About a year ago, still on the last stretch of the Trans
Labrador Highway, I started to think about “the next trip”. Three Canadian
riders told me about the James Bay Road and what a great ride it was for them.
Studying maps and ride reports talking about Black Bears,
broken bones, burned bikes, medevac flights, black flies, bad weather and miles
of nothing but Tundra , I said “perfect, that’s exactly where I want to go!”
Very little convincing was needed, and my friend George was
in and the planning process started.
After a terrible winter and spring - wait, did we have
spring? and very few miles on the bikes, we met up in Acadia National Park end of May to
finalize the route to James Bay and the Trans Taiga Route.
We had a great night around the campfire - George came down
from Canada with two of his friends, Greg and Scott.
The evening flew by with stories about bikes, camping gear
and life in general.
Scott carried more gear than anyone else and pretended that
all was in his panniers on his 1200GS Adventure – I still haven’t figured where
he hid the trailer, I had half the stuff and needed two bags in addition. Same with
Greg he carried a “Sleep Number Mattress” and kept pulling out cooking gear,
folding chair and a flamethrower to ignite the campfire.
Good learning opportunity and first orders on Amazon were
placed the same day – can’t have enough gear!
The plan was finalized, meaning other than making sure to
dip our feet into the Southern Arctic Ocean, ride to the point furthest away
from a town you can get to by road in North America, taking the North Road (Route
du Nord) either on the way up or down and adding the few gas stations to the
list of waypoints there was really not much more we could have planned for. All will depend on
weather, bikes / riders not breaking down and making the miles to get there.
“The Plan”
The James Bay (Baie
James) region of northern Quebec is located in northeastern Canada along
the eastern side of James Bay. It is a vast wilderness area of taiga/boreal
forest, reached by a single road - the very remote James Bay Road (Route
de la Baie-James) - 620 km of forest and taiga and not a single town along
the way! If you're interested in a long road trip into a very remote part of
northeastern Canada, then this is the road
The Trans-Taiga
Road is a gravel road that runs 666 km east from near the top end of
the James Bay Road. It was built to access the various dams and
generating stations that extend upriver along the La Grande River.
This is
an extremely remote road, leading 666 km east - almost to Labrador - with
no settlements or towns aside from Hydro Quebec's settlements for workers (not
open to the public). At the far end you will be 745 km from the nearest town!
This is the farthest you can get from a town on a road in North America!
Now it’s only one more week to the start of the” JBTT 2017”,
getting new Conti TKC70 tires on the bike tomorrow, final selection of the gear
and trying to fit it all onto the bike is left.
Weather looks great – wait a minute, 37F at night?
I doubt there will be (m)any WiFi hotspots along the trip so
updates to the blog might take a while,
so be patient!
Odometer reading
Today: 0 miles
Total: 0
miles
So long,
Thomas
