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magazine / jf08 / quebec north shore
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January/February 2008 issue |
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SPECIAL FEATURE
On the road
Writer Christopher Frey embarked on a two-week journey through Quebec’s Lower North Shore to learn about the region’s rich history and culture and to discover what a planned road through the isolated towns and villages might bring
Story by Christopher Frey |
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Click map to enlarge |
Day 7: St. Augustine to Blanc Sablon
We ride to Old Fort through intermittent gusts of blowing snow under a gauzy sky. More grand
mountain scenery cradling the trail, which is a little hard-packed and rough today. Route
138 begins again in Old Fort so we get a lift to Blanc Sablon. We pass through St. Paul’s
River, a wide-mouthed, prehistoric beauty carving a cold, glacial-like pace out to the Gulf.
| " It was the ideal Canada for me. It was exactly what I was dreaming
of, a place where everybody can co-exist and work together." |
Gilles worked as a teacher in Blanc Sablon in the early 1990s. “More happened to me
in those two years,” he says, “than in my whole life before that.” Before
living here, Gilles was a souvereigniste.
“What impressed me was French and English working together,” he says, the place
largely lacking much of the historical baggage and resentments one finds elsewhere. “It
was the ideal Canada for me. It was exactly what I was dreaming of, a place where everybody
can co-exist and work together.”
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TERRY BEAUDOIN
Photo: Christoper Frey |
Day 8: Blanc Sablon
After a morning tour of Blanc Sablon with Anthony Dumas, much of it on foot, I take a snowmobile
tour of the hinterland with Terry Beaudoin. We cruise the beach and traipse along ice baffles
rammed against the shoreline. Caused by the cold, swift-moving Labrador current surging though
the Strait of Belle Isle, the ice sheets are crushed into tiles, boulders and blocks of frozen
saltwater.
The 3 p.m. golden hour is lighting up a trio of sombrero-shaped peaks in the distance — Three
Mountain Pond. Beaudoin says we’ll need to travel fast to make it there and back before
sundown. We ascend across windswept ice fields reflecting the sun like brilliant pools of
light and charge up high slopes as though directly into blue sky. For a while we are trailed
by a small flock of ptarmigan. Blowing ice is picked up by the hard mountain winds like mists
of jagged confetti.
On the way back, racing to beat the encroaching darkness, I open my visor to take in the
orange light. When I part with Beaudoin at my motel, he pays my newfound snowmobiling skills
the ultimate compliment: “Not bad for a guy from Toronto.”
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