A Drive on the Trans-Labrador Highway

Labrador basically has one highway, the Trans-Labrador Highway. Down here, on the southern end it’s route 510. When you get as far north as Happy Valley – Goose Bay and turn west it’s route 500. This country here is all rock and bog and every mile of this highway is built up, like a causeway.

Every time there’s a highway sign they build a little causeway out to it. Bud figured it must take a full dump truck load of gravel for every sign. No wonder there’s only one road.

Along the southern shore, where we are, there are a series of little towns for about 35 miles, to Red Bay. Then there’s nothing for a long time and then you come to Mary’s Harbour. I thought we would probably only go as far as Red Bay, but Bud was up for a longer drive.

We’ll be exploring the closer towns in the next days but today we left Red bay behind and drove fifty miles without seeing a single house. There were two Quonset garages and about in the center of the stretch was a highway maintenance depot. That’s it. We saw 12 cars in that 50 miles.

They call this The Big Land, and you can see why.

Since we were going the hundred miles to Mary’s Harbour I suggested we go another 30 to St. Lewis. This town is the furthest east you can drive in North America without taking the ferry to the island of Newfoundland. We made the turn to St, Lewis and found we had twenty miles to go on a gravel road. Fortunately it was the best gravel road Bud has ever driven on. He was doing 50 mph and the drive was smooth.

On the way out we met the guy on the road grader who is probably responsible for that.

I was excited to see that this route was named Iceberg Alley.

We made it to the end of the road. Not only is this as far east as you could drive, it’s as far north as we’ve ever driven. We were at 54.4 degrees north.