Look for the Torngat Mountains National Park in the extreme northern regions of Labrador. All above treeline, the park hosts the highest mountains east of the Rockies and some of the oldest rocks on the planet – up to 3.9 billion years, they say. That's remarkable, considering the age of the Earth at around 4.54 billion years.
I just returned from eight days in the Torngats. I was there compliments of Parks Canada who asked me to come to the park, to experience it, and to help tell the story of the park and the people.
No one lives in the park, but it has been the traditional home of the Inuit people of northern Quebec (Nunavik) and northern Labrador (Nunatsiavut). The park is currently managed by a Cooperative Management Board composed of Inuit from both Nunavik and Nutatsiavut. Inuit are permitted to continue their traditional hunting, fishing and gathering in the park. All people who go to the Torngats enter the park at a base camp located just south of the National Park boundary.
Nutatsiavut is best translated from Inuttitut as "Our Beautiful Land." Never have I experienced such raw, elemental beauty. Long, deep, coastal fjords slice the primeval coast with cliffs towering 900 metres out of the cold Labrador Sea. Our helicopter pilot was well versed as he safely manoeuvred these breathtaking fjords that funnelled deadly winds down from the glaciated George Plateau.
The frigid coastal waters abounded in life – bearded and harp seals, minke whales, dolphins, birds of all kinds – and a healthy population of nanuk, the while bear of the north. I was awe-struck by my first sighting of a large female polar bear with her two cubs scooting over the gentle slopes of a coastal island. Black bears were a common sighting – apparently the only known population of barren-ground black bear. The base camp was protected by an electric fence at night and armed Inuit bear monitors accompanied us in our travels.
For many, the Torngats is a wilderness landscape. Wilderness it is. Several times I shuttered before the starkness and naked power of the land – a power that I knew could so easily snuff out my life. One does not enter this land without some thought.
For others, particularly the Inuit, the Torngats is a homeland. Hundreds of archaeological sites exist in the park, reminders of occupation over thousands of years by the Maritime Archaic Indians, the Pre-Dorset and Dorset Paleo-Eskimos and the Thule culture, the ancient ancestors of the contemporary Inuit of these northern lands.
I was privileged to help build a rock cairn that welcomed the remains of several Inuit who had been removed from their burial sites by palaeontologists in the 1960s. From where we stood one can see many rocks cairns that served as ancient burial sites of the nomadic Inuit peoples. The polar bears also loved this low-lying, gently sloped island, witnessed by the many seal skeletons that littered the grassy and mossy hollows.
Torngat means "land of the spirits." The word is derived from Torngarsoak, the most powerful of the Inuit spirits. Today, the Inuit claim the Christian faith, but there still resides the mighty spiritual powers of the Torngats. I wish that I could put words to that spirit. But maybe as with the Holy Spirit, we are mute before the ineffable. All we can do is offer our lives in prayer and abandon.
Please check the tourism video [1] produced by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism. Let the spirit of Torngarsoak, the great white bear, call you to awe and worship.