I'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?
I 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.
If 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.
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.
> 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...
Might 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.
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.
Re 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.
> 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"
>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.
With 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.
Its 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
The 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.
Fascinating! 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.
Different 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.
I think you're right, but I don't think 'colonization' ever really stopped in Ontario - it just moved elsewhere. While Quebec was incentivized to develop its regions, there were more valuable places for Ontario capital to flow to, such as Alberta.
The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.
Thanks for the history. Very interesting. I guess Ontario still isn't interested in trying to farm land further north now..? The last time I was in Australia (15 years ago), I met a French chef in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory (he walked out of the bush with a can of kangaroo meat to say hello) who told me he was being paid something like $500 per month by the government just to live out in the middle of nowhere and homestead, which I found astonishing.
It 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.
Yes, and no one sane invests into agriculture around Moscow when there's much more warmer and fertile land down south. Factory farms and greenhouses? Yes, certainly, but this is driven by the food demands of a massive metropolis next door: move east or west far enough to offset this benefit and you will see scenes of rural decay.
That's because small-scale farming is not sufficient profitable, not because it's not possible. You can find scenes of rural decay in most any industrialized country.
That'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.
Its 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
I'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.
I 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.
From 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.
Only 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.
If 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.
Intersting! 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.
You're right, and I edited my comment accordingly, but I asked Google and got this interesting AI response, so I guess a lot of people on the internet make the same mistake, since AI just echos its training data:
The term "Continental United States" (CONUS) generally refers to the 48 contiguous states plus the District of Columbia, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. It encompasses the landmass of the United States located on the North American continent. While sometimes confused with the "contiguous United States," which also refers to the 48 states, "continental" specifically emphasizes the geographical location on the continent.
For 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).
Nerd 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
Go 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.
Honestly 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.
Melville (roughly) agrees -- from the first chapter of Moby-Dick:
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Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
Specific 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.
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.”
Sorry for the huge response to your passing comment but:
Not really. Statistically, the things that most often kill people lost in the wilderness are exposure and following that, accidents that outright kill or weaken the body's ability to deal with the weather and thus accelerate exposure effects. You do not need freezing temperatures to die of exposure. Even being exposed to mild cold, but continuously, and particularly if wet or partly submerged in water, will eventually bring your body down to hypothermic temperatures.
Hunger is barely a factor because you can go without food for an exceptionally long time before you weaken severely, let alone die, and though we need water to live quite soon, it's rarely impossible to find unless you're in a very arid place. In either case, if the weather is bad and you're under-dressed, that's what will kill you well before you need to worry about dropping from hunger or even thirst.
As for wild animals, they're your single lowest worry, despite being the things that tend to most scare people about the wilderness (thank our ancient hunter/gatherer instincts for this, since they led to us not immediately fearing things we'd adapted ourselves to handling well, like weather and sources of nutrition, but continuing to fear the things we couldn't easily control, like lurking beasts).
Generally, you'd have to be incredibly unlucky to be the victim of something like a bear or puma attack and forget completely about attacks from any other animal, since they're nearly unheard of.
Just to be clear, with most of the above i'm referring to North America or at least to some sort of northern or southern temperate region that may include deserts, forests, prairies, etc, and not tropical conditions or wildlife.
In tropical conditions, and especially jungles, the calculus changes quite a bit, with exposure being less of a risk (though one can be surprised by unexpected cold, as has happened to me in outright jungles deep inside central America where you wouldn't fucking expect to feel really cold, but holy shit!.) Certain kinds of wildlife also become much more of a danger in tropical places, though with few exceptions, the really problematic ones won't be the big predators. Instead you can genuinely worry about smaller things that sting or bite with venom.
Walking 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.
Keep 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.
Same time as I was doing similar work in the same area, same time the Pintupi Nine popped up wondering who all these pale people are.
> likely has
Yeah, mostly the case but certainly not all .. had they been available at the time it'd be unlikely that pair would have been given an EPIRB given the run down economic state of the pastoral station then.
If you want an EPIRB success story for those that are routinely well prepared, there's this tale from the Gunbarrel network:
If your employer doesn’t supply one for that sort of work, they need to be reported to the OH&S authorities. That said, you can always bring your own. If it were my kid in that scenario I’d buy one for them.
Another factor: currently satellite-based SMS is becoming increasingly available - I just got a message from Telstra the other day telling me it had been enabled on my service (using Starlink direct-to-cell). In years to come it is going to become ever more mainstream. So even if you don’t have an emergency beacon, so long as you have a sufficiently recent mobile phone…
.. then you're golden and just waiting for some one to pop on out the David Carnegie Road, or out into the Tanami.
Communication is only part of the issue here.
In the above linked recent incident the police when contacted couldn't make it out from Kalgoorlie (despite an initial indication) and handed off to a station owner who was able to make a 600 km+ round trip across a broken road to resupply water.
In a truly life-threatening situation, the emergency authorities can send help by air
If they don’t and someone dies as a result, they are going to have an awful lot of explaining to do at the coronial inquiry, it isn’t going to end well for them
Of course I realise in this 1986 tragedy the coronial findings (whatever they were) seem to have made very little impact - but again, I think standards and expectations today are different from what they were almost 40 years ago
That's just my opinion, of course, from working in such environs.
Ideally (hear me out) SMS messaging via Starlink won't operate in large swathes of the Murchison in any case, assuming Musk and other operators carry through on vague promises to turn ground|orbit comms off over Radio Quiet Zones for Radio and Microwave astronomy.
Further, I'm not sure you're grasping the practicalities of sending search and rescue teams to remote locations even when messages get through. Naturally emergency authorities want the best outcomes and make the best efforts they can.
In reality resources have to be available and not directed elsewhere at the time, sufficient to the task (eg: able to land or drop aid that can be used at the correct location ) and numerous other problems that crop up in every post mortem of such incidents from well before the 1980s all the way through until today as people still die in the outback despite your thoughts about standards and expectations.
Forty years ago we prepped to go deep into areas and to have backup on standby (of our own and not "the authorities"). Today it's the same.
It would be interesting to study coronial findings/records - I don’t have the time (or even expertise) to do so properly - to understand to what extent recent fatal incidents have been due to being so unprepared (or unlucky) that they lacked the means to contact the authorities for help versus the authorities were unable to promptly send any due to resource limits (or bureaucratic ineptitude). I suspect the former is (especially nowadays) much more common than the latter, but of course I could be wrong-such a study could turn this discussion from a difference of opinion/perspective into something much more objective.
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)
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.
> 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.
I 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
Well, 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...
One 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.
As 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.
It 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.
Relatively 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?
The 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.
--------
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.
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]
I 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.
Note 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...
I'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?
I 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.
Similarly, 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.
If 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.
The most recent update on the homepage is from 2009-03-03.
> 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...
Might 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.
One of those countries has its longest land border in South America
the US, Denmark and France?
You 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.
Re 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.
> 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"
There’s that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.
>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.
With 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.
I think it's also because of water. There is too much water in the northeast - central to make permanent roads.
What? You’ve never heard of a causeway? Or a bridge?
Its 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
The 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/
Fascinating! 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.
Different 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.
I think you're right, but I don't think 'colonization' ever really stopped in Ontario - it just moved elsewhere. While Quebec was incentivized to develop its regions, there were more valuable places for Ontario capital to flow to, such as Alberta.
The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.
Thanks for the history. Very interesting. I guess Ontario still isn't interested in trying to farm land further north now..? The last time I was in Australia (15 years ago), I met a French chef in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory (he walked out of the bush with a can of kangaroo meat to say hello) who told me he was being paid something like $500 per month by the government just to live out in the middle of nowhere and homestead, which I found astonishing.
Does it matter if it’s fertile though? Isn’t the climate there the limiting factor on ag?
It 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.
Both Finland and Norway have low population, too, because overall the climate is too harsh for high-yield agriculture.
*subsidizing
You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc.
It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.
Yes, and no one sane invests into agriculture around Moscow when there's much more warmer and fertile land down south. Factory farms and greenhouses? Yes, certainly, but this is driven by the food demands of a massive metropolis next door: move east or west far enough to offset this benefit and you will see scenes of rural decay.
That's because small-scale farming is not sufficient profitable, not because it's not possible. You can find scenes of rural decay in most any industrialized country.
Plenty of people invest in agriculture around Moscow. That's why Russia is one of the leaders in food exports.
To be fair, the bulk of the most productive Russian agricultural lands actually ends around Moscow's latitude.
The short growing season is somewhat offset by the very long summer days.
That'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.
Its 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
I'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibb_River_Road
I 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.
From 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.
Only 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.
Can you point to one matching this description on the map?
If 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...
Intersting! 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.
This story is about a road in Canada. I doubt the 20 mile thing holds in remote parts of Alaska.
Updated 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". :)
You probably want contiguous rather than continental. Continental does include Alaska but not Hawaii or US territories.
You're right, and I edited my comment accordingly, but I asked Google and got this interesting AI response, so I guess a lot of people on the internet make the same mistake, since AI just echos its training data:
The term "Continental United States" (CONUS) generally refers to the 48 contiguous states plus the District of Columbia, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. It encompasses the landmass of the United States located on the North American continent. While sometimes confused with the "contiguous United States," which also refers to the 48 states, "continental" specifically emphasizes the geographical location on the continent.
You would have been better off asking Wikipedia: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_United_State...
I think you missed my point. My point was that it's a common error, as surfaced by the AI.
You can easily do it if you go to the center of Lake Superior ;)
For 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).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894
So 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.
Nerd 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
Go 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.
Honestly 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.
Melville (roughly) agrees -- from the first chapter of Moby-Dick:
---
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
---
Specific 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.
You could still do that parallel to a road.
The idea is to minimise tbe chance.
Assuming 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.”
If you’re lost in the wilderness, hunger and thirst are the real concerns.
Sorry for the huge response to your passing comment but:
Not really. Statistically, the things that most often kill people lost in the wilderness are exposure and following that, accidents that outright kill or weaken the body's ability to deal with the weather and thus accelerate exposure effects. You do not need freezing temperatures to die of exposure. Even being exposed to mild cold, but continuously, and particularly if wet or partly submerged in water, will eventually bring your body down to hypothermic temperatures.
Hunger is barely a factor because you can go without food for an exceptionally long time before you weaken severely, let alone die, and though we need water to live quite soon, it's rarely impossible to find unless you're in a very arid place. In either case, if the weather is bad and you're under-dressed, that's what will kill you well before you need to worry about dropping from hunger or even thirst.
As for wild animals, they're your single lowest worry, despite being the things that tend to most scare people about the wilderness (thank our ancient hunter/gatherer instincts for this, since they led to us not immediately fearing things we'd adapted ourselves to handling well, like weather and sources of nutrition, but continuing to fear the things we couldn't easily control, like lurking beasts).
Generally, you'd have to be incredibly unlucky to be the victim of something like a bear or puma attack and forget completely about attacks from any other animal, since they're nearly unheard of.
Just to be clear, with most of the above i'm referring to North America or at least to some sort of northern or southern temperate region that may include deserts, forests, prairies, etc, and not tropical conditions or wildlife.
In tropical conditions, and especially jungles, the calculus changes quite a bit, with exposure being less of a risk (though one can be surprised by unexpected cold, as has happened to me in outright jungles deep inside central America where you wouldn't fucking expect to feel really cold, but holy shit!.) Certain kinds of wildlife also become much more of a danger in tropical places, though with few exceptions, the really problematic ones won't be the big predators. Instead you can genuinely worry about smaller things that sting or bite with venom.
Edited for way too many spelling mistakes.
No guarantees that people actually use the road.
Walking 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.
You'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.
"Easy, we just A-star this thing and walk for a maximum of 273 days."
That could be an awful lot of walking though.
Finding 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...
Keep 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.
Same time as I was doing similar work in the same area, same time the Pintupi Nine popped up wondering who all these pale people are.
> likely has
Yeah, mostly the case but certainly not all .. had they been available at the time it'd be unlikely that pair would have been given an EPIRB given the run down economic state of the pastoral station then.
If you want an EPIRB success story for those that are routinely well prepared, there's this tale from the Gunbarrel network:
Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL44EAyz8Qc
Even today people disappear every year or so on these roads .. some are found, others aren't.
If your employer doesn’t supply one for that sort of work, they need to be reported to the OH&S authorities. That said, you can always bring your own. If it were my kid in that scenario I’d buy one for them.
Another factor: currently satellite-based SMS is becoming increasingly available - I just got a message from Telstra the other day telling me it had been enabled on my service (using Starlink direct-to-cell). In years to come it is going to become ever more mainstream. So even if you don’t have an emergency beacon, so long as you have a sufficiently recent mobile phone…
.. then you're golden and just waiting for some one to pop on out the David Carnegie Road, or out into the Tanami.
Communication is only part of the issue here.
In the above linked recent incident the police when contacted couldn't make it out from Kalgoorlie (despite an initial indication) and handed off to a station owner who was able to make a 600 km+ round trip across a broken road to resupply water.
That was lucky, and luck doesn't always land.
In a truly life-threatening situation, the emergency authorities can send help by air
If they don’t and someone dies as a result, they are going to have an awful lot of explaining to do at the coronial inquiry, it isn’t going to end well for them
Of course I realise in this 1986 tragedy the coronial findings (whatever they were) seem to have made very little impact - but again, I think standards and expectations today are different from what they were almost 40 years ago
Dangers now are much as they were then.
That's just my opinion, of course, from working in such environs.
Ideally (hear me out) SMS messaging via Starlink won't operate in large swathes of the Murchison in any case, assuming Musk and other operators carry through on vague promises to turn ground|orbit comms off over Radio Quiet Zones for Radio and Microwave astronomy.
Further, I'm not sure you're grasping the practicalities of sending search and rescue teams to remote locations even when messages get through. Naturally emergency authorities want the best outcomes and make the best efforts they can.
In reality resources have to be available and not directed elsewhere at the time, sufficient to the task (eg: able to land or drop aid that can be used at the correct location ) and numerous other problems that crop up in every post mortem of such incidents from well before the 1980s all the way through until today as people still die in the outback despite your thoughts about standards and expectations.
Forty years ago we prepped to go deep into areas and to have backup on standby (of our own and not "the authorities"). Today it's the same.
It would be interesting to study coronial findings/records - I don’t have the time (or even expertise) to do so properly - to understand to what extent recent fatal incidents have been due to being so unprepared (or unlucky) that they lacked the means to contact the authorities for help versus the authorities were unable to promptly send any due to resource limits (or bureaucratic ineptitude). I suspect the former is (especially nowadays) much more common than the latter, but of course I could be wrong-such a study could turn this discussion from a difference of opinion/perspective into something much more objective.
> 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.
I 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
As 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.
It's a way to get cheap tourists from invading?
Well, 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...
But when there's only four houses every hundred km, a dozen dumb tourists become a very big nuisance.
I'm itching all over from all the insect bites only reading that website.
One 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...
As 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.
Photo tour: https://www.jamesbayroad.com/ttr/virtualtour/index.html
It 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.
Relatively 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?
The 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.
--------
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.
Via 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]
Around 10% of the electricity in New York and Boston comes from the James Bay Project; the power is transferred over 1000 miles.
I 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.
[0] http://www.donniedarko.org.uk
There are many cautions, but this road is nothing that a group of 4x4s couldn’t handle, perhaps in one day.
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