Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
45 comments
·July 3, 2025newyankee
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
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/
noduerme
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
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.
bix6
Does it matter if it’s fertile though? Isn’t the climate there the limiting factor on ag?
antupis
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.
rfrey
The short growing season is somewhat offset by the very long summer days.
cyberax
You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc.
It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.
noduerme
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.
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rob74
> 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...
jedberg
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
This story is about a road in Canada. I doubt the 20 mile thing holds in remote parts of Alaska.
jedberg
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
You probably want contiguous rather than continental. Continental does include Alaska but not Hawaii or US territories.
bombcar
You can easily do it if you go to the center of Lake Superior ;)
shkkmo
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).
moralestapia
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.
bravesoul2
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
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labster
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.
brudgers
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
If you’re lost in the wilderness, hunger and thirst are the real concerns.
umanwizard
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
That could be an awful lot of walking though.
defrost
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
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.
imaginator
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.
ghssds
I'm itching all over from all the insect bites only reading that website.
petesergeant
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
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
Can you point to one matching this description on the map?
defrost
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/campaigns/met...
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Nursie
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.
jdkee
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-Québec estimates that heating accounts for more than one half of the electricity demand in the residential sector.[125]
retrac
Around 10% of the electricity in New York and Boston comes from the James Bay Project; the power is transferred over 1000 miles.
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...