the wooded valley below. The change in elevation really made our ears pop.
   This is Pope's Hill, a storied landmark located about 90 kilometres west of Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Or rather, it was Pope's Hill the year the Trans Labrador Highway was finished - that is, the year the last link in the highway between central and western Labrador (the bridge over the Ossakmanuan Narrows) was finally completed. The four of us in the tough, but roomy, truck were on our way to rescue a VW camper that almost became one of the first vehicles to traverse the whole distance of the new and not yet officially open road. The camper had ended up as one of its first casualties instead.
   The broken-down van that we loaded onto the trailer and brought back to Happy Valley-Goose Bay belonged to the Barr family. Kelly, Shirley and their children had been returning from a vacation in central Canada when they ran into trouble just as they were almost in sight of home. They abandoned their vehicle and got a lift the rest of the way into town with some helpful passersby. The van had to be retrieved later.
   Even today, in the year the final 60 kilometres of the TLH are set to be paved, the almost 1,200-kilometre drive from Happy Valley-Goose Bay to Baie-Comeau, Quebec is often long and arduous, but it hardly ever requires more than 20 hours of travel anymore. However, back in 1992 the trip could take four or five days, becoming not so much a country drive as a wilderness expedition. Following Route 389 north out of Baie-Comeau the Barrs would have then (as now) found a winding, but paved roadway as far as the huge Hydro-Quebec dam at Manicouagan. From there it was dirt, mud and sometimes gravel until Gagnon, which used to be a mining town, but is now only a collection of overgrown streets and sidewalks beside a large, pretty lake. The dirt ended temporarily in Gagnon, since the town was long ago connected by about 80 kilometres of pavement to its old mine at Fire Lake, but the dirt returned (and still returns) past the mine. Most of the rest of the distance through Quebec was and is driven on the original railway tote road some bulldozer scraped through the forest in the 1950s. Pavement begins again near to Fermont, still in Quebec, and extends into Labrador, but back in 1992 it only lasted to the east side of the twin towns of Wabush and Labrador City.
   At that point, back then, the Barrs had a decision to make. They could load themselves and their vehicle onto a train operated by the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway and get off again after many hours at an uninhabited siding called Esker, from where they could have followed the rough old Twin Falls tote road southeast to Churchill Falls and onwards to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, or they could risk driving down the new, unopened gravel road.
   The expensive and time-consuming option of using the QNS&L Railway had been available to a good number of hardy travellers ever since the Churchill Falls facility was completed in the 1970s and the unneeded service roads were abandoned to nature. As far as the provincial government of the day was concerned, once the dams were done the roads had no further purpose. They were especially not considered to be part of the provincial road system. The public nevertheless used them well, even though they were left unrepaired and unmaintained in the summer and unploughed in the winter. By the start of the 1980s this incomplete road westwards was still far from being called the Trans Labrador Highway by anyone, but local people had already given it another name. They called it the Freedom Road.
   "As somebody who came from away, Goose Bay was reachable by plane and by boat from Newfoundland and that was it - the train from Esker seemed to be only for serious holiday-makers," says Guy Playfair, now a forestry technician who works for the Innu Nation. "Labrador was more reachable from Newfoundland than Quebec, even by air."
   This was by design and it ran contrary to the wishes of local people. Demands in Labrador to have the Esker tote road connected to western Labrador and so to Quebec and the rest of Canada never ceased growing, despite near-intractable opposition from the provincial government. Even as the initial dirt track was being carved out of the bush in 1969 to let trucks transport equipment and materials from the docks at Goose Bay to the construction site at Churchill Falls, the then-Premier Joey Smallwood told Labrador residents to forget about ever getting a road out, either to the west or the south.
   "I will not spend a red cent on the construction of a road towards Quebec which would allow the Quebeckers to gobble up all the employment and drain off the natural resources of Labrador into Quebec," Smallwood declared during a public meeting in Happy Valley - a meeting that a reporter described as "tumultuous".
   Adverse government policy, however, didn't stop the people of Labrador from using what roads the region had, but given their rapidly deteriorating conditions it was often at some cost to themselves and their vehicles. When Playfair was still a high school student in Happy Valley-Goose Bay in 1981 he made his first trip west, driving the 260 kilometres to Churchill Falls with a group of friends just because none of them had ever gone there before.
   "We got six flat tires going to Churchill and back," Playfair recalls. "The road had a very variable surface with big rocks and sandy patches, sharp curves and dips. It was hard to see around the corners."
   Pressure to have the road repaired, upgraded, completed all the way to Lab West and ultimately paved continued to grow over the years, with successive provincial governments only gradually warming to the idea. When, in the early 1990s, the province commissioned a feasibility analysis to be conducted on the whole concept of building highways across Labrador the researchers had no trouble finding a favourable public.
   "The consultation process revealed a preponderance of positive social impacts on the residents of Labrador," the Fiander-Good Associates report reads. "It also indicated a strong sense of public support for the Trans Labrador Highway by virtually all residents of Labrador other than the Innu Nation [which had concerns about how the road would impact Innu land rights]."
   The first new section was planned and built between the Esker tote road west of Churchill Falls and the town of Wabush in western Labrador in the early '90s. The route required bridges to span several waterways and the last of those happened to be over the Ossakmanuan Narrows - giving the Barr family the chance to choose it, rather than the railroad, as their way home. When they drove their ill-fated VW camper up to the new bridge the structure had not yet been approved for public use. The Barrs, however, were allowed to cross, making them perhaps the first family ever to use the newly completed Freedom Road. The fact their VW didn't make it all the way under its own steam should not detract from that accomplishment.
   Now, 22 years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, the improvement of Route 500 of the Trans Labrador Highway is almost finished. All the one-lane wooden bridges have been replaced by wide concrete spans. The whole roadway has been given a proper foundation and all the twists and turns were taken out. Now only 60 kilometres of gravel just east of Churchill Falls remains to be covered in tarmac during the summer of 2014.
   "Sounds strange hearing that the road will be paved," Kelly Barr, who no longer lives in Labrador, recently remarked. "I hope the mortality rate has gone down."
   Barr was referring to the number of crashes caused by poor road conditions over the years, many of which resulted in fatalities. Safety remains a common concern, despite the vastly improved driving surface, because many people are worried what might happen if someone crashes or goes off the road at high speed far from help.
   "There are still a lot of good Samaritans on the Trans Labrador Highway," says Playfair. "I hope the new speed of travel and reduced travel time does not eliminate the humanitarian ethic established by the years of dangerous road conditions."
   This paving milestone does not, of course, mean the end of rough roads in Labrador, or of more paving contracts to be awarded in the region. Since 1992 Cartwright was connected to Red Bay by the Labrador Coastal Route and then that highway got a 300-kilometre link across the Mealy Mountains to meet Route 500 at Blackrock on the Churchill River. Those sections are supposed to start seeing pavement as soon as the Freedom Road is done with the equipment.

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Downhome Magazine, May 2014