| Summary | None |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2012-04-16 21:26:37 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Swimming in the Arctic Ocean – Hudson Bay, Quebec
Eric and Matthew Gilbertson Friday April 13 3:30pm to Monday April 16 5:30pm 2,229.7 miles driving 1.0 miles hiking Friday evening: Boston to somewhere near Mont Laurier, Quebec Saturday: Mont Laurier to Waskaganish (Arctic Ocean), Quebec Sunday: Waskaganish to somewhere near La Tuque, Quebec Monday: La Tuque to Boston “You guys are going where?!” the border patrol agent asked in disbelief. “Hudson Bay,” I repeated. “Do you know how far away that is?” she asked. “Yes we do,” I replied. “It’s a 24-hour drive from Boston, and since we’ve been on the road for 6 hours so far, it must be 18 hours from here.” “And how long will you be in Canada?” “Just for the weekend.” The border patrol agent was silent for a moment. She looked down at our passports again, then back at us, and then started writing something down. “You guys have just been randomly selected for a full car inspection. Please pull up to the closest parking space and get out of the car,” she said, returning our passports to us with a little yellow slip of paper. Somehow this inspection didn’t seem 100% random. I pulled up to the parking spot and Matthew and I got out of the car as two new border patrol agents started walking towards us. “What business do you have in Canada?” the first agent asked. I handed him the little yellow slip of paper. “We’re driving to Hudson Bay for the weekend.” He looked at the other agent skeptically. “Have you been smoking something?” he asked half joking. “Why would you go all the way to Hudson Bay on a weekend?” “We were hoping to see some polar bears, swim in the arctic ocean, and maybe see the northern lights. It’s way too expensive to fly, but we can still drive there. It’s even a 3-day weekend in the US.” That about summed it up. Who wouldn’t want to go somewhere with that much to offer? “Open the trunk please,” he asked, as he and the other agent donned plastic inspection gloves. One agent started sifting through our backpacks and sleeping bags, and the other moved to the front of the car and looked through all our map and route description printouts. I detected a slight grin on his face as the agent saw the maps and detailed plans. The agent at the trunk started putting everything back. She looked at the agent at the front of the car and shrugged her shoulders with a look on her face that seemed to say “I don’t know what these guys are up to, but I can’t find anything wrong with what’s in their car.” They both stared at the trunk for another moment, before the first agent turned toward us. “Ok, you’re free to go. Welcome to Canada, and good luck.” --------- FRIDAY A trip to Hudson Bay had been in the back of our minds for several years. Dave Wentzlaff first gave us the idea that it might be feasible to drive far enough into Quebec on a weekend to reach the Arctic Ocean. Indeed, Google Maps said it would be a 24-hour drive to the southernmost city on Hudson Bay – Waskaganish – and a three-day holiday weekend would be just enough time to complete the out-and-back trip. Flying to the Arctic Ocean was definitely out of the question – that would be over $1300 per person. We did a little background research and found that the road to Waskaganish – the James Bay Road – actually is the second-longest road without services in North America, second only to the Dalton Highway in Alaska. In fact, the last 210 miles have no civilization at all and are partially unpaved. That’s equivalent to driving from Boston to the Vermont-Canada border and seeing nothing but wilderness. If that didn’t make the trip appealing enough, we also discovered that Nunavut technically owns the waters and islands of Hudson Bay, so if we swam in the bay we would technically have touched our toes in Nunavut. That sealed the deal. On Friday afternoon we cruised out of Boston in a black Mercury Grand Marquis rental car loaded with three days of food, camping gear, and lots of Canadian maps. We wanted a car with a full-size spare tire in case we got into trouble on the James Bay road, and we were told this was the only car Budget had with a full-size spare. Unfortunately it turned out to be just a doughnut, so we resolved to be extra careful to avoid flat tires. We carefully monitored the odometer for the first quarter-tank of fuel and calculated the car had a range of ~350 miles. Our longest predicted stretch of gas-station-less road would be 210 miles, but it was conceivable that Waskaganish could be out of gas, or the road could be washed out close to Waskaganish. In the worst-case scenario we would have to turn around and re-drive those 210 miles back to the start of the James Bay Road to find fuel again. Thus, we really wanted our car to have a 420-mile range. In Concord, NH we made a critical decision – we stopped at a Lowe’s hardware store and picked up a one-gallon and a 2-gallon fuel container. That would give us an extra ~75 mile-range in the car and should keep us out of trouble. We continued driving through the night, passing the Canadian border checkpoint with a little more hassle than expected, and driving north through Montreal. At 10:55pm, an hour or two northwest of Montreal, we noticed we were approaching the last town before an 80-mile stretch of potentially-gas-station-free road and our tank was close to empty. I turned off at Sainte-Agatha-des-Monts and pulled up to the nearest gas station. Matthew jumped out and stuck his credit card in the slot, but nothing happened. I glanced at my watch, and it had just turned 11pm “It looked like it was on before, but now the screen just says ‘ferme’,” Matthew said. I went to try the main door to the station but it was locked and the clerk was obviously more eager to leave than to help me. We had missed this station by less than a minute. We hopped back in the car and looked for other stations, but the only other two we found were also closed. There wasn’t enough gas in the tank to make it to the next town, so we reluctantly decided we’d have to camp just outside this town and fill up in the morning. I headed back toward the highway, but just before we got there we noticed one final station that still had its lights on. It was 11:10pm, and the guys inside looked like they were locking up, but we pulled in anyways and tried our credit card. It worked! The station had certainly intended to close at 11pm but for whatever reason hadn’t locked off the pumps yet. With a full tank we continued driving into the night until we found a nice stealthy place to camp just past Mont-Laurier around 1:30am. SATURDAY We hit the road again at 6:30am Saturday, after what I’d consider a 5-hour nap. It was still a long ways to the Arctic Ocean and we didn’t want to waste too much time sleeping. We drove through La Verendrye National Park, Val-d’Or, and Amos, each taking ~3-hour shifts at the wheel. Amos was a border town in several senses: it marked the approximate border between winter and spring in Quebec. South of Amos all the lakes were melted out and there as very little snow, but north of Amos the lakes were mostly still frozen, there was snow on the ground in the trees, and the road-cuts still had ice pillars hanging down. Amos was also the boundary of the developed and civilized part of Quebec with the great northern wilderness. We prudently filled up the tank in Amos, and just past the northern outskirts of town we saw a road sign with a picture of a gas station and “186km” written underneath. Now the trip was starting to get interesting. Over the next two hours we passed very few cars, no buildings or towns, but plenty of untouched wilderness. By 1pm we reached Matagami, the last little outpost before the famed James Bay Road. We topped off the tank at the Shell station and filled up our extra three gallons of reserve tanks as well. Ideally we’d have strapped these on the roof, but the car didn’t have a top rack so we had to triple bag them in garbage bags and store them in the trunk. Somehow gasoline odor still made its way into the car, but with the windows down it wasn’t that big of a deal. We had one final piece of business to take care of. There’s actually a little checkpoint center a few kilometers outside of Matagami where we had to register our names, how many people were in the car, where we were going, and our expected return day. This reminded us that the James Bay Road was nothing to be taken lightly. The official person taking down our information showed us a map of the road and the locations of numerous emergency phones about every 30 miles. Understandably there would be no cell service up there if something were to go wrong. With a final “Au revoir” we left the checkpoint and continued north. The road was in noticeably worse shape than before, with numerous potholes and often no discernible center line. Luckily it was paved though. The forest gradually started changing into muskeg – a swampy, bushy landscape with stunted pine trees. We were finally starting to feel close to the Arctic. At about mile marker 150 we hit our first real feature: the turnoff to Waskaganish. So far we had driven the equivalent of Boston to Pinkham Notch without seeing a single other building and only passing by seven other cars. And now the road turned to gravel. The “Access Road,” as the locals call it, was just completed in 2001 and still looked pretty new and well-maintained. There were hardly any potholes, and no washboard. We actually got the car up to 60mph on the staightaways, though we slowed for the turns. The forest now turned into scraggly pine trees with very short branches, often leaning over at weird angles. In Alaska they call this a “drunken forest,” and the leaning trees are caused by the permafrost underneath the soil melting and refreezing. I did some Wikipedia research later and figured out that we were indeed at the southernmost extent of permafrost in Quebec. We passed a few trucks roaring down the road, and then at 5pm arrived at Waskaganish. This was definitely not a normal town like you’d see down south in New England. The first buildings we saw were huge garages housing construction equipment like road graters and dump trucks. The road in town was about 5-lanes wide, all gravel, but only needed room for two vehicles to pass. There was a baseball field, highschool, and then a nice building labeled as “The Gathering Place.” All the houses were identical and looked pretty new. None of the lawns had any grass, just dirt and snow piles, and almost every vehicle was some sort of truck. We stopped at one of the few intersections in town, with the red octagon stop sign reading “Arrete,” “Stop,” and then the Cree symbols for stop. You don’t see a sign like that too often in Boston. We could admire the town later, though. Now it was Arctic Ocean time. I whipped out the GPS and guided us around the houses, past the little airport, and down a dead-end road that happened to end at the local dump. The town was actually on the shore of the Rupert River, so getting to the official ocean would take a little bit of work. “We’re currently 0.5 miles line-of-site from the shoreline, so might need to bushwack,” I noted as we parked at the dump. We’d seen some rough looking characters walking around town, so put everything that might look valuable in the trunk of the car before locking up. We put on our hiking boots and started down a small four-wheeler trail that seemed to head towards the ocean. It was extremely muddy from the melting snow, but luckily we had come prepared. The trail then turned south, paralleling the coast, and we decided to bushwack the rest of the way. Matthew dove in first, leading the way through the snow and branches. After about ten minutes the trees started opening up. Matthew got to the shoreline first. “We ain’t gonna be swimming in this ocean for another few months,” Matthew proclaimed, “unless we cut a hole in the ice.” I emerged from the bushes and was met with ice as far as I could see. This was the Arctic Ocean alright, just a little more Arctic than we had expected. To the north the ice extended to the horizon, and likely to the north pole beyond that. To the west we could just barely make out some land that must have been the opposite side of Rupert Bay, the little bay we had come out at. Rupert Bay was a part of James Bay, which was a part of Hudson Bay, which was part of the Arctic Ocean, so this still counted as long as we could find some way to swim. We ventured cautiously out past the last bushes until we were far enough out to be certain we were standing over ocean and not land. The temperature was in the 40s and the snow on top of the ice was melting into small pools. “If we can’t swim *in* the Arctic Ocean then at least we can swim *on* the Arctic Ocean,” Matthew said. “That still counts in my book,” I replied. Matthew took the first turn. He changed into his swimming suit, cleared some of the ice chunks from the top of a melt pool, and plunged in. Swimming would be an overly generous term for this activity. The pool was only a foot deep, and he rolled around in it for just long enough to get completely wet before jumping back out. It still counted, though. I went next, and probably spent a full 2.5 seconds in the frigid water before retreating. Water can’t really get any colder than that at atmospheric pressure, and it was pretty darn cold. It was also a little risky walking around the ice and snow in bare feet and my heels got pretty cut up from the sharp ice. We hung out on the “beach” for a while longer and started seeing a helicopter pass back and forth above us. We would later learn from the locals that this helicopter was ferrying Cree hunters to check their goose traps farther down shore. They would normally travel by snow mobile over the ocean, but the elders of the village had decided that the ice was too thin for that to be safe anymore, so were renting a helicopter for $3000 per hour for the next five weeks. Think about how crazy that is – 1.2 million dollars total so that locals can trap Canadian geese. Matthew and I could easily, and gladly, have snatched up a few carloads of Canadian geese from Briggs Field back at MIT and driven them up to Waskaganish for orders of magnitude less money. It’s a little mysterious how a village like Waskaganish can have so much money, but it comes down to owning valuable land. Hydro-Quebec, the power company that supplies much of the Eastern US with power, has its hydro-electric reservoirs located on Cree land in northern Quebec and pays the Cree a percentage of its profits. Also, Cree land happens to be over precious metal deposits, and mining companies need to pay the Cree for rights to mine. All of this means the Crees are very wealthy and can afford to hunt Canadian Geese by helicopter. We finished drying up and headed back into the bushes and to the car. Nobody had touched the car, though we did see a rough-looking family pull up to the dump just as we got there. They donned thigh-high rubber boots and the youngest little 10-year-old boy was wielding a big shotgun. It looked like the father was taking his family out for a little Saturday evening hunt. We drove around town a bit and then found a nice picnic table on the river shore to cook some dinner. A few locals walked by and warned us that a pack of wolves had been roaming through town yesterday and that we’d better watch out. “Any chance of us seeing polar bears around here?” I asked hopefully. “No, we’ve never seen any around here. Probably farther north you’d see them though,” they replied, probably wondering why anyone would want to see such a dangerous animal. Even if we couldn’t see a polar bear we could still be content that we’d visited the Arctic Ocean and seen a part of Quebec that most people never see. Another local stopped by the picnic and filled us in on basically every question we could think of about Waskaganish. First of all, it’s pronounced Wa-*ska*-guh-nish, with emphasis on the second syllable. It’s technically a dry town, but this fellow – we’ll call him Umiat to protect his true identity – claimed he’d made millions of dollars smuggling in liquor and drugs from the other side of James Bay. Now he just hung out in town and didn’t have to worry about working anymore. Umiat told us the elders have the final word on everything in town. One time the kids wanted to set up a snow-mobile race track out on the ocean, but unfortunately the elders shot down that idea. He told us the pack ice usually melts sometime in June, so we’d have to come back later if we truly wanted to swim in the ocean. He’d seen polar bears before, but only on some islands farther north in Hudson Bay. We had unfortunately forgotten to fill up gas on the way in, and discovered that the gas station was already closed for the night. We asked Umiat if the station would be open tomorrow. “Tomorrow, hmm. Tomorrow is Elders Day, and then Mondays the station is always closed, so you’ll have to wait until Tuesday to fill up,” he replied. What!? Would we be stuck here another two days? “Just kidding, it opens at 9am tomorrow,” he finished, grinning at how gullible we were. I had definitely believed him. Our tank was exactly half full, so if we assumed the dial was linear we could just barely get back to Matagami with what was left. However, with the three extra gallons in the trunk we could comfortably get back to Matagami without having to wait til 9am to fill up. So we decided not to bother filling up the next morning but just head back early. We talked for about an hour before Umiat decided it was time to go see a little concert starting at The Gathering Place. We were pretty exhausted so decided to go find some place to sleep. It would have been awesome to sleep on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, but we still weren’t 100% sure that there wouldn’t be any polar bears out there. This shore is still supposedly within their range according to our online research, and polar bears are one of the few animals known to actually hunt humans. So without a gun we decided it’d be safer to camp farther inland. We drove out of town for about 30 minutes, and then found a nice pulloff to pitch the tent. SUNDAY We now had two full days to get back to Boston, and that meant plenty of time to see more of Quebec. We had somehow shaved four hours off the predicted driving time from Boston to Waskaganish, and figured we could probably do the same on the return. We signed out at the end of the James Bay Road, and then filled up again in Matagami. For the return journey we decided to loop east toward Chibougamau and then south through Quebec City to see as much of Quebec as possible. There was a gravel road of unknown quality leading out of Matagami on this route, but we were pretty experienced on gravel roads by now so decided to go for it. This first road was not actually on our road maps and we hadn’t loaded satellite images for it on our GPS, so we kind of had to get lucky that we’d make the right choices at intersections to get us to another main road. At one point we went left where we probably shouldn’t have. The logging road started deteriorating and heading north, deeper into the wilderness and farther from our destination. After half an hour we decided to turn around and try a different route. Luckily our next try was successful, spitting us out near the town of Miquelon and the paved route 113. From Miquelon to Chibougamau the road was mostly wilderness with only a couple tiny outposts along the way. It’s amazing how you can look at a map of northern Quebec and see a road with all kind of towns on it, but in reality the towns are so small that you could drive for four hours and see 3hours and 55 minutes of wilderness. We cut south at Chibougamau and after a few more hours finally reached civilization again near Lac-St-Jean. It was a little disappointing to see buildings and people, but was inevitable if we ever wanted to reach Boston again. That night we made it past La Tuque to a nice gravel pull-off in the woods outside of Trois-Riviers. MONDAY We got up at sunrise and crossed the St Lawrence Seaway, and then drove through Drummondville and Sherbrook before hitting the US border in Northern Vermont. This time the border officer obviously hadn’t heard of Hudson Bay (he was American), but he still asked us every question he could think of for about 15 minutes. It must have been a slow day there and he was just bored sitting around. We took a little detour through Dixville Notch to see a little road-side ice climb there (it looked climbable still but not for long), then stopped at Pinkham Notch to catch a glimpse of Mt Washington. We made it back to Boston just in time to drop off the rental car and not have to deal with parking it over night. If you’re interested in seeing polar bears there’s still hope. There’s a Cree proposal to extend the James Bay Road to the small village of Kuujjuarapik much farther north on Hudson Bay. |