Spruce Pond Drive-In Itinerary
Before Your Hunt:
When driving to Spruce Pond, you need to arrive at the North Sydney, Nova Scotia, Marine Atlantic terminal in time for the Saturday night crossing at 11:45 pm. It is recommended you be at the terminal and registered two hours before the ferry departs. The ferry crossing will get you in Port aux Basques around 7 am and it takes about an hour to get offloaded.
From Port aux Basques, it is a 2.5 hour drive to the staging area from where we fly you into Spruce Pond. Please follow these directions: Leave Port aux Basques and drive north on the Trans Canada Highway for about 1.5 hours. Look on the right hand side for a turnoff to Route 480, the Burgeo Highway. When you take this turnoff be careful as the road is quite rough in some places.
After about 45 minutes of driving, you should see a large pond in the distance. This is Peter Stride’s Pond. About 1 mile before you reach the pond, on your left, you will see a flat, gravelled area with several parked trucks. You may also see a helicopter; it is from here that the chopper flies you to Spruce Pond.
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After Your Hunt:
On the following Sunday, when your hunt is completed, you will return to the gravelled area. Once we have you iced down, you can hit the road and drive back to Port aux Basques, where you will have booked the Sunday evening crossing at 11:45 pm to return back to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, and from there, home.
Spruce Pond Fly-In Itinerary
Before Your Hunt:
You will fly into Deer Lake Regional Airport (YDF) on Saturday, the day before your hunt begins. You will get a taxi for the 3-minute drive to a hotel in Deer Lake, where we will have booked a room for you. Sunday morning, you and other hunters destined for Spruce Pond will take a taxis from Deer Lake to Peter Stride’s Pond, from where we fly you into Spruce Pond for your hunt.
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After Your Hunt:
On the following Sunday, when the hunt is completed, hunters, gear, meat and racks will be flown from Spruce Pond to the staging area. We will then drive you back to Deer Lake and from there bring you to the nearby community of Cormack, where the butcher is based. Your meat will be weighed and your cut sheets are given to the butcher. You then pay separately for the processing of your meat and the shipment of the meat and rack to the US. The shipper leaves in late November or early December and makes stops in the selected cities, where hunters will come and meet the truck to collect their meat and rack. Please consult the butcher’s cut sheet in your package for the current list of cities.
Once your meat and rack have been left with the butcher, we bring you back to your hotel in Deer Lake, from where you will get a taxi in the morning to the airport to begin your journey home.
