Barb and I skipped Canadian Thanksgiving this year and
decided to get out of town for one last pre-winter weekend of camping and
hiking instead. On Friday afternoon we drove east out of the city into Quebec (somehow managing to hit rush hour in Ottawa AND Montreal)
and arrived in the province’s Cantons-de-l’est (Eastern Townships) a couple
hours after dark.

The Eastern Townships are a hilly, under-touristed corner of
Quebec, tucked in east of Montreal,
south of the St. Lawrence, and just north of the border with Vermont
and New Hampshire.
They’re very popular with Quebecers but everyone was surprised to meet us: we
didn’t see any other Ontarians, let alone foreign tourists, the entire weekend.

Parc du Mont-Megantic is one of several protected areas in
the region, and boasts three hills (mountains?) with summits over 1000 metres
above sea level: Mont-Megantic, Mont-Saint Joseph, and Mont-Victoria. Each one
has a few hiking trails of varying difficulty, and in the winter several
snow-shoeing trails open up, too. There’s a parking lot at the gate and
drive-able roads up to Megantic and Saint-Joseph, but the campsites are 3, 6,
or 11-kilometer hikes from the trailhead. There are tent sites and cabins (the
latter are open year-round) and we picked one halfway up Mont-Megantic, a six
km hike from the park gate. I don’t have much experience camping without a car
and a cooler full of beer, but hauling all our gear (tent, sleeping bags,
water, food, camping stove, fuel, and layers of clothes for sleeping in
near-freezing temperatures) uphill for an hour and a half wasn’t as bad as I
expected.

On Saturday afternoon we took a pretty rugged trail almost
straight uphill from our camp to the summit of Mont-Megantic; it drizzled on us
the whole time but we were pretty sheltered in the trees for most of it, and
the bit of rain that did get through just helped to keep us cool. Saturday
night poured rain but we handled it pretty well, managing to keep (mostly) warm
and dry – although it was tricky getting our food up a tree in a downpour! A
helpful sign in an outhouse had told us that 10 bears lived in the park at last
count, so we persevered and eventually had our food bag swinging from a branch
like pros.

Sunday was sunny and clear, and we took a less-hardcore
route up to Mont-Saint Joseph, where we were finally rewarded with the views
we’d worked so hard for on Saturday. We ate the last of our food at the summit,
on a grassy patch with a view, and then headed down again for the long drive
home.

If you want to check out the camping and hiking in the
Eastern Townships, your first stop should be www.sepaq.com,
the site for the Quebec
parks authority. The park’s sites all have outhouses, firepits and water, but
it’ll need to be boiled for five minutes or purified before you can drink it or
cook with it. There are also a lot of (cheaper) private campsites just outside
the park, if you’d prefer to car-camp and do a few day hikes instead. We arrived
too late Friday night to hike into our park site, so we stayed at La
Cedriere de la Montagne, a private site run by a really cool Quebecois
couple who speak good English. (Which brings up another important point – since
so few outsiders come to the area, plenty of the people you’ll encounter won’t
necessarily speak much English. Learn a few key French phrases before you come
if possible.) Park du Mont-Megantic is just east of Sherbrooke, clearly signed and about 60 0r 70
kms off the main road through the area, Highway 10. It’s 2-3 hours from Montreal, 4-5 hours from Ottawa,
and probably only an hour or two from the Highway 91 border crossing into Vermont.

I’ve put up a few pics here but Barb has most of our best
ones and will be adding more soon, I think. Did I miss anything important,
Barb?

Correction: I just looked at a map, and we were a bit further east than I realized. Parc du Mont-Megantic is almost directly north of the New Hampshire-Maine border, maybe 20 km from the Highway 3 border crossing with NH. Vermont is still close too though. Boy does my US geography need work.