (Qikiqtaruk)

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More of Pat Brennan’s adventures . . .