Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
(Assuming nothing kills you in nature)
Edit: Wait, no. You could be extremely unlucky and be walking parallel to the closest road, lol.
Nerd snipe 2. Same without a compass or any sense of direction. Assume you can accurately make a 90 degree turn and count steps
---
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
---
Compasses are pretty useless without a map or a terrestrial view of some sort, as all you can do with them is shoot a bearing relative to magnetic north, or if your compass includes a declination adjustment a bearing to true north, provided you know the declination beforehand. It's often printed on topographical maps for this reason.
If you're on top of something then you can use the compass to get somewhere you can do dead reckoning. Usually there's little landmarks every 10 or 20 feet that you can stay on a bearing to. But if you can't see any topography from where you're at you'll have to infer it somehow. So another strategy might be to head uphill if you can ascertain there will be some kind of view there.
A lot of what you'd do depends on the terrain you find yourself in.
The latter - pick a direction, walk in a straight line.
eg: Lost while bore running- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7065113/How-two-boy...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/horrific-desert-death-parent...
Anyone doing the same kind of work today (bore maintenance in extremely remote Australian desert) likely has a Personal Locator Beacon-which can be used to transmit your location to the authorities in an emergency via satellite. Dramatically increases the odds of being rescued promptly if stranded.
likely has
Yeah, mostly the case but certainly not all .. had they been available at the time it'd be unlikely that pair would have been given an EPIRB given the run down economic state of the pastoral station then.
If you want an EPIRB success story for those that are routinely well prepared, there's this tale from the Gunbarrel network:
Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL44EAyz8Qc
Even today people disappear every year or so on these roads .. some are found, others aren't.
Another factor: currently satellite-based SMS is becoming increasingly available - I just got a message from Telstra the other day telling me it had been enabled on my service (using Starlink direct-to-cell). In years to come it is going to become ever more mainstream. So even if you don’t have an emergency beacon, so long as you have a sufficiently recent mobile phone…
Communication is only part of the issue here.
In the above linked recent incident the police when contacted couldn't make it out from Kalgoorlie (despite an initial indication) and handed off to a station owner who was able to make a 600 km+ round trip across a broken road to resupply water.
That was lucky, and luck doesn't always land.
If they don’t and someone dies as a result, they are going to have an awful lot of explaining to do at the coronial inquiry, it isn’t going to end well for them
Of course I realise in this 1986 tragedy the coronial findings (whatever they were) seem to have made very little impact - but again, I think standards and expectations today are different from what they were almost 40 years ago
That's just my opinion, of course, from working in such environs.
Ideally (hear me out) SMS messaging via Starlink won't operate in large swathes of the Murchison in any case, assuming Musk and other operators carry through on vague promises to turn ground|orbit comms off over Radio Quiet Zones for Radio and Microwave astronomy.
Further, I'm not sure you're grasping the practicalities of sending search and rescue teams to remote locations even when messages get through. Naturally emergency authorities want the best outcomes and make the best efforts they can.
In reality resources have to be available and not directed elsewhere at the time, sufficient to the task (eg: able to land or drop aid that can be used at the correct location ) and numerous other problems that crop up in every post mortem of such incidents from well before the 1980s all the way through until today as people still die in the outback despite your thoughts about standards and expectations.
Forty years ago we prepped to go deep into areas and to have backup on standby (of our own and not "the authorities"). Today it's the same.
An archeologist would walk down a gradient until they find a stream and therefore a fluvial network to a human settlement.
Your answer gets me killed.
Weather is the only likely natural hazard outside polar bear country (and to a lesser extent grizzly country because grizzlies are less likely to see you as food). And if you are in polar bear country weather is extreme.
But as the saying goes “there is no bad weather just poor clothing choices.”
Not really. Statistically, the things that most often kill people lost in the wilderness are exposure and following that, accidents that outright kill or weaken the body's ability to deal with the weather and thus accelerate exposure effects. You do not need freezing temperatures to die of exposure. Even being exposed to mild cold, but continuously, and particularly if wet or partly submerged in water, will eventually bring your body down to hypothermic temperatures.
Hunger is barely a factor because you can go without food for an exceptionally long time before you weaken severely, let alone die, and though we need water to live quite soon, it's rarely impossible to find unless you're in a very arid place. In either case, if the weather is bad and you're under-dressed, that's what will kill you well before you need to worry about dropping from hunger or even thirst.
As for wild animals, they're your single lowest worry, despite being the things that tend to most scare people about the wilderness (thank our ancient hunter/gatherer instincts for this, since they led to us not immediately fearing things we'd adapted ourselves to handling well, like weather and sources of nutrition, but continuing to fear the things we couldn't easily control, like lurking beasts).
Generally, you'd have to be incredibly unlucky to be the victim of something like a bear or puma attack and forget completely about attacks from any other animal, since they're nearly unheard of.
Just to be clear, with most of the above i'm referring to North America or at least to some sort of northern or southern temperate region that may include deserts, forests, prairies, etc, and not tropical conditions or wildlife.
In tropical conditions, and especially jungles, the calculus changes quite a bit, with exposure being less of a risk (though one can be surprised by unexpected cold, as has happened to me in outright jungles deep inside central America where you wouldn't fucking expect to feel really cold, but holy shit!.) Certain kinds of wildlife also become much more of a danger in tropical places, though with few exceptions, the really problematic ones won't be the big predators. Instead you can genuinely worry about smaller things that sting or bite with venom.
Edited for way too many spelling mistakes.
And I'm aware it's about Canada, which is why I said "I wonder what the answer to this same question is for the USA". :)
The term "Continental United States" (CONUS) generally refers to the 48 contiguous states plus the District of Columbia, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. It encompasses the landmass of the United States located on the North American continent. While sometimes confused with the "contiguous United States," which also refers to the 48 states, "continental" specifically emphasizes the geographical location on the continent.
In fact barely equal to the diagonal length of the country. How much ever one talks about fertile plains, tropical weather being able to support more people, this no is still bonkers to me
A few hundred kilometres south of the area in the article, is a vast clay belt of about half a million square kilometres. It's fertile. You can grow potatoes and oats and the usual garden vegetables up there. Somewhat settled on the Quebec side, and there are farms, but less than 5% of the area suitable for agriculture, is currently used for agriculture. It's a region about the size of France, and there are no large cities, and the total population is about 100,000.
You can even see the Quebec/Ontario border from space in some spots, because the Ontario side is wholly undeveloped: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.7805302,-79.5591059,52996m/
It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.
To be fair, the bulk of the most productive Russian agricultural lands actually ends around Moscow's latitude.
[edit] one reason in the US for those sorts of divisions has to do with water rights. I think that probably applies to my other two examples as well. Buy I don't understand how that would be an issue in the northern parts of Canada.
The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.
Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada.
Not to belittle the remoteness of this road, but I just find it interesting that the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada is further south than most of Sweden (not to mention Norway or Iceland, which also have very extensive road networks). Another reminder of how important the Gulf Stream is for the climate of Europe...
Canada's divided almost exactly in half with the top half (48% of the land area) being the territories (Yukon, Northwest Territory, Nunavut; collectively "Northern Canada") and the bottom half being the provinces.
When people say "Eastern Canada", they're referring to the Eastern provinces (Ontario, Quebec, the maritimes), and have already excluded the entire Northern half of the country. The nothernmost point of Eastern Canada is barely further north than the southern tip of Finland.
However if you look at Northern Canada, there's stuff like Alert, NU with roads and an air strip which is the northernmost continuously inhabited place in the world. It sits more than 1200km further north than the northernmost tip of Scandinavia.
My favourite Canadian geography fact: Canada shares borders with three countries. Two of those are land borders.
After a long, protracted dispute with Denmark where we sent our respective militaries out to Hans Island to give each other gifts of Whiskey and Schnapps (known as "The Whisky War"), we finally settled on drawing a border down the middle of the island giving Canada and Greenland/Denmark a land border.
Canada shares a maritime border with France at St Pierre and Miquelon, a few islands off the coast of Newfoundland that are a French overseas territory.
Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada.
There's always so much room for pedantry with statements like that. If eastern Canada includes Labrador (which it generally does), the town of Nain (which is further north) has roads that people drive cars on: https://maps.app.goo.gl/b1saMzzXKDQrHZQy6
Nain isn't connected to the rest of Canada's road network though, so it depends if one really means something like:
"this is as far north as I can take a long road trip in eastern Canada" or "this is as far north as I can be in a car, on a road, in eastern Canada, even if it is just a 1km ride from the airport on one side of town to the hotel on the other"
Whitehorse’s average daily low in winter is close to -20°, with common drops to around -40°. When I was a kid up in that area, I remember walking to school at around -30 to -40°. We also played outside in those temps, which seems a bit mad now.
Here’s the fun part: Whitehorse has the warmest climate in the Yukon.
I get that there are other factors, like coastal vs inland environments, but regardless, any disruption to the Gulf Stream is bad news indeed for Europe.
There’s that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.
If you're referring to just Northern Quebec, then sure, the area is maybe a bit larger than Sweden, but if you're referring to northern canada, meaning all of its territories above the provinces, then that's a whole different thing. You could fit much off central and western Europe into that region with room to spare.
no settlements or towns aside from Hydro Quebec's settlements for workers (these are private and are not open to the public - they will kick you out)
people normally actively invite you to their places.
I've recently watched a Youtube vlog made by some tourists who went there on motorbikes and they stopped just to have a look at one of the Hydro settlement, they were invited in, given coffee and when they mentioned they wanted to find a spot nearby to pitch a tent they were told they could sleep in a hut that was unused at the time. So I guess they are indeed very nice with passersby, I guess they just have a general "rule" because they don't want travellers to rely on them.
The google map pins are pretty approximate.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
My understanding is that Northern Quebec and Ontario are similar, lots of very small indigenous communities that still follow pre-colonial practices. They would get supplies by plane or by boat. It's not surprising a settlement with 50 people is hard to find on satellite.
The James Bay Road exists essentially as a service road for a bunch of hydroelectric infrastructure that's part of Quebec's James Bay Project. I've never gotten past planning a trip up, but I gather much of the traffic on these roads are transport trucks delivering supplies to these remote locations (beyond what can normally be shipped up there by Hydro Quebec's aviation fleet, which as I understand is mostly wet-leased from Air Inuit and can land on many of the unimproved strips near the major project sites).
Anyway, little outposts like these might've been maintained by either Hydro Quebec on an emergency basis for these transports, or by volunteer (sort-of) trail associations, or by the province itself, or a combination of the three.
Someone, somewhere, has almost certainly gone there and done that, with pictures, documentation, and enough mentions of other things that you can look up for more details.
On that note, here's a 2021 trip from someone that I read a few months ago: https://forum.expeditionportal.com/threads/riding-the-most-r...
-------
But for a quick summary of what I got out of it/minor additional research:
- A few company (Hydro-Quebec) outposts of a few buildings each for workers out there at the hydro sites that are why the road exists and some rural airstrips for the same purpose. Presumably like any other isolated worksite in that sense.
- An outfitters near the mid-point with lodging, supplies, etc that seems to serve both the workers traveling the route and some tourism. Looks like some very good fishing out there and I see other notes on the internet of people trekking out that way to fish - both indigenous people and tourists. (Also quite pretty if you like the taiga + lakes environment).
- There appear to be some other travel groups that have some private camps in the region and fly people in for fishing via floatplane, too.
- Doesn't appear to be any other permanent settlement along the road.
In addition to the natural difficulty of cycling this extremely remote road (both ways), he was dousing himself in so much bug repellent that his heart was constantly racing (he thought he was going to have a heart attack) and he was hallucinating (IIRC) a giant bear that was stalking him.
He has taken the blog down, so I can't link it - presumably because he has published a book - https://www.amazon.com/Cycling-Quebecs-Trans-Taiga-Road-Wild...
Curious to know if something bigger was in the plans, or perhaps the road also have/had other uses?
Additionally, the reservoirs formed are important for making the system provide reliable power to match demand - demand for power in Quebec peaks in the coldest parts of winter, and the natural peak of runoff/river flow....is not then.
So, the generation out there is useful but is not the primary reason why the road was built all the way out to there.
--------
No special insight on the difficulty/expense of constructing the transmission, but ~788MW of extremely cheap power forever for constructing/maintaining ~130mi of extra transmission doesn't seem completely improbable to work out financially, especially at the time.
I'll also note:
- Vegetation maintenance costs are probably low given how slow things grow out there.
- This was constructed long before the modern era of cheap(er) renewables.
- Even today, Quebec's location, weather, and time of year of peak demand make the calculation for solar's cost-effectiveness a lot harder.
The average consumption of residential and agricultural customers is relatively high, at 16,857 kWh per year in 2011,[119] because of the widespread use of electricity as the main source of space (77%) and water heating (90%).[124] Hydro-Québec estimates that heating accounts for more than one half of the electricity demand in the residential sector.[125]
There are a few campsites along the way, and there is fuel at around the halfway point, and a town at each end, so it's not quite as far from civilisation as the Trans-taiga, plus you don't have to drive back the same way to get out! It's also significantly warmer, so much so that you want serious sunscreen and bugspray.
I think my first encounter with a website like this was for the movie Donnie Darko, which I found after I first watched the movie and was trying to understand the story. The website is still up![0]
If anyone has examples of similar websites, I would absolutely love to read them.