The Coast

The Route Blanche Snowmobile Trail stretches from Kegaska on the western most end of the Lower North Shore, of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, to Old Fort Bay in the East. The trail connects all of the villages on the coast, and most of the trails are around 20-40 km between the villages. This is nice, since you can ride for a few hours, and then stop at one of the villages for a snack, or to buy gas. As I pointed out in my last post, most of the villages do not plow their roads in the winter, so you can just ride your snowmobile up to the restaurant or gas station, which is very convenient.

The trails are marked and are well groomed, so if you are in a rush you can make really good time on the lakes. The photo of the trail below is at the end of one of the portages on the trail, and gives a pretty good idea of what most sections of the trail are like. As you can see the trail itself is optional for many people, and if you are familiar with the area, there are lots of regions that you can explore off of the main trail. Of course this can be very dangerous if you are not familiar with the region, since there are a large number of rivers and rapids near sections of the trail.

The Lower North Shore is an isolated region, and it may take time for someone to find you, if you run into trouble on the trail. Because of this, there are several small cabins on the longer sections of the trail, that can be used for emergency shelter. The cabins have a wood stove, are stocked with wood, and would not be a bad place to spend the evening. It is recommended to bring an axe, and some matches with you, since I don’t think these are available in the cabins.

On this particular vacation, I stayed in La Tabatiere and just did day trips on the trail between Tete A La Baleine, and St. Augustine. I prefer this over trying to ride the entire trail, since it allows me to take shorter day trips, and then spend more time exploring sections off of the main trail. Also, by doing it this way, you don’t need to worry about rushing to make up time, if you get delayed because of bad weather.

Luckily, I had some great weather on this trip, which is common in mid March, and the riding was great. As you can see from the evening photo below, which was taken between St. Augustine and La Tabatiere, I spent many hours exploring the trail each day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Lower North Shore, Route Blanche, Vacation, snowmobile, snowmobiling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.