the rest of Northern Quebec and Labrador

Our next mini-stop on the road was a place called Ancienne Ville de Gagnon, which no longer exists but used to be a mining town in the 1950s. The only indication there was anything there was the forest looking disturbed (trees and shrubs smaller than the surrounding forest), a couple of manholes, and some small piles of rubble.

It's amazing to think that there used to be 1500 people living here. There wasn't a road at the time, so train was the only way to get there. In 1985 the town closed and it was bull dosed and buried. Then two years later the road, highway 389, was completed and went right through the middle of the town that no longers exists.

There are actual towns along the highway, but there are no more than a handful of portable-looking buildings in a small clump. Some have a gas station, but most do not.

At one point there was a transport that had stopped to rest on the side of the road, by a pretty river. The truck was transporting timber for my home town of Thunder Bay, so I had to take a photo:

Next we passed Fire Lake QC, and there was a fairly big open-pit mine. The water in the lake and streams surrounding the mine was bright red/orange--it's an iron mine, but since I know little about such things I'm not sure if that's normal or healthy.

A bit further down the road is a much larger iron mine, Mont-Wright.

I recently read that there is a surplus of iron in the world right now, so they anticipate the mine will be slowing down. Just north of the mine is Fermont, the last town before Labrador. They have a huge work truck on display as you enter:

Standing next to it, I'm half the height of the wheel!

As you can see from the photos, the weather was beautiful the whole time--sunny and warm. It continued to be that way the whole rest of the way on the highway.

Just a few more minutes on the highway got us to Labrador and Labrador City.  It actually was a bit uninteresting. They did have a nice Tim Hortons with wifi though! (we didn't have any coffee there though, so rest assured our coffee-snobbery is still going strong)

So, before we left for our trip I bought a bug jacket since I had heard about how bad the bugs are in the summer.  All through Quebec though we didn't have any problems with bugs at all, so I was starting to think I bought it for nothing....then we entered Labrador.

I don't understand why the difference in bugs between northern Quebec and Labrador would be so profound, but was it ever. Even though we were closed up in the van to sleep, we swatted mosquitos non-stop, all night. We smushed hundreds of mosquitos. Of course they have to come buzzing around your head as you're trying to sleep, and as soon as you'd get it another one would be there almost instantly.
After two nights of this, we clued in that we had to be much fussier about where we stopped for the night. As long as we could find a breezy enough place we were fine, so we became pretty good at hunting those places down.

During the day, it was the black flies that were swarming. However, for some strange reason they weren't really biting very much...so I didn't have to resort to killing them mercilessly. There were some monstrously big horseflies though.