Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
154 points by jason_pomerleau 1 week ago | 92 comments- linehedonist 1 week agoNote that all this information is 20 years old and is badly outdated. Many of the facilities mentioned (eg the Nouchimi Outfitters gas station) no longer exist. https://www.facebook.com/TabascoADV/photos/a.696618650541057...
- williamdclt 6 days agoI'm fascinated by these. Who are the people operating these places? Where do they live, what's their lifestyle? Who are the customers, what are their stories?
- _verandaguy 6 days agoI don't have a definitive answer, but there's probably demand for these outside of adventure tourists trying to get to some of the most remote road-connected points in the world.
The James Bay Road exists essentially as a service road for a bunch of hydroelectric infrastructure that's part of Quebec's James Bay Project. I've never gotten past planning a trip up, but I gather much of the traffic on these roads are transport trucks delivering supplies to these remote locations (beyond what can normally be shipped up there by Hydro Quebec's aviation fleet, which as I understand is mostly wet-leased from Air Inuit and can land on many of the unimproved strips near the major project sites).
Anyway, little outposts like these might've been maintained by either Hydro Quebec on an emergency basis for these transports, or by volunteer (sort-of) trail associations, or by the province itself, or a combination of the three.
- xattt 6 days agoSimilarly, the Sultan Industrial Road is a private logging road that saves a few hours of driving on the Trans-Canada between Wawa and Sudbury.
However, amenities, and the likelihood of getting timely help, is low. Take your pick.
- xattt 6 days ago
- volkl48 6 days agoIf you want to know what virtually any wildly remote road is like, one of the best places to check is usually where people doing motorcycle/off-road adventures post, like advrider.com
Someone, somewhere, has almost certainly gone there and done that, with pictures, documentation, and enough mentions of other things that you can look up for more details.
On that note, here's a 2021 trip from someone that I read a few months ago: https://forum.expeditionportal.com/threads/riding-the-most-r...
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But for a quick summary of what I got out of it/minor additional research:
- A few company (Hydro-Quebec) outposts of a few buildings each for workers out there at the hydro sites that are why the road exists and some rural airstrips for the same purpose. Presumably like any other isolated worksite in that sense.
- An outfitters near the mid-point with lodging, supplies, etc that seems to serve both the workers traveling the route and some tourism. Looks like some very good fishing out there and I see other notes on the internet of people trekking out that way to fish - both indigenous people and tourists. (Also quite pretty if you like the taiga + lakes environment).
- There appear to be some other travel groups that have some private camps in the region and fly people in for fishing via floatplane, too.
- Doesn't appear to be any other permanent settlement along the road.
- _verandaguy 6 days ago
- BeFlatXIII 6 days agoThe most recent update on the homepage is from 2009-03-03.
- williamdclt 6 days ago
- rob74 6 days ago> Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada.
Not to belittle the remoteness of this road, but I just find it interesting that the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada is further south than most of Sweden (not to mention Norway or Iceland, which also have very extensive road networks). Another reminder of how important the Gulf Stream is for the climate of Europe...
- nucleardog 6 days agoMight be less surprising once you hear what Canadians mean when they say "Eastern Canada".
Canada's divided almost exactly in half with the top half (48% of the land area) being the territories (Yukon, Northwest Territory, Nunavut; collectively "Northern Canada") and the bottom half being the provinces.
When people say "Eastern Canada", they're referring to the Eastern provinces (Ontario, Quebec, the maritimes), and have already excluded the entire Northern half of the country. The nothernmost point of Eastern Canada is barely further north than the southern tip of Finland.
However if you look at Northern Canada, there's stuff like Alert, NU with roads and an air strip which is the northernmost continuously inhabited place in the world. It sits more than 1200km further north than the northernmost tip of Scandinavia.
My favourite Canadian geography fact: Canada shares borders with three countries. Two of those are land borders.
- sorokod 6 days agoOne of those countries has its longest land border in South America
- widforss 6 days agothe US, Denmark and France?
- nucleardog 6 days agoYou got it.
After a long, protracted dispute with Denmark where we sent our respective militaries out to Hans Island to give each other gifts of Whiskey and Schnapps (known as "The Whisky War"), we finally settled on drawing a border down the middle of the island giving Canada and Greenland/Denmark a land border.
Canada shares a maritime border with France at St Pierre and Miquelon, a few islands off the coast of Newfoundland that are a French overseas territory.
- nucleardog 6 days ago
- sorokod 6 days ago
- cgh 6 days agoRe your Gulf Stream comment: Whitehorse, Yukon is roughly at the same latitude as Bergen, Norway. Bergen’s climate is temperate and similar to, say, Vancouver: rainy, a bit of snow in winter, rarely staying below freezing for long. The coldest temperature recorded is -17° back in 1987.
Whitehorse’s average daily low in winter is close to -20°, with common drops to around -40°. When I was a kid up in that area, I remember walking to school at around -30 to -40°. We also played outside in those temps, which seems a bit mad now.
Here’s the fun part: Whitehorse has the warmest climate in the Yukon.
I get that there are other factors, like coastal vs inland environments, but regardless, any disruption to the Gulf Stream is bad news indeed for Europe.
- lastofthemojito 6 days ago> Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada.
There's always so much room for pedantry with statements like that. If eastern Canada includes Labrador (which it generally does), the town of Nain (which is further north) has roads that people drive cars on: https://maps.app.goo.gl/b1saMzzXKDQrHZQy6
Nain isn't connected to the rest of Canada's road network though, so it depends if one really means something like:
"this is as far north as I can take a long road trip in eastern Canada" or "this is as far north as I can be in a car, on a road, in eastern Canada, even if it is just a 1km ride from the airport on one side of town to the hotel on the other"
- nkrisc 6 days agoThere’s that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.
- southernplaces7 6 days ago>There’s that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.
If you're referring to just Northern Quebec, then sure, the area is maybe a bit larger than Sweden, but if you're referring to northern canada, meaning all of its territories above the provinces, then that's a whole different thing. You could fit much off central and western Europe into that region with room to spare.
- deadbabe 6 days agoWith climate change this will change in the coming decades perhaps. Kind of exciting, a whole new landmass that few people have ever considered exploring and know very little about.
- southernplaces7 6 days ago
- gosub100 6 days agoI think it's also because of water. There is too much water in the northeast - central to make permanent roads.
- madaxe_again 5 days agoWhat? You’ve never heard of a causeway? Or a bridge?
- madaxe_again 5 days ago
- nucleardog 6 days ago
- newyankee 1 week agoIts funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.
In fact barely equal to the diagonal length of the country. How much ever one talks about fertile plains, tropical weather being able to support more people, this no is still bonkers to me
- retrac 1 week agoThe low population density of central Canada is not because it's not fertile.
A few hundred kilometres south of the area in the article, is a vast clay belt of about half a million square kilometres. It's fertile. You can grow potatoes and oats and the usual garden vegetables up there. Somewhat settled on the Quebec side, and there are farms, but less than 5% of the area suitable for agriculture, is currently used for agriculture. It's a region about the size of France, and there are no large cities, and the total population is about 100,000.
You can even see the Quebec/Ontario border from space in some spots, because the Ontario side is wholly undeveloped: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.7805302,-79.5591059,52996m/
- noduerme 6 days agoFascinating! The border between Quebec and Ontario looks like the Mexican border with the US, or the Israeli border with Egypt, but this is all in the same country, Canada. In the US you can see some traces of this between Nevada and California or Idaho and Oregon, due to different laws and tax structures. Obviously if it's a sharp difference in land use along an arbitrary imaginary line, it must be due to the governance. So why is the Quebec side so much more farmed and developed?
[edit] one reason in the US for those sorts of divisions has to do with water rights. I think that probably applies to my other two examples as well. Buy I don't understand how that would be an issue in the northern parts of Canada.
- retrac 6 days agoDifferent history of colonization policy in Quebec and Ontario. Colonization in Ontario was shut down in the 1930s during the Great Depression. In Quebec, formal colonization was more tightly integrated with the Church, had more institutional support, and officially continued until 1973. There were still government-backed homesteading projects in the 1960s in Quebec. Also, on the Ontario side in the early 20th century there was no road/rail connection except via Quebec. Which meant that development in the region was tied more to Quebec than southern Ontario. And Ontario had little reason to support that. So it remained government land on the Ontario side. Or at least that's how I understand it.
- retrac 6 days ago
- bix6 1 week agoDoes it matter if it’s fertile though? Isn’t the climate there the limiting factor on ag?
- antupis 6 days agoIt depends, like here in Finland, there is lots of farmland and active farms, but most is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_continental_climate , Norway also has a lot of farms in subarctic areas like this in the article, but Norway is substituting farming very heavily even European standards.
- cyberax 1 week agoYou can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc.
It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.
- rfrey 1 week agoThe short growing season is somewhat offset by the very long summer days.
- antupis 6 days ago
- noduerme 6 days ago
- noduerme 6 days agoThat's not specific to this road. You could probably pick any 50,000 sq km area on the planet besides Bangladesh, and the population density would be several orders of magnitude lower than that of Bangladesh, except for maybe the few largest metropolitan areas in the world. Bangladesh can't support half its population, and Canada could probably support 10x its population, so one has to conclude that the wild difference in fertility rate is not as simple to explain as a function of how much land there is or how much food can be produced there.
- LAC-Tech 6 days agoIts funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.
I feel like you've just given the Canadian Government some ideas
- 1 week ago
- retrac 1 week ago
- Nursie 1 week agoI'm a fan of the Gibb River Road in northern Western Australia, it's around as long, has some beautiful gorges along the way for a little swimming, there's a river crossing at the Pentecost.
There are a few campsites along the way, and there is fuel at around the halfway point, and a town at each end, so it's not quite as far from civilisation as the Trans-taiga, plus you don't have to drive back the same way to get out! It's also significantly warmer, so much so that you want serious sunscreen and bugspray.
- petesergeant 1 week agoI find browsing around the map in remote Canada pretty interesting, especially the number of named settlements for which there appear to be absolutely no information or satellite evidence they exist. Take Roggan River: there’s a Wikipedia page claiming it’s a small village, and it’s on Google Maps, but there’s nothing identifiably there, and there’s no further information I can find online. The map is littered with these.
- gdbsjjdn 6 days agoFrom personal experience, there's over a dozen fly-in communities in the Northwest Territories. No roads, the only way to reach them is snowmobiling in the winter or taking a plane from Yellowknife.
My understanding is that Northern Quebec and Ontario are similar, lots of very small indigenous communities that still follow pre-colonial practices. They would get supplies by plane or by boat. It's not surprising a settlement with 50 people is hard to find on satellite.
- defrost 1 week agoOnly a few of the villages on and about the Amistustikwach will have visible road access and cleared land plots. Many will blend in with the landscape and have river access.
The google map pins are pretty approximate.
- petesergeant 1 week agoCan you point to one matching this description on the map?
- defrost 6 days agoIf I took the time to find one, very likely .. it was literally a daily task back in the day when I worked Canadian resource postings for the company that ran [1] before being picked up by Standard and Poor.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
- defrost 6 days ago
- petesergeant 1 week ago
- gdbsjjdn 6 days ago
- jedberg 1 week agoIntersting! I know that in the contiguous USA, you will never be more than 20 miles from a road no matter where you are, but have no idea how far one can drive from a town.
- mgerdts 1 week agoThis story is about a road in Canada. I doubt the 20 mile thing holds in remote parts of Alaska.
- jedberg 1 week agoUpdated my comment because you're right, I meant contiguous USA.
And I'm aware it's about Canada, which is why I said "I wonder what the answer to this same question is for the USA". :)
- bonzini 1 week agoYou probably want contiguous rather than continental. Continental does include Alaska but not Hawaii or US territories.
- bonzini 1 week ago
- jedberg 1 week ago
- bombcar 1 week agoYou can easily do it if you go to the center of Lake Superior ;)
- shkkmo 1 week agoFor the curious, I think that number comes from these people and is actually 21.7 miles, includes any kind of drivable surface, (like beaches and unmaintained private roads), and excludes anything that is too wet (like the middle of the great lakes or a flood plain).
- moralestapia 1 week agoSo if you're ever lost, you just walk?
(Assuming nothing kills you in nature)
Edit: Wait, no. You could be extremely unlucky and be walking parallel to the closest road, lol.
- bravesoul2 1 week agoNerd snipe: given a compass and dropped in a random location what is the best strategy (based on direction assuming no clues from terrain) of finding a road. E.g. strategy might be 1000 steps south then 1000 east, repeat.
Nerd snipe 2. Same without a compass or any sense of direction. Assume you can accurately make a 90 degree turn and count steps
- throwway120385 6 days agoGo find water and then try to follow where it flows. Look at the scenery and try to determine whether you're in a valley or on a plateau or in the mountains.
Compasses are pretty useless without a map or a terrestrial view of some sort, as all you can do with them is shoot a bearing relative to magnetic north, or if your compass includes a declination adjustment a bearing to true north, provided you know the declination beforehand. It's often printed on topographical maps for this reason.
If you're on top of something then you can use the compass to get somewhere you can do dead reckoning. Usually there's little landmarks every 10 or 20 feet that you can stay on a bearing to. But if you can't see any topography from where you're at you'll have to infer it somehow. So another strategy might be to head uphill if you can ascertain there will be some kind of view there.
A lot of what you'd do depends on the terrain you find yourself in.
- labster 1 week agoHonestly I’d just walk downhill. Most human settlements are on rivers, most roads take the lowest passes. At night, I’d just walk in the direction of the sky that’s glowing the most.
- madaxe_again 6 days agoSpecific to the U.S., assuming no terrain clues - go NW, SE, SW, or NE, as most roads in the U.S. go N, S, E or W - mitigates the possibility of parallel tracking.
The latter - pick a direction, walk in a straight line.
- 1 week ago
- moralestapia 6 days agoYou could still do that parallel to a road.
- throwway120385 6 days ago
- brudgers 1 week agoAssuming nothing kills you in nature
Weather is the only likely natural hazard outside polar bear country (and to a lesser extent grizzly country because grizzlies are less likely to see you as food). And if you are in polar bear country weather is extreme.
But as the saying goes “there is no bad weather just poor clothing choices.”
- rafram 1 week agoIf you’re lost in the wilderness, hunger and thirst are the real concerns.
- rafram 1 week ago
- saagarjha 1 day agoNo guarantees that people actually use the road.
- umanwizard 1 week agoWalking in a spiral pattern (where the layers of the spiral are close enough that if you look toward the center, you can always see the point where you were on the previous layer) will guarantee that you eventually see all points on any given radius.
- mousethatroared 6 days agoYou're not wrong, but this is proof that Id rather be stranded in the wilderness with an archeologist than a CS major (I'm assuming).
An archeologist would walk down a gradient until they find a stream and therefore a fluvial network to a human settlement.
Your answer gets me killed.
- jedberg 1 week agoThat could be an awful lot of walking though.
- mousethatroared 6 days ago
- defrost 6 days agoFinding a road, even having a car and fuel is no guarantee of survival in remote areas.
eg: Lost while bore running- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7065113/How-two-boy...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/horrific-desert-death-parent...
- skissane 6 days agoKeep in mind that tragedy happened all the way back in 1986.
Anyone doing the same kind of work today (bore maintenance in extremely remote Australian desert) likely has a Personal Locator Beacon-which can be used to transmit your location to the authorities in an emergency via satellite. Dramatically increases the odds of being rescued promptly if stranded.
- skissane 6 days ago
- bravesoul2 1 week ago
- mgerdts 1 week ago
- smikhanov 6 days ago
Will they really kick a passing driver out when it's freezing outside? Heck, wherever the population is this sparse and conditions are this harsh people normally actively invite you to their places. This sounds so weird.no settlements or towns aside from Hydro Quebec's settlements for workers (these are private and are not open to the public - they will kick you out)
- mastazi 5 days ago> people normally actively invite you to their places.
I've recently watched a Youtube vlog made by some tourists who went there on motorbikes and they stopped just to have a look at one of the Hydro settlement, they were invited in, given coffee and when they mentioned they wanted to find a spot nearby to pitch a tent they were told they could sleep in a hut that was unused at the time. So I guess they are indeed very nice with passersby, I guess they just have a general "rule" because they don't want travellers to rely on them.
- mastazi 4 days agoI have found the video, it was Brisay Station, relevant part starts at 9:20. This is the second of a three-video series and I've really enjoyed it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX9U2cI2uxk
- mastazi 4 days ago
- nsavage 6 days agoAs bad as it sounds, I'm guessing this policy is because of the indigenous peoples who live in the area and not wanting to create a pattern.
- mousethatroared 6 days agoIt's a way to get cheap tourists from invading?
- rob74 6 days agoWell, I mean, the touristic potential of a gravel road with 666 km of taiga scenery is a bit limited (if you have seen the first 20 km, you can probably imagine the remaining 646 pretty well). And I say this as someone who has been to Iceland recently...
- mousethatroared 6 days agoBut when there's only four houses every hundred km, a dozen dumb tourists become a very big nuisance.
- mousethatroared 6 days ago
- rob74 6 days ago
- mastazi 5 days ago
- ghssds 1 week agoI'm itching all over from all the insect bites only reading that website.
- wmitty 6 days agoOne of the most memorable cycle touring blogs I have read is of Bill St Onge's tour down this road.
In addition to the natural difficulty of cycling this extremely remote road (both ways), he was dousing himself in so much bug repellent that his heart was constantly racing (he thought he was going to have a heart attack) and he was hallucinating (IIRC) a giant bear that was stalking him.
He has taken the blog down, so I can't link it - presumably because he has published a book - https://www.amazon.com/Cycling-Quebecs-Trans-Taiga-Road-Wild...
- Lio 6 days agoAs soon as I read "gravel road" I instantly started thinking about what it would be like to cycle it. I think I'm going to have to get hold of that book.
- Lio 6 days ago
- shmerl 1 week ago
- imaginator 1 week agoIt looks like the road was constructed to serve the four hydro facilities that generate power for Montreal. https://openinframap.org/#7.12/53.8/-74.103/A,B,E,I,L,O,P,T show's the hydro facilities and power lines weaving their way down to Montreal.
- hkleppe 6 days agoRelatively long distances of road and power transmission lines to reach the two most remote locations. Especially considering they seem to be limited in capacity (only 319 and 469MW).
Curious to know if something bigger was in the plans, or perhaps the road also have/had other uses?
- volkl48 6 days agoThe piece of the puzzle that you're missing is the dams at the far end of the road divert the Caniapiscau River into the La Grande River, which provides close to half the water that eventually feeds all of the generating stations downstream.
Additionally, the reservoirs formed are important for making the system provide reliable power to match demand - demand for power in Quebec peaks in the coldest parts of winter, and the natural peak of runoff/river flow....is not then.
So, the generation out there is useful but is not the primary reason why the road was built all the way out to there.
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No special insight on the difficulty/expense of constructing the transmission, but ~788MW of extremely cheap power forever for constructing/maintaining ~130mi of extra transmission doesn't seem completely improbable to work out financially, especially at the time.
I'll also note:
- Vegetation maintenance costs are probably low given how slow things grow out there.
- This was constructed long before the modern era of cheap(er) renewables.
- Even today, Quebec's location, weather, and time of year of peak demand make the calculation for solar's cost-effectiveness a lot harder.
- volkl48 6 days ago
- hkleppe 6 days ago
- jdkee 1 week agoVia Wikipedia:
The average consumption of residential and agricultural customers is relatively high, at 16,857 kWh per year in 2011,[119] because of the widespread use of electricity as the main source of space (77%) and water heating (90%).[124] Hydro-Québec estimates that heating accounts for more than one half of the electricity demand in the residential sector.[125]
- retrac 1 week agoAround 10% of the electricity in New York and Boston comes from the James Bay Project; the power is transferred over 1000 miles.
- retrac 1 week ago
- vaindil 6 days agoI absolutely love websites like this that have a ton of information about a very niche topic. No ads or monetization, just someone who put together a very detailed website about something they love.
I think my first encounter with a website like this was for the movie Donnie Darko, which I found after I first watched the movie and was trying to understand the story. The website is still up! [0]
If anyone has examples of similar websites, I would absolutely love to read them.
- deadbabe 6 days agoThere are many cautions, but this road is nothing that a group of 4x4s couldn’t handle, perhaps in one day.
- 1 week ago
- nancyloure 6 days ago[dead]