We spent 3 nights this week, camping in Yamaska National Park, just outside of Granby, Quebec. This national park surrounds Réservoir Choinère and has a variety of hiking trails, campgrounds, and bicycle paths.
After driving to the park on Monday, we arrived around 1:00, and went for a short hike on Sentier La Rivière.
This is an easy 2.5 km trail which winds through open forest, alternating between areas of softwood and hardwood.
At the far end of the trail are a couple of picnic tables looking out over the Rivière Yamaska Nord.
After returning from our short hike, we headed to our campsite to set up camp.
The campground is divided up into 7 different sectors. We were in Secteur Les Roselins. This is the northernmost part of the campground, and contains walk-in tent sites. From your car, wheelbarrows are available to help you carry your stuff to your site. We had an excellent site right on the water.
It was also a very private site with no immediate neighboring sites. This part of the campground was almost deserted, and there were only a couple more campers in the entire sector.
We set up camp, and had a dinner of hot dogs and mashed potatoes over the fire. This was our first time trying BBQ hot dogs, which I suppose is a Canadian thing. They had an interesting flavor, almost like the flavoring from BBQ chips had been added. We both agreed that they were pretty good.
On Tuesday, we started out on a longer hike through the park. We started on Sentier La Forestière, before continuing on Sentier La Digue and Sentier La Pinède.
These are all relatively easy trails which pass through the varied forests of the park.
The forests range from dark spruce forest, to open maple forest, and were all very interesting.
We had lunch at one of the picnic areas near the far end of our hike, and then headed back to the campground via the bike path which circumnavigates the park.
Wednesday's goal was to ride La Grand-Tour. This 19 km long stone dust bike path encircles Réservoir Choinière.
It's a very well constructed path with lots of rest stops and viewpoints along the way. We greatly enjoyed our loop around the lake, and found a perfect picnic area on the Rivière Yamaska Nord to cook some ramen for lunch.
The northern part of the loop is more wooded and hilly, while the southern portion hugs the lakeshore with fewer hills.
On the last day of our trip, we packed up camp and started heading east. We stopped in Scotstown at Parc Régional du Marécage-des-Scots.
The Rivière au Saumon and Ruisseau McLeod flow through the park, and a bike path travels through the center of the park by both waterways.
We did an out and back ride along the length of this path. As was the case with the previous day's ride, the bike path was stone dust with excellent signage, and lots of stops along the way. However, there were very few people on this path and it wound its way through much denser forest than we found in Yamaska National Park. It was a beautiful ride with lots of great foliage, especially along the stream.
After this enjoyable ride, we finally headed back across the border to home, after a quick poutine stop in Woburn, of course!
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