Off to Gaspesie

Upstate Outpost has been on a two week hiatus as we prepare for a ten-day road trip in Canada. We leave today (June 11, 2010) to drive all the way down the south shore of the St. Lawrence River from Lake Ontario to it's outlet in the Bay of St. Lawrence.


Our destination is the little town of Percé at the very eastern tip of the Gaspé peninsula.


The Gaspésie (official name) or the Gaspé is the eastern most part of the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River. The river is many miles wide in this section. Beyond Quebec City the river increasingly becomes a mixture of fresh and salt water that supports a wide variety of sea life including several varieties of whales. The peninsula extends into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and is separated from New Brunswick on the south by the Baie des Chaleurs and the Restigouche River.


Gaspésie is at the very northern end of the ancient Appalachian Mountains at the point they finally plunge into the ocean. The interior is filled with fairly high mountains that I imagine as something like a more northern brother to the Adirondacks. In Gaspésie the range is called the Chic-Choc Mountains. The highest mountain in the rugged interior is Mont Jacques-Cartier at 4160 ft (1268-m) but there are several others near this height. The mountains support a unique mix of mega-fauna including moose, white-tail deer and caribou, all sharing the same ecosystem. The interior is heavily forested and crisscrossed by deep river valleys so as a result almost everyone lives in small villages on the coast.


Our destination is the easternmost point of the peninsula called Cap Gaspé. The name "Gaspé" may come from a Mi'kmaq word gespeg meaning "land's end". According to the Commission de toponymie de Quebec, Gaspé may also be a mutation of the Basque word "Gerizpe" which means "shelter". Our general plan is to quickly travel on four-lanes highways to just past Quebec City, then meander along the south shore of the big river on Route 132. At Sainte-Flavie, the entry point for Gaspésie, this route splits to circle the peninsula, with one branch following the coast and the other cutting south across the peninsula. The two branches meet at the town of Percé where we plan to stay for three days.


There are a few things I hope to see and do on this trip. I want to visit Isle Bonaventure in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and see the colonies of pelagic sea birds that come there to nest. Of course, I also want to see the Rocher Percé in person and check out the seal and whale watching. We hope to rent a sea kayak and paddle along a stretch of the wild coast. I hope we can swing inland into the Chic-Chocs to get a taste of the mountains. On the way back we plan to stop at the Reford Gardens to see their famous blue poppies www.jardinsdemetis.com/english.


Along the way we will explore the culture, the natural world and the food, especially the seafood.


The incredible fishing off the Grand Banks is what originally drew Europeans to this part of the world. When Jacques Cartier first came ashore in Gaspésie in 1534 to make an official claim on the new world for France he was very surprised to find the natives were able to converse with him in a pidgin form of the Basque language. This is believed to have been the result of many earlier visits by Basque fishermen who started to visit the Grand Banks beginning sometime in the late 1400s. The native population was never very large due to the rugged coast, mountainous and heavily forested interior combined with severe winter weather. Over the next four hundred years different waves of European immigrants settled here. The original permanent French settlers first arrived about 1650. They were joined a hundred years later by a different cultural group of ‘Acadian’ French settlers evicted from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by the British in 1755. Two waves of English speaking immigrants also arrived in the eighteenth century. The first wave was made up of British Channel Island fishermen who began to move in after the British defeated the French for control of Canada in 1759. The second wave was British ‘Loyalists’ fleeing north from New England after England lost her American colonies in 1783. A wave of celtic people arrived from Ireland and Scotland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Native people, francophones and english speakers have lived together in Gaspésie literally for centuries.


So, we're off to see for ourselves. I'll keep you posted.