From Baie St-Paul to Manic 5
If you are ever in the Baie St-Paul area, I strongly suggest you do as we did and take route 362 (they call it hwy 362 but, really, it’s a route…) to La Malbaie going through Les Éboulements. It’s twisty, hilly, offers amazing views of the St-Lawrence river and basically just a lot of fun to drive. Because, unless you have an accute love of evergreens, you will find there is not much to be seen between Baie St-Paul and Baie Comeau besides route 362 and Tadoussac and its ferry…
After Tadoussac things change. The road becomes a little more flat as opposed to being hilly and steep like we got accustomed to, sort of. Our surroundings change quite a bit also. Before, it was all evergreens between small towns now, it’s all evergreens, period.
“Oh! Look honey, there a house there! Oh well, next bit of action in 200kms…”
Here’s France, Dave, Minnie, Sacha and Sadie enjoying lunch on the tail gate! Sacha, the black lab, and Sadie, the husky are Daves two dogs, by the way.
In Baie Comeau, we resupply and fill up the tanks as we don’t expect to see much in the way of fuel stations between here and Fermont, some 567kms out there in the total boonies. We then make a left onto rte 369, head north-east and hope the Landcruiser will meet our expectations of reliability… 567kms of mosquitoes, black bears and… Evergreens… Before the next town… Gulp…
Surprisingly enough, rte 369 is paved to the Manic 5 dam (Actually called Daniel-Jonhson dam after the name of then Prime minister of Quebec).
God Oh God, please don’t that dam break right now, pllllllease…
At 702 ft tall and 4,311 ft wide (214m X 1,314m), the Daniel-Johnson dam is the the largest arch buttress dam in the world. It required 2,900,000 cu yds (2,200,000 m3) of concrete to build and holds back 135 MILLION cu meters of ice cold water.
Please God, not now…
The 2 power houses of this dam can produce close to 1,600 Megawatts of power. Quite the generator… The dams’ erection filled the Earths’ fifth largest confirmed impact crater making it easy to see from space (and on Google earth…)
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