 | CANADA |
| CANADA |
RAGUENEAU AND OUTARDES ONE
I was not alone when I slept here at Ragueneau last night. You can see that I had acquired some congenial company.
I haven't travelled back in time (well, not that far back) and I'm not in Jurassic Park either, but I'm on a promontory overlooking the bay at Rageuneau.
And at first glance, I'm not quite sure of the significance of the dinosaurs, but presumably, all will become clear in due course.
So after something of a restless night I am (much to my own surprise) bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at all of 06:30 to find a windy day but glorious bright sunshine.
It's a good job that I'm wide awake as good old Percy Penguin texted me a few minutes later to enquire after my well-being. So one mug of coffee later I went for a quick explore among the dinosaurs. Much more exciting than a quick tiptoe through the tulips.
I slept right by the obelisk here and if you peer through the gazebo you can see the Dodge
And as I was walking around, I was thinking ... "makes a change" - ed. Cartier, when he came to Canada, he had crosses erected top mark the spots where he set foot on land during his voyages of 1534 and 1535.
I wonder if in the centuries to come people will be erecting obelisks to wherever I spent the night.
Now I thought that I would find out something about the dinosaurs and obelisk as I wandered around.
The obelisk, which is 100 feet high, symbolises the light, to render hommage to all the volunteers of the region, whereas.the dinosaurs simbolise the strength and grandeur of heart that characterised the pioneers around here and also the forces of nature.
These are the works of a M Renald Girard - who has completely overlooked the fact that in relating the dinosaurs to the strength and grandeur of heart that characterised the pioneers around here, one thing that they all have in common, the dinosaurs and the strength and grandeur of heart of the pioneers, is that they are extinct and we shall never see their like again.
Climate change might well have done for the dinosaurs, but whole rafts of Government legislation limiting the ability of the individual to be an individual and to do as he thinks fit have done for the strength and grandeur of heart that characterised the pioneers the whole world over.
Nowadays we must all live, speak and think exactly as our Government wishes us, even if we do no harm to anyone else by continuing with our pioneering lifestyle.
The days of individualism, free thought and personal character are all behind us and we must now live in the way that the Communist Chinese of the 60s were ordered to live by their leaders.
And the depressing part of this is that the civilians don't care.
Back in the terminal days of the Roman Empire, the population were distracted from their rights by giving them bread and circuses. Here in the terminal years of the Western world, our leaders have given us 24-hour drinking and 200 channels on the television, in order to distract us.
And "terminal years of the Western world"? So what was the West's response to Russian activity in the Ukraine?
Now, somewhere along the road between Forestville and Baie-Comeau I encountered this waterfall too, and so I took a photograph of it.
But it's more-than-likely to be well out-of-place just here because I can't now for the life of me remember where it was and for some reason that I don't quite understand now, I didn't make a note of it on the dictaphone.
You will find that two things will happen to you when you reach my age
And so on my travels I always carry a dictaphone with me to record what happens and what I see, and without the dictaphone, I am sunk.
And that's not all either.
Somewhere round about 35 kms from Baie-Comeau, I saw the top of another impressive waterfall. However it was not possible for me to get get down there to photograph it, at least, not without a rope, a mountain axe, some pitons, a pair of crampons and a sherpa.
That was a shame -
Chute aux Outardes was the next town to visit along Highway 138 - the Route des Baleines.
And not only does the aforementioned have a village square, it's actually a village green and a proper village green too.
It is, to be honest, not exactly the kind of village green on which you could have a decent game of cricket, but it's the first village green that I have seen for, well, ages, and that in itself is something worth celebrating.
Of course, we have to have a church, don't we? And a fairly modern church too.
That is explained by the fact that the town is comparatively modern, being founded in the 1920s to house the employees of the hydro-electric power plant that was built here then - the first hydro-electric power plant in the area.
Another plus for the town, as far as I was concerned, was that at the Edifice Communale there was a public open-access municipal wi-fi connection, and so I took full advantage of that.
I arrived on the day that there was a Garage Sale and although I found no books and no CDs either (my usual targets at these events) there was a set of four 4 mud-and-snow winter tyres the same size as the one that I had been obliged to buy at the Saguenay River when I had had a puncture.
Had I had the room, they would have gone inside the Dodge.
Back on the road again looking for the hydro electric plant that I had just mentioned, and over there is certainly a dam. The access to it was controlled and so it wasn't possible to go for a closer look, unfortunately.
And even more unfortunately, that's not the dam in question either. That is actually Outardes 2, as I found out later, and built during the 1970s. As for Outardes 1, the original power plant of the 1920s, the remains of that are right down at the waterfront apparently, and it seems that I have somehow managed to miss it.
And so I wrote in 2012.
In 2015 I was much more tenacious, having more time to conduct a more thorough search. And this involves performing a U-turn and going back into Chute aux Outardes. Not actually doing a U-turn, I hasten to add, just a virtual one, because in 2015 I was travelling in the opposite direction, from the east to west.
Back in town again, I drove around and around for quite a while but I couldn't see anything that might give me a clue, but suddenly in the middle of a housing estate I saw a sign indicating a "Footpath to the Old Quay".
Now I knew that the quay was at the mouth of the river and that the old power station was on the river close to its mouth, so following the footpath to see where it led me - that seemed like a good plan.
Following the footpath, which had a very steep descent and then tumbled down about 300 steep steps I eventually found some of what remains of the generating station of Outardes One.
And it wasn't easy to find either. Down at the bottom of the steps the quay was signposted to the right and so I decided to follow another sinuous trail that led to the left. And after much binding in the marsh, a couple of false starts and being led up quite a few garden paths, I eventually stumbled upon the building where the turbines used to be housed.
The building was all locked up and the doors and window had been welded closed. But peering through the windows as best as I could, I could see that all of the turbines had been removed.
And that's hardly a surprise because the plant has been out of action for almost 40 years and they aren't going to leave stuff like that lying around. Especially equipment that was capable of producing 40,000 horse-power - almost 30,000 kilowatts - of electrical power.
And that, at the time that it was built, was quite a record for this region.
While you admire the discharge course of the power station, let me tell you a little about the history of the plant.
We need to go back as far as the early 1920s and the rise of the newspaper industry. The demand for newspapers was so high that the established sources of pulp could no longer keep up, and companies had to look elsewhere for timber.
The Chicago Tribune was caught up in the surge and its supplier, the Ontario Paper Company, couldn't supply sufficient pulp from its own resources and so set out on an exploration of any unexploited area of Canada where there would be easy transport to Chicago.
The company ended up looking up and down the Manicouagan valley, which we will be looking at in early course . Here there was an almost-inexhaustible supply of timber (such was the thought at the time) and not only that, the product could be easily shipped out on a "laker" up the St Lawrence and into the Great Lakes and round to Chicago with little if any inconvenience.
The company applied to the Quebec Government for a licence to exploit the timber, but it wasn't quite as straightforward as that. The Government imposed conditions on the company, one of which was to build a hydro-electric plant on the waterfalls where the River Outardes dropped down 80 metres to the St Lawrence River.
Construction began in 1925 and despite slowing up during the Great Depression of the late 1920s, the plant came on line in 1931. And its power output totally eclipsed that on the rivière Ste Marguerite near Clarke City. That plant, built 30 years earlier, had previously held the regional record with its output of 12,000 horse-power - about 9,000 kilowatts.
Although the building is completely sealed up, it's possible to walk all around the outside of the premises, and you can see how the water arrived here. It's not a waterfall or a tunnel bored through the rock, but a couple of conduits on the surface which have been encased in concrete and which you can see in this photo.
The water flows through the conduits, through the turbines andthen out of the building into the discharge down below that you saw in a previous photo.
Astonishingly as it might seem, the original conduits were made of wood - and with a diameter of 5 metres too. It was the longest of its type at the time that it was built.
I'm not sure though whether they are still there underneath the concrete or whether they were subsequently replaced
And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that this is not the first time that we've seen wooden conduits. When we went on our mega-ramble to explore the abandoned village of Riccarton Junction in Scotland we encountered a wooden conduit. But it was nothing like the one here of course.
But now Outardes-1 is no more. What happened is that when Outardes-2, which we saw just now, was being built (and which, incidentally, produced power of a mere 523,000 kilowatts in 2009) in the mid-1970s, its dam drowned the headings of Outardes-1,
Being as ill as I was, (it was 5 weeks before I was diagnosed with pernicious anaemia caused by Waldenstrohm's Disease) I didn't really fancy the climb back up the steps.
But I had reasoned that they didn't bring (or take away) the power station material via the steps. There must be some vehicular access to the site
I had a good nosey around and eventually found an old asphalt path that might once have been a roadway. This took me back up to the main highway not too far away from Outardes-2 but there was a gate and fence that was all closed up and padlocked that I had to negotiate.
That kind of thing has not inhibited me before as you know, and the particular barrier here was no great challenge. And having dealt with that, I then had a nice, easier but rather long walk on a reasonable surface took me back to Strider.
©