Mont Tremblant National Park Day 4, Roughing It in the Campground

 We got up and the power was still off. We're camping, what could be wrong with no power in the campground? We had the battery pack for the fridge and if we needed to charge it, we'd just go for a drive. We had a camp stove, and rechargeable lights. What could be wrong? I used to wilderness camp every summer!

Well. It's a weekend, at a very popular campground. Nearly every of the 98 sites and 5 cabins were in use. How many people?

Rob went to the comfort station. The bathrooms were locked. The handicapped bathroom couldn't be locked but had one of those "Closed for cleaning" bars across the door. He went in anyway. Someone had covered the bathroom in toilet paper. The toilet was filled of poop, and the floor had been urinated on. 

Okay, but what about outhouses? Surely there's outhouses? And a handpump for water? You know the old fashioned ones with the big handle? Nope.

There was ONE single outhouse for the entire campground. No water pumps. 

There could have been 400 people there! The outhouse was far enough that it warranted driving. We actually had to wait.

We drove to the registration building and they had no power too. We asked if there were more outhouses and they said no. We asked why and they said it wasn't warranted. What?! Seriously? There are winter activities in some parts of the park, I don't know about there, but only 1 outhouse?! I really hope they re-think this. Keep it locked up unless there's an emergency. Power outages are pretty frequent from what we hear. 

They also said there was no refunds because of the power outage. Somewhat understandable, but we had no potable (drinkable) water! (Well, we did have a 2L jug in the fridge, but we weren't using that to wash dishes). 

I did notice these meat sticks in the shop--these are from where we live! They had a generator running to keep the ice cream treats frozen but that was it. 

We went in to St Donat for gas and to charge the battery. The staff had said power was out "even in the town" but we found there was power there. Maybe they meant the tiny village just outside the park. I'm not sure what else we did in town.

We went for a walk to see what was at "Blue Jay Point".  It wasn't on the map but there was a sign.  We followed the sign but we didn't see anything except some rocks and tree saplings in an area that looked like maybe it used to be a fire pit and seating area.  We then went down the path near our campsite. The path isn't on the map but there's a symbol saying "Discovery Activities". The symbols and legend are so tiny, and it doesn't show exactly how to get there. Go down the path near the bike rack at the very back of the campground.

What do you think this was?

It's a nice little area. You can probably walk along the beach all the way. When we went to the beach the first time we walked back a LONG way along the beach and then the trail went into the trees a bit, but then we went uphill and came out at a campsite that is on the main road (42-52....the area where the outhouse is). 

This is the star gazing bench. It would have been amazing to come down to star gaze. I laid down for awhile, but I did find it a bit awkward to get the right position. I'm so short and I didn't get lined up right, but with a blanket and maybe pillow, it'd be really comfy.

This was my view. Yeah, no stars. 

We headed back to the campsite and had lunch. Rob wasn't feeling well so I encouraged him to have a nap--something he usually does a lot when we road trip. I wanted to go for another walk and he didn't. So I went down the main trail, the Chutes-aux-Rats trail.

It was pretty easy walking, and there were quite a few other people out, especially close to the campground. There's a few benches and tables in nice spots along the trail. I even found another outhouse, but it was a 15 min walk from our campsite. 

Mushrooms are always fun to take pictures of. They don't move like flowers.

The signs indicated that the path to Chute-aux-Rats was closed. I had seen signs at the buildings but didn't really know what that was about. 

Shortly after I got back from my walk, around 3:30, the lights came back on! We wait about 15 minutes and went to wash our dishes. The washrooms stayed closed for awhile longer since they needed to be cleaned.

We had left them plugged in so we'd know when the power came on. We had been told 5:30, so we were excited it was earlier. 

We had another delicious dinner, trying to use up food. 

We were sitting at the fire in the evening, enjoying the peace and ....well...there was a large group down the hill with a lot of happy, excited kids. Almost every site was full.  Anyway, we moved the table over to the fire, and were just relaxing when suddenly I got startled by a voice beside me! It was a park ranger, walking site to site, to remind us to turn off the string lights when we go to bed. We had gotten in trouble in a Quebec park before because we had a bright light in our makeshift kitchen (Rob had fixed up the box trailer to have a sort of kitchen area at the end, complete with a large patio umbrella and fluorescent light fixture). I thought the string lights were pretty tame. They were low, dim, orange.  We had turned the lights off the other nights, so we figured this was just a routine walk about. She was friendly about it too. 

It was a somewhat early night since we were leaving pretty early in the morning, hopefully. 

Mont Tremblant National Park, Day 4, Diable Sector

I woke up in the morning, and Rob wasn't at the campsite. I quickly found him, enjoying the porch across the "street" LOL. 

Rob went to the registration building while I was doing morning stuff, and got the story about the road closure. The staff's English wasn't as good as the man the night before, but he gave him a park map and showed where the road was closed. It had just closed the month before after a bad storm, and they wouldn't get it fixed this summer. So, to go from the St Donat/Lac Provost sector to the Diable/Mt Tremblant sector, you have to leave the park and drive the long way around. However, after the drive the night before, I didn't that was too bad of an idea. I wasn't expecting the road through the park to be washboard gravel. Maybe when there's constant traffic on it, it's in better shape, but I thought it would at least be paved.

We decided to take the long route and see what we could find coming in from the other end. That's where the cool visitor centres are.

This is the one thing I really love at the Discovery Centre. It's a really nice place to go for souvenirs, snacks, or a comfy chair while it's raining. I picked up some souvenirs for myself and my mom, and some snacks made by local companies. I got a glow in the dark star chart that's more durable than the cardstock one I have that you can't see in the dark, and a t-shirt with a French saying ("time spent in the forest is not lost time"). I also bought a camp kitchen towel so I don't have to bring my home kitchen towels.

There are taxidermized animal displays that are cool to see. 

There's also a nice little dock on a lake. There were all these mid-sized fish. Looking at a poster later, my best guess was white striped sucker, but I'm not totally sure.

What a nice place to sit. That red-brown water is so iconic to me, it's what I knew growing up. The turquoise lakes of the Rockies were bizarre. Cool, but also...a little creepy. This is nostalgia. This is every summer of my childhood.

We left the Discovery Centre and almost immediately, I noticed a temporary sign on the road, indicating deer. Indeed, in a tiny meadow across from the Discovery Centre were a herd of deer having a nibble. When we had camped in the Lac Chat campground with the kids, there were deer everywhere. We didn't see any over at Lac Provost.

We headed back down the road to the first waterfall on the Diable River, Chutes Croches. We had taken the kids on these hikes when we had come before and they were not impressed with "hiking" except for the jerky I had made and brought. 

This was them when I told them there was a second hike and they weren't getting anymore jerky or fruit leather until after the hike.

We thought this tree was really cool. It looked burnt, and twisted.

We continued up the road to Chute du Diable. 

This was the kids back in 2016! No wonder people thought Megan and Lucy were twins. Now, Megan is 4" taller than Lucy!

This rock face at the look out (we think the upper level) provided a fun mini photo shoot back then. This time, there was a couple sitting on the bench so we didn't want to intrude, and I made Rob pose on a nearby rock face instead.

On our walk back (it's really not a hike, but also, the family carrying a stroller probably wouldn't consider it a "walk"), I saw something run across the path ahead of us. I thought at first it was a squirrel, but its body was too long.

It ran back across the path and I realized it was a mink!! Although my mom has had some around her pond, I'd never seen one! This picture below was the best I could do.

The loon being fed, and the mink, were two of my best moments from this trip!

We were ready for lunch and didn't really know where to go. We'd see a sign with a picnic table, but didn't know how far in, and they weren't on the map. So we decided that at the next campground, we'd pull in and find an empty spot and have a quick picnic. The crazy thing is, there were this little campgrounds all along the road, but they weren't marked on the map! Some of the campgrounds were, but not the one we stopped at.

We kept it quick. All I could think of was when we tried to find our campsite in the municipal campground in Grand Falls, NB. It was the only vacant site, and the site we thought it was, had a couple eating dinner at the table. Awkward!!

We continued up the road and cam to Camping du Lac-Escalier. We had to wait 5 min for the staff member to return from his break. At the entrance to this campground, the road that continued on was barricaded. We asked just how "impossible" was it to continue. He spoke good English, but was struggling. He said "like, Mission Impossible."  He also said that he hadn't actually seen the damage. We asked if we could walk to it and he didn't know. So we decided to walk.

We set a limit of 10 min and then we'd turn around. We went about 12 minutes because we both have the curse of  "just to the next bend".  We didn't make it there and have no idea of how much further it would be.  It was a nice walk though. As you can see, there is traffic on the road. We were told they weren't going to repair it until the spring, so what's going on? We could see the barricade had been moved aside and Rob asked me to move it for him but I refused LOL.

Basically, it says you can be kicked out if you go past!

We had to admit defeat. I said I'd do some detective work when we got home and see if I could find pictures. Unfortunately, even a request to Sepaq hasn't yielded anything. They just said it was closed for safety and they appreciate us respecting the closure. 

On the way back, we stopped at the Lac Monroe visitor centre for firewood. The map said there was "ready to eat" food here but all we saw was grocery and snack items.  Prices weren't too bad, even for the camping items like one burner stoves and even Starfrit frying pans. 

For firewood, you get two pieces of twine, and you choose your own wood and stack it in this contraption. 

The pictures make it look much bigger than it is!

Rob of course tried to stack it as high as possible. The first try, the twine was not in the right place so he had to stack it again. It was hard to tie the knot with barely any twine tails. And, it did fall apart on the way to the truck!

On the way back, we stopped at the IGA in St Donat. It's a great store! Lots of Quebec food options, and the deli, cheese, and desserts looked great! One thing we picked up was a ready to bake pizza, which we cooked on the BBQ. We even got a dessert which was a lovely treat while camping.

We had some trouble lighting the fire. We didn't have a lot of cardboard or paper, and we didn't want to turn too much of the firewood into kindling! We did find a few small sticks in the campsite and on the road, but we won't go into the forested parts to get wood. Plus, much of it was wet from the rain earlier.

Although we spent a lot of time in the truck, we managed quite a few steps this day too!

It was quite cool, and we were tired, so we opted to skip a shower and just do the dishes and our teeth. As we finished up, it started POURING. The wash up station is covered, but not closed in. A man pulled up and asked if there was anyone in the lady's washroom. I asked if it was his wife and kid, they were in the shower when I went in.

Then, before they came out, the power went out!!! I'm sure there was emergency lighting, but man, imagine being in the shower with a young kid and the power goes out! They had taken lights with them because it was already dark, but wow.

We got back to our site and it was already quite wet! Our tent was still dry. Rob hooked the fridge up to the battery pack and we went to bed, because it was already 9:45. We did get up later to go to the bathroom, and the power was still out. We used the handicapped washroom and there was no emergency light. The water barely flushed, and the door couldn't be locked. There was no water in the taps.

Surely the power would come back on soon?

 

Mont Tremblant National Park, Day 3

 We woke up and didn't have any concrete plans. We thought we'd drive down to Ste Agathe des Monts and see if we could find the restaurant we went to when we went with the kids. At least, we thought it was in that town. 

We made it into the town and went to the Visitor Centre for a few reasons. One was for the bathrooms but it was closed. So we went to the nearest Tim Hortons. I ordered two coffees on the app, then we went in and I waited by the Mobile Pickup. Forever. Eventually I noticed an older woman ask the young man working the front what was up with me. I held out the app showing my order. They looked at the monitor and didn't see it. They couldn't speak English, I couldn't say much more than duble-duble LOL and va to the question of "ici or va?" 

We headed to the waterfront where the map indicated there was parking. There was, but not much! A very lovely park! Place Lagny at the bottom of Rue Principale:

There's a playground, a community use building that one side opens up to a stage with some amphitheater type seating on the lawn, bocce, walking trails and a municipal pier with a pleasant sitting area:

It's not Lake Ontario, but I could live here!

We decided to make our lunch before exploring the town. We had brought our new one burner stove and everything we thought we'd need to make an old family recipe for "Red Noodles."  There weren't any table right beside the parking lot, but we got one we thought was reasonably flat. It wasn't. 

We lost the frying pan full of almost sauteed onions on the grass when it slid off the stove. Luckily, I had only used 1/3 of an onion (I needed some for another meal). Gave it another go. The other issue we encountered was the wind. We never even thought about that, since our old Coleman 2 burner had wind flaps on the sides and the top became the back panel. I had seen 3 paneled privacy screens for students at the dollar store, so we'll have to pick one up for our next trip. We had carried everything over in this collapsible basin, so Rob tried it as a wind screen. He went back to the truck and got the lids from the Rubbermaid bins instead. We also put the stove on the ground, almost under the table and that helped.  

Legendary Red Noodles. A warm, cheesy, tomatoey lunch. While we were cooking, a whole crowd came to play bocce behind us. It was nice seeing a park being used by so many different people. 

That was a ton of carbs, so we headed out to walk uphill, up the main street, looking for the restaurant. It was one of the best pizzas I'd ever had, back then. Thin crust, wood oven. I can remember what it looked like from the outside, but nothing seemed to match. It looked like a nice little town and we had    quite a nice walk around it.  We decided to head south to the next big town, Sainte-Adèle. 

I found there's a beach, but the only parking we could find was a lot with a sign that said $10/day. Maybe the machine had smaller time segments, but we decided not to stay. It's a small town and unless you're going to a ski hill there's not much there. 

We headed back, and I think we explored St. Donat. Yes, it seems every town is named Saint or Sainte.

The rain finally caught up with us! Luckily, because we were on the sand section, it drains really well.

Rob the chef.

A little bit of autumn at our campsite.

We decided to see how to get to the west side from our campground. We were expecting a road like the one into our campground--two lanes, narrow but paved. A little bit past our campground it turned to washboard gravel. We kept going. At one intersection, we saw barricades and I knew there was something about the trail not going to Chutes Aux Rats, but didn't know about the roads. We hadn't been given a map of the whole park, and there was no cell service. Even if there was, Google Maps didn't show the roads through the park, so you had to zoom in on the satellite view so much that you couldn't tell where you were. So we just kept going. 

We came to a Y in the road and barricades. 

I thought we were going to the La Diable sector, but I didn't know for sure, or what road we were even on. We opted to go the non-barricaded road. It had taken awhile to get this far, we weren't stopping yet!

We quickly ended up at a campground and beach, Accueil du Lac des Sables. It looked nice, but the showers weren't free (not that we had one, we were the only people there, but we like checking these things out).

We admitted defeat and headed back. On the way, a ranger (or whatever they call their park staff) was going the other way. He slowed down so we stopped so Rob could ask what "Impossible" meant. He said there had been a storm and it was closed. It was a young guy, friendly and good with English. Rob asked if it was really closed, or just "closed".  The guy said it was closed. Rob pressed on, asking if his truck could make it. The guy kind of laughed and smiled. He said, "well, you could try, but..." I took this as a no. Rob took this as there's a chance. LOL. 

We got back to the campsite and it was raining. The "Ready to Camp" across from us was empty, so we went and sat on the covered porch for awhile until it stopped.

This little bird has been so wonderful. I got it from Amazon, and it's rechargeable with a standard USB C cord. It has two light temperatures, and can dim. It's got a hanging chain and a stand (that actually stays in when you're using the hanging chain). The light is soft but bright. It didn't work great as a flashlight because it's not really directional. It lit the ground below, not up ahead. But it was great on the table or in the tent, for a nice soft light instead of the candle lantern or naptha fuel lantern.