Saint Anne River

March 7, 2023

We set off on the recommended ski route in a light drizzle on a warm day, following a snowmobile trench down a road. It took a couple of tries for me to get wax that worked, but in the end I found purple with some blue overlay did the trick, at least if I kept moving. After a few kilometers of pretty awful skiing we came to a junction which we thought would be a ski trail, however we were greeted with another road. After some map study, we realized that the entire route was going to be on road and even worse, on a snowmobile track. Given the poor ski conditions and warm weather we decided to abort the Lake Cascapedia destination and continue on towards some cabins a couple kilometers further.

We met a group of four travelling in the opposite direction pulling sleds and postholing along here, at which point the skiing went from bad to just freaking awful. I broke out some new tracks where I could, but this was not too fun either since buried snow machine tracks made the route fairly uneven. We arrived at the cabins and found three of the four full but the last one was unoccupied (probably where the postholers came from) and we sat down on some comfy chairs on the porch with a view while we ate a 09:00 lunch.

Lunch on the porch

For the way back we decided to try a different trail along the Saint Anne River and this was actually quite pleasant skiing. The sun even started to come out, but it still was raining thanks to melting snow dripping off of the trees overhead. As we neared the end a group of about a dozen snowshoers followed by a postholer came along and our nice ski turned awful again. Thankfully it was only about 500 meters of this and we were back at the car completing a three hour day.

Back in Saint Anne des Monts we had a coffee and second lunch prior to continuing on to Village Grande Nature where we start our five day hut-to-hut ski tour tomorrow. The awesome cliffs of the Mont Logan Massif are quite impressive viewed from the window of our challet accomodations. Hopefully the weather cools down a little during the ski trip.

Exploring Saint Anne des Monts

Chic Choc mountains

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