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GeoConnections Helps Aguanish Bridge Its Winter Blues
For most of the year, the communities in and around the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec rely on snowmobile roads for the transportation of goods and services, and for communication between towns and villages. Over the past 10 years, however, the winter season has decreased dramatically in these areas—on average, each of the fall and spring seasons are now 12 days longer than normal. The St. Lawrence River is freezing later and thawing earlier, and in the winter of 2000 the snowmobile roads that used to criss-cross the frozen bays around it were accessible for only three months of the year. Last year, the ‘ice-time’ was only a month and a half.
“Winters are getting shorter and shorter,” says Marc Otis, Director of the Comité Z.I.P. Côte-Nord du Golfe in Aguanish, Quebec. Today, to compound the problem, large sections of the ice on the existing snowmobile roads, which travel along the North Shore, are not freezing to a sufficient thickness to bear the weight of snowmobiles and have less snow—making transportation virtually impossible. “In the smaller communities, their culture is based on snow. Many villages are only accessible in winter by skidoo.”
The solution was to use geomatics tools to forge a new snowmobile route farther inland. The loop will run through Blanc-Sablon, up to Labrador along the Churchill River, and back through to Sept-Îles, covering a distance of about 3 300 km.
The Sustainable Communities Initiative (SCI)of GeoConnections provided funding for computer hardware, software, and training expenses. Funding also helped to cover the cost of maps, which made up one-third of the project’s total budget. Five people have been trained so far. “Usually on a project like this, there may not be much work after the initial phase, but one of our trainees will be busy for the next three to four years!”
The idea of the snowmobile loop came from Newfoundland where a trail was being built from Red Bay to Goose Bay in Labrador. The organization Gestion Économique et Touristique Aguanish (GETA) thought that the trail could be extended down to Sept-Îles, along the coast, and back to Red Bay. Working with representatives in Labrador, three staff members made a 20-day trip by snowmobile to seek out a new route.
SCI’s support was crucial. “The project would not have gone through GETA without the back-up of the mapping,” Mr. Otis says. “Without SCI, it would not have been possible.”
At first, Mr. Otis believed that the project would be a relatively simple matter of traveling inland and mapping a new road. “We knew that a new road would make sense for transportation, but as we got into it, we transformed the project from a simple process of redrawing the road to one that would help communities map areas of interest in their region.”
Many of these communities, which include four Aboriginal reserves, are interested in taking part in the project as a way to boost economic development and tourism. One idea that is very popular with some of the communities is to promote ice fishing to draw people into the villages along the route. Another option in the future may be to use part of the route for Harricana, an internationally recognized snowmobile race that draws thousands of people each year to Quebec, which currently runs from Shawinigan to Québec City.
Although the primary maps that include the major landmarks have been completed, the project is still in its initial phase. Over the course of the 2001-2002 winter, Comité Z.I.P. plans to reach about 25 communities and ask them to develop an inventory of the human, financial and other resources they have available. These resources will also be mapped in order to explore the full potential of the route.
“This part of Quebec and Labrador has been mostly ignored by the
rest of the world,” says Mr. Otis. “But there are so many
beautiful places and it deserves much better.” The new snowmobile
loop should go a long way to drawing more attention to this
little-known “jewel” of the Canadian landscape.