A Brief Account of the Remarkable Torngat Mountains: Wilderness and Wonder
“Take two minutes,” said the man with the gun.
His name was Wayne Broomfield, and his job was to stand between us simple tourists and the bears of northern Labrador. Day after day, fjord after fjord, he walked ahead with a 12-gauge shotgun slung over one shoulder and binoculars round his neck, watching for any ravenous white specks loping over the tundra. He was there to keep us safe, to keep us smart, to keep us moving on an invariably tight schedule, but just then, on the outer loop of a four-hour hike, he did something different. He said that precious few people will ever stand where we are standing. Take two minutes. Just rest. Just look.
I obeyed, dropping backpack and camera, peeling off coat and toque, kicking off boots and socks. I sat down with bare feet planted on lichenized rock and cushions of moss, arms hugging knees, and gave a moment of silence to the Torngat Mountains National Park—and also a little gratitude.
These peaks, 80 million years in the making, were formed when Labrador, Greenland and Baffin Island were ripped apart by plate tectonics, their jagged edges rising from the ocean as the spaces between them—Hudson Strait, Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay—yawned to modern dimensions. The result, at least in Labrador, was a chain of “rift-shoulder mountains,” witnesses to the rending of continents.
These were further carved by glaciation, restless rivers of ice burrowing crescent fjords so deep into eastern Labrador they almost touch Quebec. The Torngats, then, present one of two faces—the first, holystone smooth, swooping from base to peak with the precision of a protractor; the second, rough as freshly torn paper, top heavy and strange.
“The interior of the park,” said Wayne, “is absolutely stunning.” This, from a man who’s seen both poles, was no small boast.
That July day was my first taste of the true interior—mountains rising and falling with the grace of vertebrae on either side of a gaping river valley, its shallow water flashing as occasional beams of morning sun cut through the fog. The river itself flowed east, narrowing to a 20-metre drop where its gentle roar became a shriek, thundering down a long, abrasive gorge which emptied into Eclipse Channel, thence the Labrador Sea. Only a few hours before, I’d ridden up this gorge via zodiac, a tumult of white and angry water biting at black rock and bucking our small boat. The waterfall at its end pushed us rudely away at some angles and drew us hungrily near at others.
Maybe it was the lack of landmarks or a mind maladapted to places without trees, but during these precious two minutes, everything felt close, as if I could reach out with a stick and carve my initials on the next mountain over. In reality, I couldn’t have reached that mountain before nightfall. Without Wayne, I couldn’t have reached it at all. Food and water were one thing, experience and a loaded gun another.
“I’ve seen polar bears here at 3,000 feet,” said Wayne. “If there’s snow, they’ll climb to the top of some of these mountains and slide all the way down, even with their cubs. It’s pretty amazing to watch.”
He tells stories of near escapes from more than one bear, some emerging from tundra as if from thin air, and on this hike alone, he’d point out Rock ptarmigans, Red-Throated loons, Red foxes, Rough-Legged hawks and entire herds of Barren-Ground caribou littering the valley between me and my mountain, all of them somehow invisible the moment before, all of them staring me square in the face. The Inuit have lived here some 700 years, and I wouldn’t last as many minutes.
I came to the Torngat Mountains National Park by the grace of Adventure Canada, an expedition cruise company conveying me and my fellow passengers—maybe 100 Americans and Canadians—north aboard the Ocean Endeavour and equipping us with Inuit guides and guards like Wayne. Over two weeks, we cruised southern and western Newfoundland, southern and eastern Labrador and then feasted on the Torngats for four days straight.
Since the Inuit established this national park in the early 2000s—achieving self-governance and territorial rights in the same stroke—maybe 300 people have visited each year, most confined to the Parks Canada basecamp in Saglek Fjord to the south and to whatever distances they’re prepared to walk. Sailing was better, said Wayne, anchoring places people couldn’t otherwise reach in a park twice the size of Prince Edward Island. One’s age, fitness and gear need not be barriers to the sublime. Not with this ship. Not with this crew.
His point would have been difficult to argue. Only the day before, we’d navigated the length of Nachvak Fjord, watching its toothy mountains spew fog as volcanoes spew ash, some with conspicuous gaps in their sides and peaks left behind by melting glaciers, some bald red from excessive wind, some lush green from relative shelter. Later, we anchored in Martin Bay, where Nazis built a short-lived weather station on October 22, 1943, and where us passengers endured a polar dip straight off the ship’s gangway, assured of both a sauna and hot tub once we’d scrambled back aboard. There was a morning I watched a Minke whale circle the ship from the bulwark. There was an afternoon I stared, stupefied, as a polar bear swam across our bow.
Yes, sailing was the best bang for one’s buck, but when my two minutes were up in the Eclipse Channel, and it was time to return to our floating fortress on the far side of the labyrinthine granite pillars and the fields of pale pink flowers, I found myself envying the people who walked, beginning their journeys at Parks Canada’s base camp. For them, the silence and solitude lasted days rather than minutes. For them, the next mountain over was well within reach. In spite of all good sense, I wanted to hike deeper, the 1,000 tonnes of fuel oil, 600 tonnes of fresh water and all the food aboard ship be damned.
I didn’t, of course. I was instead escorted back to the ship under armed guard and delivered to the next miracle of northern Labrador, maybe an iceberg more elaborate than Notre-Dame or outcroppings of rock eroded into huge receding spirals. It was an expedition of contradictions—the absurd grandeur of land at once empty and teeming juxtaposed with live music, warm beds and waiters chucking napkins neatly into our laps. I measure it all against those two minutes gifted to me by Wayne, when I felt farthest from comfort and closest to the mountains, where my only protection from bears, bad weather and runaway naïveté was the man with the gun.
