Going all CMG: Our 2019 fails and recoveries

ZAC: The Labrador campsite

I was in Labrador, about 100 km into the 430-km stretch between Happy Valley-Goose Bay and Port Hope Simpson. It was spitting rain, and it was getting dark. Surely, there was somewhere to stop – a pull-out, a bridge to camp underneath, something?

Nothing looked promising. The only pull-out I found had plenty of signs around, warning about bears. Uh, nope. Not with just a tent. I continued down the gravel highway, but there was nothing but rocks and trees. The sun was setting. I was cold. I was going to have to camp beside side the road in the middle of nowhere, and if I didn’t stop right now, I was going to have to make camp in the dark. Already, it was 9:30ish, and the sun had disappeared over the horizon.

I pulled over and looked around. Camping right on the side of the road was an option, but I didn’t want to be woken up by late-night traffic. One side of the highway had a steep embankment, where the roadbuilders had blasted out rock during construction. I wheeled the bike to the right, down the ditch, up the embankment, and promptly fell off as a lack of traction and cold, stiff hands and feet combined to work against me.

I righted the bike and decided to hang the hammock behind some boulders, where at least I’d have some shelter from wind and rain. I noticed some bugs around, but paid no mind, mostly because I was trying to avoid slipping in the almost total darkness.

When I finally jumped into the hammock, there were dozens of mosquitoes zipped inside with me. I flailed about madly, blindly smashing the bloodsucking bugs into oblivion. Finally quelling their carnivorous onslaught, I laid back in my sleeping bag, exhausted from a day of hundreds of hard kilometres on a small bike … and then the noises started.

They weren’t traffic noises, because nobody was driving by. Nobody. No, these were the sort of noises a bear might make, while it ransacked your motorcycle luggage, looking for the trail mix that you’d forgotten in the saddlebag.

I twisted uncomfortably in my hammock, and listened. I was sure the next sound I’d hear would be my WR250R crashing to the ground, knocked over by a hungry black bear. My luggage and seat would be torn apart, and the fuel spilled all over the ground, with the nearest gas station 300 kilometres away. I’d be lucky to escape the woods in the morning.

Somehow, I fell asleep, woken occasionally through the night by more unfamiliar noises, as well as the all-too-familiar noise of thousands of mosquitoes trapped under my rain fly, but thankfully not in my hammock.

In the morning, my worst fears were unfounded — the bears hadn’t touched my bike. The mosquitos were retreating, beaten back by the sunlight, like the insectoid vampires they were. I was hungry, but not for the bag of stale trail mix I’d been nibbling on for the past three days. I grabbed my fishing rod and headed up the road, hoping for a feed of brook trout.

An hour later, I’d lost three brookies, a Red Devil spinner, and any interest in being in the Labrador bush any longer. The black flies had come out, after the shift change with the mosquitoes. I got back to the bike, loaded it up and roared off. It was Time to Head Home.

Click Page 3 to read about Dean’s airport mishap