Back in the fall of 1973, at the age of 24, I was in my second year living in an old farmhouse in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia along the Bay of Fundy. It was nearly 1,300 miles to the home where I grew up in Mount Airy, North Carolina.
Today technology seems to be everywhere. Smartphones, smartwatches , and laptop computers that find out anything given a good Internet connection. Back in the seventies, there were no cellphones, no Internet, and certainly no laptops, iPads, or portable Garmin GPS devices to guide you.The only technology we had was compass which we used with detailed topographic maps. Reading maps and using a compass were skills I mastered in Boy Scouts and honed while working on my pilot’s license.
Beyond technology we had faith in our abilities and the people we trusted with our lives. Perhaps it makes the adventures a little more exciting to recall because there were no safety nets and we were over 1,800 miles from friends and family.My new wife, Glenda, also from Mount Airy, and I were looking for a new place to farm. I had been thinking about homesteading in Newfoundland. Back before the Internet, research required actually visiting places. Since the place the department of agriculture recommended that I check out was a remote valley, the only way to get there was by bush plane.
I really needed to get on the ground and feel the soil not just fly over a frozen landscape like I had already done before I married Glenda.In preparation for potentially living in the bush, I had already passed the written test for a pilot’s license and completed my solo flight. I had also flown into the Alaskan bush a few years earlier. While the Newfoundland bush plane flight was a first for Glenda, she handled it well in spite the challenges of trying to land in a windswept box canyon. Strong crosswinds eventually forced us to give up trying to land down in the valley. Plan B was quickly hatched, and we landed on a small pond up on the barrens.
There was a moose camp (pictured above) on the pond but that was the closest thing to civilization for twenty miles on one side and over three hundred miles on the other. There is a good reason the mountains of Newfoundland are called barrens, but the terrain is not nearly as even as it looks. However, we were young and foolish so we bravely stepped off of the float plane onto the dock which was covered with moose and caribou parts, partially wrapped for a trip home.
We were soon met by a number of angry American moose hunters who were suffering from a severe hangover after celebrating the previous evening with some ladies of the evening who had been flown in for the occasion. They were convinced we had come to steal their hard-earned moose carcasses. I managed to convince them that we were just recent college students and the only thing that we had which would shoot was a camera. They relented and allowed us off the dock and into the wilderness.
We had agreed to rendezvous with the float plane in four days. We headed off into the barrens with our packs on our backs. I had assured Glenda that we would find plenty of wood in the river valley. Unfortunately we were now in the barrens, and I would soon be regretting that I had ignored Glenda’s unrelenting advice to bring a gas stove. I am still hearing about that mistake. Our three-mile hike across the barrens to the edge of the valley we hoped to see was both arduous and long. While the barrens look level, that is deceptive. The vegetation covering the boulders and rocky soil grows to a height that makes things seem level. But when walking through it, the ground is uneven and often disappears between the hidden rocks.
After a few hours of hiking we made camp on the edge of the valley in a cleared area. It was the flattest area that we could find, but it was also marshy. It did not take me long to realize that I made a huge mistake by not bringing a stove. There was no wood on the barrens. Of course we had not planned to be on the barrens. If things had worked out like we hoped, we would have been camping in a valley of trees. As it was, we were high on the barrens, and there was no wood beyond blueberry bushes. We spent three nights in our mountain tent in rain that was barely above freezing. With no stove, we survived on Ez-Cheese (Cheese-Whiz) and some snacks.
On the third morning, we decided that we needed to start making our way back to the small pond by the moose camp where we were to meet with the float plane that would hopefully take us back to civilization. Glenda had almost given up hope of seeing civilization again. She had shed a lot of tears in the three days, but I was confident we would make it back to Corner Brook. The day we decided to break camp and leave was about as foggy a day as one might imagine finding in the mists of Newfoundland. Landmarks were barely visible, but fortunately I had gotten us to our camp on the edge of the valley using a topographic map and taking compass readings frequently and recording them on the map. We actually had far less trouble than we expected getting back to within sight of the moose camp on the pond.
We worried about what kind of reception we might receive there, but it turned out that all the drunken hunters were long gone. The only inhabitants left were a couple of university professors who were moonlighting as guides. They invited us for lunch of caribou chops and moose tongue. They were waiting for their float plane to pick them up. As lunch was cooking they heard the Beaver float plane that was to take them home. They did not even bother turning the stove off or removing the almost done food. They grabbed their gear and ran. Over their shoulders they told us to enjoy the camp and turn the oil off when we left.
It was nice to spend the night in a place with some beds and where you could stand up. Glenda did not seem to mind the walls decorated with Playboy playmates. Anything was better than the mountain tent. The next morning, we awoke to clouds and not a very nice day for a ride in a small float plane. Being in the bush waiting for a ride back to civilization was a little different. in the seventies. There was no way to communicate, and we just had to trust that our pilot would come and retrieve us instead of selling our LandCruiser and leaving us to hike out or struggle through a long Newfoundland winter. The daylight hours of our proposed pick-up day moved slowly. There was not even a hint of airplane engine. Thoughts of being stuck 20 miles from the nearest road quickly ran through my mind, but I held onto to the belief that we would be retrieved. Late in the day just as the light was starting to dwindle, our Cessna 185 on floats winged its way between threatening clouds and the rocky barrens to make a landing on the small lake.
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