Beyond Gagnon the terrain
flattened out with lakes all around us and mountains on the horizon.
Here tamaracks were the predominant trees and everywhere was gold
around us. We could see signs of mining in the mountains, whole peaks
cut in half, and massive piles of tailings. The ore is transported by
rail, and we crossed the QNSL (Quebec, North Shore, and Labrador)
railroad in a number of places. The road deteriorated badly here,
with potholes, bad camber, 
and washboards that wore our teeth out. We
came to an iron processing plant, sitting on the edge of a
horribly-orange lake and overshadowed by a dune of tailings miles long
and hundreds of feet high. The tiny ants we could see on the top of
the dune were giant earth-moving machines.
A few miles on, we took the side road to Fermont (Iron Mountain) another mining company town. Its main feature is a block of apartments and offices that stretches across the north side of town. This is the town's windbreak, and all the town's houses are nestled behind it on the south side of town. The weather there gets quite grim in the winter, down to -50, so we could understand their need. The lady at the single gas station in Fermont didn't understand "propane" either. We were wondering if everybody only used electricity as it was probably very cheap. If so, we had a problem.
Shortly after, we crossed from
Quebec into Labrador. We had made it! 
Labrador City is close to the
border and it is large enough to have a Walmart, Tim Hortons, and a
Coop but not much else in the way of shops. We found the Labrador
West visitor centre and picked up some useful maps and directions,
and filled our water tanks. The lady there had been quite helpful and
assured us that we had a couple of weeks of reasonable weather before
the snow would start flying.
On our way through Quebec we had noticed that their license plates carried the phrase "Je me souviens" in the same spot that Minnesota's says "10000 Lakes". I translated the phrase for Sandie as "I remember" but I didn't know what it was that they remembered. So Sandie asked the lady what it was. She didn't know but she called her boss who was a French Canadian. He didn't know either so she called her counterpart in Fermont, who also didn't know but was going to call somebody else in Quebec. I had this vision of phone calls spreading out across Quebec asking "Do you remember what it is that we're supposed to remember?"
We were directed to a gas station
that had propane, but they couldn't fill motorhomes and they sent us
on to a propane company. They filled us directly from their tanker.
We got to talking about where we'd been and the owner showed me a
picture of the town of Gagnon back in the 70s. It had been a town of
5000 people. When the iron ore ran out in 1982 the mine closed and
the company had to return the area to its natural state, so the
entire town was bulldozed into the ground, covered over with topsoil
and planted with trees. The only surviving part of the town is the
straight piece of highway at the front of the picture.
Our next stop was at the laundromat. Sandie took most of our clothes and all our sheets and towels in and got the machines going while I started cooking. Unfortunately she hadn't noticed that it closed at five or that we'd gone through a time zone change and it was not four o'clock any more. The lady insisted on closing up so we had a large pile of wet stuff and needed to find a place to camp and hang out a washing line. There were no campgrounds still open this late in the year so we drove up a likely looking road, past the gun club, and the ski lift, until we found a snowmobile track going up the mountain. We followed that to a flat spot alongside a derelict shack next to a derelict ski lodge and lift. Another great Stephen King spot! We hung the washing out on trees for an hour and then brought it in and ran the furnace at full blast for the rest of a steamy evening with sheets draped all around us. At least it wasn't raining!
We slept OK but all night there was this strange fog horn noise coming over the mountain. We later found that this was from the iron mine, the sound of the great machines gouging out the iron ore.
Tuesday September 27th
It was a cold night and we made a slow start, having to rearrange all the drying clothes. We drove into town and found that the library didn't open until 2, so we couldn't get at the Internet until then. We stocked up with food at Walmart and lunched at Tim Horton's, and still had time to kill so we drove over to the nearby town of Wabush. Wabush was created by a rival iron mining company. It also had a library but it opened at 1, so we waited for an hour or so by Jean Lake and then went back to the library to check our e-mail and bank accounts. I also took a look at the "Je me souviens" question and found that it's already prompted a book and a video. The words were put into the Quebec legislature by a politician back in the 1870s and he forgot to record what it was that the Quebecois were supposed to remember. Rene Levesque put it on the license plates back in the 1970s and he didn't tell them either, so it's been a problem ever since.