Its funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.
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
The low population density of central Canada is not because it's not fertile.
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.
Fascinating! The border between Quebec and Ontario looks like the Mexican border with the US, or the Israeli border with Egypt, but this is all in the same country, Canada. In the US you can see some traces of this between Nevada and California or Idaho and Oregon, due to different laws and tax structures. Obviously if it's a sharp difference in land use along an arbitrary imaginary line, it must be due to the governance. So why is the Quebec side so much more farmed and developed?
[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.
Different history of colonization policy in Quebec and Ontario. Colonization in Ontario was shut down in the 1930s during the Great Depression. In Quebec, formal colonization was more tightly integrated with the Church, had more institutional support, and officially continued until 1973. There were still government-backed homesteading projects in the 1960s in Quebec. Also, on the Ontario side in the early 20th century there was no road/rail connection except via Quebec. Which meant that development in the region was tied more to Quebec than southern Ontario. And Ontario had little reason to support that. So it remained government land on the Ontario side. Or at least that's how I understand it.
Thanks for the history. Very interesting. I guess Ontario still isn't interested in trying to farm land further north now..? The last time I was in Australia (15 years ago), I met a French chef in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory (he walked out of the bush with a can of kangaroo meat to say hello) who told me he was being paid something like $500 per month by the government just to live out in the middle of nowhere and homestead, which I found astonishing.
It depends, like here in Finland, there is lots of farmland and active farms, but most is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_continental_climate , Norway also has a lot of farms in subarctic areas like this in the article, but Norway is substituting farming very heavily even European standards.
Yes, and no one sane invests into agriculture around Moscow when there's much more warmer and fertile land down south. Factory farms and greenhouses? Yes, certainly, but this is driven by the food demands of a massive metropolis next door: move east or west far enough to offset this benefit and you will see scenes of rural decay.
That's because small-scale farming is not sufficient profitable, not because it's not possible. You can find scenes of rural decay in most any industrialized country.
That's not specific to this road. You could probably pick any 50,000 sq km area on the planet besides Bangladesh, and the population density would be several orders of magnitude lower than that of Bangladesh, except for maybe the few largest metropolitan areas in the world. Bangladesh can't support half its population, and Canada could probably support 10x its population, so one has to conclude that the wild difference in fertility rate is not as simple to explain as a function of how much land there is or how much food can be produced there.
> 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...
Intersting! I know that in the contiguous USA, you will never be more than 20 miles from a road no matter where you are, but have no idea how far one can drive from a town.
You're right, and I edited my comment accordingly, but I asked Google and got this interesting AI response, so I guess a lot of people on the internet make the same mistake, since AI just echos its training data:
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.
For the curious, I think that number comes from these people and is actually 21.7 miles, includes any kind of drivable surface, (like beaches and unmaintained private roads), and excludes anything that is too wet (like the middle of the great lakes or a flood plain).
Nerd snipe: given a compass and dropped in a random location what is the best strategy (based on direction assuming no clues from terrain) of finding a road. E.g. strategy might be 1000 steps south then 1000 east, repeat.
Nerd snipe 2. Same without a compass or any sense of direction. Assume you can accurately make a 90 degree turn and count steps
Honestly I’d just walk downhill. Most human settlements are on rivers, most roads take the lowest passes. At night, I’d just walk in the direction of the sky that’s glowing the most.
Melville (roughly) agrees -- from the first chapter of Moby-Dick:
---
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.
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.”
Walking in a spiral pattern (where the layers of the spiral are close enough that if you look toward the center, you can always see the point where you were on the previous layer) will guarantee that you eventually see all points on any given radius.
Keep in mind that tragedy happened all the way back in 1986.
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.
Same time as I was doing similar work in the same area, same time the Pintupi Nine popped up wondering who all these pale people are.
> 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:
If your employer doesn’t supply one for that sort of work, they need to be reported to the OH&S authorities. That said, you can always bring your own. If it were my kid in that scenario I’d buy one for them.
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…
.. then you're golden and just waiting for some one to pop on out the David Carnegie Road, or out into the Tanami.
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.
It looks like the road was constructed to serve the four hydro facilities that generate power for Montreal. https://openinframap.org/#7.12/53.8/-74.103/A,B,E,I,L,O,P,T show's the hydro facilities and power lines weaving their way down to Montreal.
I find browsing around the map in remote Canada pretty interesting, especially the number of named settlements for which there appear to be absolutely no information or satellite evidence they exist. Take Roggan River: there’s a Wikipedia page claiming it’s a small village, and it’s on Google Maps, but there’s nothing identifiably there, and there’s no further information I can find online. The map is littered with these.
Only a few of the villages on and about the Amistustikwach will have visible road access and cleared land plots. Many will blend in with the landscape and have river access.
If I took the time to find one, very likely .. it was literally a daily task back in the day when I worked Canadian resource postings for the company that ran [1] before being picked up by Standard and Poor.
I'm a fan of the Gibb River Road in northern Western Australia, it's around as long, has some beautiful gorges along the way for a little swimming, there's a river crossing at the Pentecost.
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.
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]
Note that all this information is 20 years old and is badly outdated. Many of the facilities mentioned (eg the Nouchimi Outfitters gas station) no longer exist. https://www.facebook.com/TabascoADV/photos/a.696618650541057...
Its funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.
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
The low population density of central Canada is not because it's not fertile.
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/
Fascinating! The border between Quebec and Ontario looks like the Mexican border with the US, or the Israeli border with Egypt, but this is all in the same country, Canada. In the US you can see some traces of this between Nevada and California or Idaho and Oregon, due to different laws and tax structures. Obviously if it's a sharp difference in land use along an arbitrary imaginary line, it must be due to the governance. So why is the Quebec side so much more farmed and developed?
[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.
Different history of colonization policy in Quebec and Ontario. Colonization in Ontario was shut down in the 1930s during the Great Depression. In Quebec, formal colonization was more tightly integrated with the Church, had more institutional support, and officially continued until 1973. There were still government-backed homesteading projects in the 1960s in Quebec. Also, on the Ontario side in the early 20th century there was no road/rail connection except via Quebec. Which meant that development in the region was tied more to Quebec than southern Ontario. And Ontario had little reason to support that. So it remained government land on the Ontario side. Or at least that's how I understand it.
Thanks for the history. Very interesting. I guess Ontario still isn't interested in trying to farm land further north now..? The last time I was in Australia (15 years ago), I met a French chef in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory (he walked out of the bush with a can of kangaroo meat to say hello) who told me he was being paid something like $500 per month by the government just to live out in the middle of nowhere and homestead, which I found astonishing.
Does it matter if it’s fertile though? Isn’t the climate there the limiting factor on ag?
It depends, like here in Finland, there is lots of farmland and active farms, but most is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_continental_climate , Norway also has a lot of farms in subarctic areas like this in the article, but Norway is substituting farming very heavily even European standards.
*subsidizing
You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc.
It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.
Yes, and no one sane invests into agriculture around Moscow when there's much more warmer and fertile land down south. Factory farms and greenhouses? Yes, certainly, but this is driven by the food demands of a massive metropolis next door: move east or west far enough to offset this benefit and you will see scenes of rural decay.
That's because small-scale farming is not sufficient profitable, not because it's not possible. You can find scenes of rural decay in most any industrialized country.
The short growing season is somewhat offset by the very long summer days.
That's not specific to this road. You could probably pick any 50,000 sq km area on the planet besides Bangladesh, and the population density would be several orders of magnitude lower than that of Bangladesh, except for maybe the few largest metropolitan areas in the world. Bangladesh can't support half its population, and Canada could probably support 10x its population, so one has to conclude that the wild difference in fertility rate is not as simple to explain as a function of how much land there is or how much food can be produced there.
> 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...
Intersting! I know that in the contiguous USA, you will never be more than 20 miles from a road no matter where you are, but have no idea how far one can drive from a town.
This story is about a road in Canada. I doubt the 20 mile thing holds in remote parts of Alaska.
Updated my comment because you're right, I meant contiguous USA.
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". :)
You probably want contiguous rather than continental. Continental does include Alaska but not Hawaii or US territories.
You're right, and I edited my comment accordingly, but I asked Google and got this interesting AI response, so I guess a lot of people on the internet make the same mistake, since AI just echos its training data:
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.
You can easily do it if you go to the center of Lake Superior ;)
For the curious, I think that number comes from these people and is actually 21.7 miles, includes any kind of drivable surface, (like beaches and unmaintained private roads), and excludes anything that is too wet (like the middle of the great lakes or a flood plain).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894
So if you're ever lost, you just walk?
(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: given a compass and dropped in a random location what is the best strategy (based on direction assuming no clues from terrain) of finding a road. E.g. strategy might be 1000 steps south then 1000 east, repeat.
Nerd snipe 2. Same without a compass or any sense of direction. Assume you can accurately make a 90 degree turn and count steps
Honestly I’d just walk downhill. Most human settlements are on rivers, most roads take the lowest passes. At night, I’d just walk in the direction of the sky that’s glowing the most.
Melville (roughly) agrees -- from the first chapter of Moby-Dick:
---
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.
---
Assuming nothing kills you in nature
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.”
If you’re lost in the wilderness, hunger and thirst are the real concerns.
Walking in a spiral pattern (where the layers of the spiral are close enough that if you look toward the center, you can always see the point where you were on the previous layer) will guarantee that you eventually see all points on any given radius.
That could be an awful lot of walking though.
Finding a road, even having a car and fuel is no guarantee of survival in remote areas.
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...
Keep in mind that tragedy happened all the way back in 1986.
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.
Same time as I was doing similar work in the same area, same time the Pintupi Nine popped up wondering who all these pale people are.
> 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.
If your employer doesn’t supply one for that sort of work, they need to be reported to the OH&S authorities. That said, you can always bring your own. If it were my kid in that scenario I’d buy one for them.
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…
.. then you're golden and just waiting for some one to pop on out the David Carnegie Road, or out into the Tanami.
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.
I'm itching all over from all the insect bites only reading that website.
It looks like the road was constructed to serve the four hydro facilities that generate power for Montreal. https://openinframap.org/#7.12/53.8/-74.103/A,B,E,I,L,O,P,T show's the hydro facilities and power lines weaving their way down to Montreal.
I find browsing around the map in remote Canada pretty interesting, especially the number of named settlements for which there appear to be absolutely no information or satellite evidence they exist. Take Roggan River: there’s a Wikipedia page claiming it’s a small village, and it’s on Google Maps, but there’s nothing identifiably there, and there’s no further information I can find online. The map is littered with these.
Only a few of the villages on and about the Amistustikwach will have visible road access and cleared land plots. Many will blend in with the landscape and have river access.
The google map pins are pretty approximate.
Can you point to one matching this description on the map?
If I took the time to find one, very likely .. it was literally a daily task back in the day when I worked Canadian resource postings for the company that ran [1] before being picked up by Standard and Poor.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
I'm a fan of the Gibb River Road in northern Western Australia, it's around as long, has some beautiful gorges along the way for a little swimming, there's a river crossing at the Pentecost.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibb_River_Road
Photo tour: https://www.jamesbayroad.com/ttr/virtualtour/index.html
Via Wikipedia:
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]
Around 10% of the electricity in New York and Boston comes from the James Bay Project; the power is transferred over 1000 miles.