TrekEast Blog 65 Hiking International Appalachian Trail in Quebec

A Corridor to Restore

Late October to mid November, 2011

Trails can be catalysts for conservation and restoration.  They can be backbones for land protection, as America’s Appalachian Trail has been.  Footpaths connect places and connect people with the natural world.  If the International Appalachian Trail lives up to its potential, it will connect Maine with Gaspe, Americans with Canadians, and people with wild Nature; and it will inspire ecological restoration along its thousand kilometer course.  Restoring wild Nature along this varied route – ranging from cobble coastline to alpine summits – could serve as a model for how an Eastern Wildway might be recreated, step by step, volunteer by volunteer, species by species, region by region. 

One life at a time, please, though, as Ed Abby urged.  I should save such philosophizing for after I’ve actually labored over these surprisingly steep Canadian Appalachian slopes.  (Remember, Ed also said, philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul.)

So, do not let Quebec’s generally modest topography fool you.  The Gaspe Peninsula has plenty of steep mountains and rushing rivers.  If you wish for a gentle stroll to focus on birds or flowers, the International Appalachian Trail may meet your wishes in places, but in hillier sections leave you gasping for air.  Moreover, the weather here can be wet and cold for days on end, so keeping warm and dry is a challenge, once the short summer has passed.  Nonetheless, the woods are especially lovely in autumn, with views opened by leaf-fall and trails cushioned by colorful blankets of maple and birch leaves.

Unfortunately, as is the case across this region, especially from central Maine northward, much of the forest has been degraded by decades of heavy logging.  Northern Appalachian forests should grow plenty of spruce and fir, yes, but they should not look like Christmas tree farms, much less clearcuts, as a hiker too often sees on private and crown lands in New Brunswick and southern Quebec.

Despite the tragedy of industrial forestry, a traverse of Quebec’s part of the International Appalachian Trail/Sentier Internationale Appalachien (IAT/SIA, or simply IAT) is a rich and varied experience; and Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula, even after extensive over-cutting, remains relatively remote and undeveloped, and should in time serve as a northeastern anchor for an Eastern Wildway.  A great hope of the IAT is that, like its southern counterpart -- the Appalachian Trail, it will become a locus and focus for conservation and restoration efforts, for reconnecting wildlife habitats – and the Gaspe Peninsula is surpassingly important for such connections.

If you look at the human footprint mapping that Wildlife Conservation Society and Two Countries One Forest have done, the Gaspe Peninsula emerges as a big block of green.  So does northern Maine, though; and in both cases, it is partly an artifact of the mapping criteria: so far, human footprint mapping has factored in logging roads lightly if at all, though in fact they are pervasive fragmenting features in far too much of the Northern Appalachians.  Northern Maine, New Brunswick, and the Gaspe Peninsula all enjoy large areas with few or no permanent human residents; but the bulk of each of these related parts of the Northern Appalachian/Adirondack/Acadian ecoregion is criss-crossed by logging roads and cut on short rotation cycles.  In the Gaspe, this maze of logging roads is now also serving the proliferation of hill-top wind turbines.

Some of your walk along the IAT, then, will be through forests treated like crops.  A little tree-farming here and there, on private lands, might be fine; but to my mind, turning forested landscapes – including major public land holdings -- into pulp production grounds is wrong.  Occasionally, the trail itself has been messed up by muddy logging operations.  IAT trail adopters deserve extra credit for keeping trail sections navigable even through logged areas.

I do not mean to sound unduly critical of Quebec’s or Canada’s land management.  All the clearcuts, logging roads, and power lines I’ve seen in New Brunswick and Quebec can be found many times over in the United States.  Indeed, Americans lead the league in this arena. It will be ecologically disastrous and socially tragic, however, if Canadians decide to exploit their lands as heavily as we Americans have exploited ours.  The world cannot afford a colder America.

(By the way, as I write this blog, from deep in the Gaspe Peninsula, I am in spirit and solidarity with the thousands of environmental activists, American and Canadian, in Washington DC and elsewhere, protesting the proposed Keystone tar sands oil pipeline, which would ruin large wildlands in Albertaand lead to fatally high emissions of carbon, enough to take us past a threshold of no return from climate chaos, climatologist James Hanson and 350.org leader Bill McKibben have warned.  I urge all readers to add to the pressure on President Obama to stop this disastrous tar sands oil pipeline.  Go to 350.org for information.)

Thank goodness, conservationists in Quebec long ago succeeded in getting some areas set aside as parks or faunal reserves, Gaspesie and Forillon National Parks being the outstanding ones.  None of these are big enough for the full range of native species, but all are vital to wildlife locally, regionally, and even continentally.  Thankfully, too, these reserves stretch across a long and broad cross-section of Gaspe’s mountainous terrain.  If Quebec’s Faunal Reserves, including Matane and Chic-Chocs, are in the future truly and fully protected for wildlife, not managed for timber, much of a wildway across Gaspe will be in place.

The wildest parts of the hike north through and above the Matapedia Valley (north from Restigouche River and Chaleurs Bay) seemed to be the Clark Brook watershed, which includes small canyons and rushing streams, and the Assemetquagan River watershed, replete with moose, a young bull of which came browsing along nonchalantly as I prepared for a frigid fording of the river.  These and adjacent watersheds ought to be fully protected as ecological reserves.

Matapedia Adventurers (newest TrekEast sponsor, a great little company run by Genvieve & Jesse, whom we met at the end of the Restigouche paddle) had kindly provided me with trail maps and sound advice, else I’d have gotten lost in the mazes of logging roads or run afoul of sportsmen.  It seems much of Gaspe in autumn (like northern Maine) is essentially given over to men in orange, when some roads crawl with pickups on the hunt for moose.  I was not permitted entry into the Matane Faunal Reserve, because it is moose hunting season.  Hikers are also barred entry in late October and early November from the highest peaks of Gaspesie National Park, for better wildlife reasons – because it is breeding season for caribou, which persist in small numbers high in the Chic-Choc Mountains.  Thus, paradoxically, some of Gaspe’s wildest country is off-limits to hikers in autumn so moose can be shot and caribou can breed!  Does not this suggest some imbalances, like the need to restore wolves and give caribou more room to roam?

Not to complain too much, though, Gaspesie Park officials kindly allowed me to rent a hut for a few days at the heart of this globally important park, and to hike mountains safely distant from the caribou herd.  Moreover, everyone I met in Gaspe, out in the bush or in small towns along the way, was extraordinarily friendly and helpful, despite my inability to speak their main language, French.  I’d originally hoped to ski the IAT on the Grand Traverse through the Chic-Choc Mountains, famous for their great snow depths (alpine skiing here in the East through April, which I had the thrill to experience two springs ago!), but respect for the caribou and insufficient snow in late October meant day-hikes in the park, saving the full traverse for another season.  (See previous blog on Gaspesie Park visit.)  The sections of the IAT in the park that I hiked were spectacular, and the part near the St. Anne River gave me access to wonderful show of spawning Atlantic salmon.

International Appalachian Trail sections below and east of the Chic-Choc Mountains were a gorgeous mix of St. Lawrence Seaway coastline and Appalachian foothills.  IAT designers, builders, and volunteers are to be commended for charting a course that gives hikers a real feel for the Gaspe Peninsula’s varied terrain and habitats.  They are also to be commended for providing comfortable campsites near water but not too near ecologically sensitive sites.  The huts built for hikers along the IAT can make camping truly luxurious.  From the gorgeous rocky beach near one of the IAT huts, I was thrilled to see eiders, seals, and dolphins all swimming not far from shore!

Again, hikers get tastes of many land uses, some benign, some not.  For instance, on the IAT section between Petite-Vallee and Cloridorm, after a gorgeous walk on the beach, you climb into lovely wooded hills and past a resort that overlooks both Lake Asselin and the St. Lawrence Seaway and makes you wish you were rich.  Then, though, you enter a heavily used area where roads, clearcuts, trucks, or wind turbines are nearly always in sight or sound.  Many hikers must struggle here, not just with the steep hills, but also with the question of whether wind power is good even if it means forest fragmentation.  The question is particularly perplexing here, as it appears much of the land was already heavily roaded and logged.  If the turbines are using existing roads in an already fragmented landscape, are they clean & green? Maybe so, but if new roads are being built in the forest to accommodate these giant turbines (which do kill birds and bats in many places, unfortunately), they are not environmentally benign.  They are almost certainly better than Quebec’s other main mode of producing electricity, however – dams.

Back to the land I’m treading: Reaching the gem Forillon National Park on the IAT after some miles through worked-over forest (more roads, logging, power lines, ATVs …) made me heave a sigh of gratitude – for a beautiful, protected place, and for the good folks who labored to gain its protection.  I will talk about Forillon National Park in a later, perhaps penultimate, blog.  For now, let me end with the thought that Forillon Park could be seen as a wonderfully wild ending or a northeastern beginning of a continental wildway reemerging.  If we can follow the International Appalachian Trail west and south from Forillon, spreading seeds of recovery as we go, we will be well on our way toward restoring an Eastern Wildway.

For the Wild,

John