Lac St. Jean is an amazing lake, so big and round on the map! We were going camping at the Parc National de la Pointe-Taillon which is on the shores of St. Jean Lake. There campsites are only accessible by bicycle or canoe/kayak which is great because it means that our fellow campers will likely not be making as much noise as car campers sometimes do.
We are at the start of our bike ride to the campsite. The trailer is packed and ready to be towed the 4km to the campsite. We are staying at “Le Prospecteur”. MALA is flexing his muscles ready to haul the trailer carrying the huge tent, our baggage and the cooler.
We made our reservation online at www.sepaq.com which is the Quebec camping online reservation website and chose La Prospecteur camping area which is only 4km from the main welcome center. We rented a trailer for our baggage, tent, cooler, knapsacks and rode off towards camp. It’s a beautiful sunny day! We got to camp and started setting up the tent, or should I call it the palace! DD and I had found this tent at the Salvation Army all wrapped up nice in a deluxe duffel tote bag on wheels: it’s a 4 room tent big enough to host a small wedding!! It took us a while to set up but once we did we hit the beach.
Under the birch trees we set up the huge Quest Tent and were ready for a trip to the beach. We can hear the waves from our campsite. How awesome!
One thing amazing about Lac St Jean is the sand on the beaches. There are four distinct types of sand and each with a different color, weight and magnetism. The waves push onto the beach and the sand separates into four distinct colors that swirl and blend like an amazing kaleidoscope.
The amazing beach on the shores of Lac St. Jean were only a few steps away from our tent!
The beach becomes layered like a parfait with four different flavors. Coming from New Brunswick where we have some nice pale brown beaches it was so awesome to see the multicolored beach and watch the dancing sand patterns that were created.
We had a campfire tonight after riding our bikes along the trail. The Park has a nice trail that runs about 30km with a loop that cuts across the peat bog at the center of Pointe-Taillon. The trail gives great views of beaver dams, dunes on the lake, and the peat bog full of low shrubs and birds. I saw a few species of birds I hadn’t seen before but didn’t have time to take pictures. There were lots of bugs too! Pointe Taillon reminds me a bit of some of the flat sandy areas in South Eastern New Brunswick where we live.
It was interesting to be at Lac St. Jean which used to be a sea that was created during the last ice age when the land was pushed down under the tremendous weight of the glaciers allowing a sea to form. Visiting Lac St Jean we can now see how the sediments from those glacier movements have created an amazing landscape.
It is a great ride through the bog of the Park. The whole circuit is very flat so there is mostly easy pedalling and there are some great places to sight birds and animals along the trail. I only saw a flock of black flies this time!
The beach becomes layered like a parfait with four different flavors. Coming from New Brunswick where we have some nice pale brown beaches it was so awesome to see the multicolored beach and watch the dancing sand patterns that were created.
We had a campfire tonight after riding our bikes along the trail. The Park has a nice trail that runs about 30km with a loop that cuts across the peat bog at the center of Pointe-Taillon. The trail gives great views of beaver dams, dunes on the lake, and the peat bog full of low shrubs and birds. I saw a few species of birds I hadn’t seen before but didn’t have time to take pictures. There were lots of bugs too! Pointe Taillon reminds me a bit of some of the flat sandy areas in South Eastern New Brunswick where we live.
It was interesting to be at Lac St. Jean which used to be a sea that was created during the last ice age when the land was pushed down under the tremendous weight of the glaciers allowing a sea to form. Visiting Lac St Jean we can now see how the sediments from those glacier movements have created an amazing landscape.
The camping turned out to be pretty expensive; two of us camping with the rental of a bike trailer came to $114 for two nights including the bag of wood for a campfire ($6.50 for a small bag for one fire). I find the campsites to be pretty close together and on the sepaq website when they say intimate I didn’t really find any site that wasn’t only a few meters from another site. Maybe the canoe/kayak site would be more private but we are here in high season so there isn’t much to do about crowds.
I am having a great time, enjoyed the bike trail but would probably not do the camping again. It was nice but now that I have done it I can cross it off my list and don’t feel a need to go back to the Park. But the Lac St. Jean area I want to revisit for sure!!