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// The Canadian summer is a precious thing. I try not to waste it. Come mid-June, I don a pair of shorts—the below-the-knee kind—and, most years, I don't swap them for my long pants until mid-September. That's because my default plan on any given day is to get outdoors—to "touch grass" as my kids say—by hopping on my bike, or running through the wooded trails up Mont-Royal.
One of my favourite activities is going for long-distance bike rides. In spite of our winters, which are as harsh and long as our summer is intense and brief, Quebec is a fantastic place for cycle touring. (That said, I continue to cycle-commute throughout the winter months; I share some of my tips for snow-cycling in this post.) Vélo Québec has worked hard to establish its Route verte throughout the province, and the more I explore these corridors, the more impressed I am by the amount of work that goes into waymarking, maintaining, and expanding this network, which now counts 5,400 kilometers of paths—the largest such network in North America—with links to bikeways in Ontario, New Brunswick, and the US.
One of the attractions of these trails is that, for long stretches, they are completely separated from the road network. That makes for one pleasant experience: you aren't in the narrow, debris-strewn shoulder of a two-lane highway—which is what rural cycling is like in many parts of the world—but following gently graded corridors, often through forests, or along canals or rivers. There's a reason for that: Quebec has transformed many former railway corridors into multi-use trails, for hiking, cycling, and cross-country skiing.
This is hardly unique to Quebec. There are many other examples of "rails-to-trails" around the world, among them the High Line in Lower Manhattan, and the Coulée verte Renée-Dumont, from the Bois de Vincennes to the Bastille on Paris's Right Bank. And there are examples across Canada (I'm thinking particularly of the spectacular ride along the trestles and tunnels of the Kettle Valley Railway, in B.C., and the Galloping Goose, which I've cycled on Vancouver Island.)
In Quebec, one of the best-known examples, and one of my favourite excursions, is Le P'tit Train du Nord. (I describe the experience of riding it with my kids here.) It's a one-night, two-day ride to Mont-Laurier, 200 kilometers to the north. We start the ride by taking our bikes on the Montreal métro, and then we transfer to an EXO commuter train to St-Jérôme, which helps us avoid much of the messy, unpleasant cycling you need to do to free yourself of the suburbs. There are micro-breweries, taquerias, beaches, bakeries, and beaver dams along the way. The grade never exceeds 4 degrees, and you almost never have to tangle with cars.
This summer, I discovered a new bike path, this one north of Ottawa. We were staying at a rented cottage in Val-des-Monts, and I'd brought my road bike with me. Cycling on the busy two-lane road near the cottage didn't feel safe, so I went to Wakefield, a charming town (famous for the Black Sheep Inn, the venue for many fantastic musicians) which was once a stop on the Ottawa and Gatineau Valley Railroad, leased to Canadian Pacific in 1902. I had a great day following the Gatineau River, cycling past floatplanes and restored train stations. Some trails erase their railway history, but this wasn't the case with Chelsea's Voie verte, where the trail was marked with railway crossbucks, whistle signs, and explanatory panels around the water tower and turntable that still stand in the heart of Wakefield (don't miss the town's very atmospheric covered bridge).
As pleasant as the ride was, I kept asking myself: Would it be better if passenger trains were still running on this route? (Or, better yet, would it be possible to combine a bike path with a rail corridor?)
