[HN Gopher] Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
___________________________________________________________________
Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
Author : jason_pomerleau
Score : 145 points
Date : 2025-07-03 01:07 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jamesbayroad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jamesbayroad.com)
| jdkee wrote:
| 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-Quebec estimates that
| heating accounts for more than one half of the electricity demand
| in the residential sector.[125]
| retrac wrote:
| Around 10% of the electricity in New York and Boston comes from
| the James Bay Project; the power is transferred over 1000
| miles.
| newyankee wrote:
| 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
| retrac wrote:
| 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/
| bix6 wrote:
| Does it matter if it's fertile though? Isn't the climate
| there the limiting factor on ag?
| rfrey wrote:
| The short growing season is somewhat offset by the very
| long summer days.
| cyberax wrote:
| You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples,
| cabbage, etc.
|
| It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 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.
| decimalenough wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| antupis wrote:
| 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.
| decimalenough wrote:
| *subsidizing
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Both Finland and Norway have low population, too, because
| overall the climate is too harsh for high-yield
| agriculture.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| nsavage wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _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
| shmerl wrote:
| Photo tour:
| https://www.jamesbayroad.com/ttr/virtualtour/index.html
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| mgerdts wrote:
| This story is about a road in Canada. I doubt the 20 mile thing
| holds in remote parts of Alaska.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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".
| :)
| bonzini wrote:
| You probably want contiguous rather than continental.
| Continental does include Alaska but not Hawaii or US
| territories.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| eCa wrote:
| You would have been better off asking Wikipedia: https://
| simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_United_State...
| jedberg wrote:
| I think you missed my point. My point was that it's a
| common error, as surfaced by the AI.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can easily do it if you go to the center of Lake Superior
| ;)
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| That could be an awful lot of walking though.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| "Easy, we just A-star this thing and walk for a maximum
| of 273 days."
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| 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
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| jonah-archive wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
| moralestapia wrote:
| You could still do that parallel to a road.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| The idea is to minimise tbe chance.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| brudgers wrote:
| _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."
| rafram wrote:
| If you're lost in the wilderness, hunger and thirst are the
| real concerns.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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...
| skissane wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| 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...
| defrost wrote:
| .. 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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
| linehedonist wrote:
| 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...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The most recent update on the homepage is from 2009-03-03.
| williamdclt wrote:
| 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?
| _verandaguy wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| 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.
| volkl48 wrote:
| 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...
|
| -------
|
| 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.
| Nursie wrote:
| 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
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Can you point to one matching this description on the map?
| defrost wrote:
| 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/campaign
| s/met...
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| 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.
| ghssds wrote:
| I'm itching all over from all the insect bites only reading that
| website.
| imaginator wrote:
| 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.
| hkleppe wrote:
| 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?
| volkl48 wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _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...
| nkrisc wrote:
| There's that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in
| that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >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.
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| widforss wrote:
| the US, Denmark and France?
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| sorokod wrote:
| One of those countries has its longest land border in South
| America
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think it's also because of water. There is too much water in
| the northeast - central to make permanent roads.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| > 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"
| cgh wrote:
| 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 -17deg back in 1987.
|
| Whitehorse's average daily low in winter is close to -20deg,
| with common drops to around -40deg. When I was a kid up in that
| area, I remember walking to school at around -30 to -40deg. 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.
| smikhanov wrote:
| 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.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| It's a way to get cheap tourists from invading?
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| mousethatroared wrote:
| But when there's only four houses every hundred km, a dozen
| dumb tourists become a very big nuisance.
| nsavage wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| There are many cautions, but this road is nothing that a group of
| 4x4s couldn't handle, perhaps in one day.
| wmitty wrote:
| 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...
| Lio wrote:
| 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.
| vaindil wrote:
| 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
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