During a 1983 mission when the space shuttle Columbia circled the planet 166 times, one of the astronauts on board turned his camera toward a remote part of eastern Québec. The resulting photo resembles a dreamscape: a great doughnut of water 45 miles across, with a snowcapped peak at its center, tributaries furrowing away into the surrounding boreal forest and mountains hugging the edge. Called Manicouagan, it’s one of the world’s largest impact craters, gouged some 214 million years ago by a meteor that may have also triggered a minor extinction event.
As the astronaut flies, Manicouagan is 500 miles northeast of Burlington; by road it’s a journey of 660 miles. It’s really not close. Yet when imagined from the Columbia’s low-Earth orbit, as I have done often over many years, the crater is just right there. A certain cruising altitude makes all the world look snug. That’s the kind of thinking, anyhow, that found me heading north over the summer, beginning a vacation with a 15-hour drive that would take me and my husband, Daniel, to the edge of the crater — and then, on foot, into the wilderness beyond it.
The way to Manicouagan begins with a four-hour jaunt to Québec City, then heads east along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River — past the Catholic pilgrimage site Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, its sanctuary decked with supplicants’ crutches and braces, presumably cast away in the wake of answered prayers. It crosses artsy Baie-Saint-Paul, then the historic resort town of La Malbaie, which Samuel de Champlain named for its poor anchorage, a malle baye (bad bay).
To reach the town of Tadoussac, we boarded the free car ferry across the Saguenay River — a glacier-carved waterway home to the southernmost population of beluga whales on Earth. A few minutes into the crossing, a trio of bobbing white marshmallows appeared off the ferry’s port side. “Belugas!” I yelped, pointing at their bodies, slick and playful in the brackish water. Our fellow passengers appeared unruffled. Tadoussac marks the start of Québec’s Route des Baleines, aka the Whale Route, a 584-mile coastal road trip signposted with a jaunty-looking blue whale, the planet’s largest animal, which can sometimes be spotted not far from shore here, as can 12 other cetaceans. Belugas, however merry, are presumably no big deal.
“Yeah, we see whales all the time,” said a woman I met a few hours later, on a riverside walking path in Baie-Comeau, where we spent the first night of our trip at Hôtel le Manoir (rooms from CA$204). The town was founded in 1936 by Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, who built a pulp and paper mill there to supply his presses back home. Its first church, the 1940 Église Sainte-Amélie (CA$7), was dedicated in honor of McCormick’s wife, Amy. The fine frescoes he commissioned from Italian Canadian artist Guido Nincheri (aka the “Michelangelo of Montréal”) are among the most expansive in North America. It’s now a museum.
Inside, we craned to see saints and sundry celestial beings daubed across the ceiling; behind the altar, I saw an ascending arc of faces suspended in what appeared to be soap bubbles. “What’s the deal with the bubble heads?” I asked the kid manning the front desk. “It’s a biblically accurate depiction of angels in the form of wheels that God travels around on,” he said gravely, setting down his paperback copy of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. Baie-Comeau hit a rough patch when the mill stopped production in 2020, he told me, with many families leaving in search of work. The factory that dominates its skyline is silent, and some of its houses seemed empty. An article about the closure in Paper Industry World cited the “structural decline of the newsprint market.”
Baie-Comeau is also where the road to Manicouagan doglegs north, upriver to the crater past four massive dams, part of the Hydro-Québec network that provides a substantial share of Vermont’s electricity. Two of the dams — Manic-2 and Manic-5 — open for public tours led by college students during the summer (tours are free but require reservations). It is the dams that created the landscape that brought us here, the vast bull’s-eye of water that caught an astronaut’s lens. When Manic-5 was completed in 1968, the resulting reservoir joined up a pair of crescent-shaped lakes: Manicouagan and Mouchalagane. Only as the water rose did the crater’s vast scope and symmetry become visible.
A wild thing confined is a sorry sight, whether it’s a river or a rhino, and touring a hydroelectric dam does feel a bit like visiting the zoo. Yet as I followed a guide through the growling intestines of Manic-2, I was awestruck, too. I thought of the large-scale waterworks that allowed ancient cities to grow, from Egypt to China, how they laid the foundation for entire civilizations. Workers building these dams created temporary towns with bowling alleys, churches and sports leagues. Photos in the visitor center showed pink-nosed children playing in snowy wilderness.
Proof that Québec could produce world-class infrastructure, the Manicouagan dams have become a symbol of the province’s “Quiet Revolution,” explained the guide, referring to the period of rapid modernization in the 1960s that left French Canadians newly confident. It also flooded a vast part of the ancestral territory of the Innu First Nation of Pessamit, dispossessing families who relied on the rivers for seasonal hunting and fishing journeys. “Back then, they pretty much said, ‘Here’s $200; now go away and shut up,’” our guide said.
Recent years have brought a reconsideration of that history; Manic-5 now has a couple of Innu guides who share their own community’s perspectives with travelers visiting the dam. On the wall at Manic-2 is a series of artworks by Pessamit artist Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. One shows the bull’s-eye of Manicouagan rendered in patterns resembling the traditional designs the Innu use on caribou-hide coats. As our guide observed, “It’s something, but it’s a little late.”
The dams also opened road access to Manicouagan Reservoir, inching Route 389 farther north into forest across decades. Today, it’s a starting point for a major overland route — branded Expedition 51 by various tourism departments — that goes north to the mining town of Fermont, then east across Labrador to the sea. It passes vast swaths of forest and mountains and not much else. It’s mostly paved now but not entirely.
“Who all stops here?” I asked the attendant at Relais Gabriel, a pleasantly ramshackle service station, café and boardinghouse at the southeastern corner of Manicouagan. Dressed in Crocs and cargo shorts, he was pulling a lasagna from the oven. In the dirt parking lot out front sat two ATVs, some 18-wheelers and a mud-spattered motorcycle. A couple of truckers nursed energy drinks at the counter. Another chain-smoked on the porch. “Who? Everyone,” the attendant said, his accent thick enough to spread on toast. “We’re the only thing there is. It’s just us.” If you’re going north, the next gas station is 155 miles away.
By then, it had been raining steadily for two days. Across the road from Relais Gabriel, we’d walked a runneled dirt path to Manicouagan and found only a shoreline that vanished into cloud. We stayed the night, hoping the rain would stop before a planned three-day backpacking traverse of the Uapishka (Monts Groulx) mountain range that borders the reservoir.
It was still raining in the morning, great gusts blowing sideways across the road. The motorcyclists — heading south after completing Expedition 51 from Labrador — clumped to breakfast wearing plastic shopping bags over their boots. Donning rain gear of our own, we drove to the northeast corner of Manicouagan to begin our hike along a trail that looked more like a river.
As much as the reservoir itself, the mountain range we were climbing into had inspired the trip. Uapishka’s 3,000-foot summits rise from spruce forest into bare caps of subarctic tundra that’s rare at this latitude. The little-visited wilderness it holds, part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, is a southerly refuge for northern species including gray wolves, lemmings and woodland caribou. Aside from two rough access trails carved at the north and south of the range, the traverse is entirely trailless. Once in the interior, you make your own way between peaks.
After we waded across a flooded section of trail where the water reached our thighs, it became clear that the traverse might not be in the cards. We’d turn back if the crossings became hazardous, we agreed. But the rain slowed, then stopped, as we rose steadily toward the summit of Mont-Jauffret. The river running down the trail turned to mere mud. I thought of the faithful back at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, of their joyful, crutchless jigs when things took a turn for the better.
Sure enough, by the time we emerged into the subalpine zone, the weather had grown mild. The ground was a thick layer of mosses, lichen, blueberries and mountain cranberries that swallowed our feet with every step. We put down our packs, stooping to graze among hundreds of ripe cloudberries — a species found in the Arctic — trembling on slender stalks.
The clouds dissolved. Views opened to the south. We could see the summits that we’d cross on foot over the next two glorious days, walking up passes through waist-high ferns, stopping to swim in tea-colored lakes under great constellations of blackflies. For two nights, we’d put up our small tent on the driest ground we could find and wake to cloudless skies. We saw no people; our footprints mingled with caribou tracks.
Back on that first ridge, we watched as the curtain finally lifted on Manicouagan Reservoir below us. Forest crowded the deep folds of its shoreline. I saw the rain-slicked flanks of Mont-Babel, a 3,123-foot summit formed in the middle of the crater when the Earth’s crust rebounded from the force of the meteor. Elevation revealed the crater’s curve; the water made a great silvery arc bending away to both horizons.
Not an astronaut’s view, perhaps, but it’s as close as my legs will take me. Giddy with beauty and sunshine, we shouldered our packs and began to walk. ➆
Sleep at the Crater
The basic rooms at Relais Gabriel are expedient, but for a longer stay head to the waterside Uapishka Station (double rooms from CA$250 per person; breakfast/lunch/dinner CA$20/25/50), a lodge and research hub that’s jointly owned and operated by the Manicouagan Uapishka Biosphere Reserve and the Pessamit Innu Council. Researchers studying the surrounding ecosystems make the station their home base, as do road crews and travelers stopping off en route to Labrador. (There’s also camping on-site.)
The station was partly conceived as a way for young Innu to gain work experience and access the territory their ancestors hunted and fished for countless generations. Meals during our three-day stay were prepared by Innu chef Simon Landry-Asselin — Le Cuisinier du Nord on TikTok — who incorporated foraged boreal ingredients into dishes such as Labrador tea-infused crème brûlée and fried cod topped with fireweed blossoms.
A short path from the station leads to the edge of the reservoir. It’s a spectacular view and makes the perfect starting point for exploring Manicouagan. There are no rental boats. We brought a pair of inflatable paddleboards from Vermont and steered them toward beaches accessible only from the water.
Hike the Uapishka
A full traverse of the Uapiskha (Monts Groulx) mountains is generally between 25 and 35 miles and takes between three and five days — a remote backpacking trip suited to hikers confident in backcountry navigation. It’s most often done from north to south, starting at the Mont-Jauffret trail and returning to Route 389 via the Mont-Provencher trail.
Maps are available by mail from the Société des Amis des Monts Groulx. The nonprofit group maintains infrastructure within the mountain range during four-day work parties held each September at a base camp at the start of the Mont-Provencher trail, where art installations in wood and stone dangle from trees and rise from the forest floor. A local mountain guide, Guy Boudreau, also leads groups on summer hikes and winter ski and snowshoe trips, though he speaks only French. Originally from the remote mining town of Gagnon — now a ghost town 48 miles up Route 389 from Uapishka Station — Boudreau lives in an off-grid cabin near the Mont-Jauffret trail and is a remarkable source of knowledge about the region’s plants and animals. He also rents out a small hut with a woodstove to winter travelers.
There are day hikes into the Uapishka mountains, too. In addition to the Mont-Jauffret and Mont-Provencher trails, there are two paths to the summit of 3,117-foot Mont-Harfang, where summer brings a profusion of edible mountain cranberries, bilberries, blueberries, cloudberries and crowberries. (Note: The Mont-Provencher trail was officially closed at the time of publication, though some hikers still use it, as we did. If you’re planning a hike, seek updated information about access before departing.)
Trip Inspiration
A 2024 documentary, Manicouagan, which can be streamed online, follows the crater from its ancient origins to Indigenous history and damming. French speakers can listen to the podcast series “Sous les Barrages” (“Beneath the Dams”) to learn more about how the Hydro-Québec projects transformed life for the Innu. The 2023 documentary Jacques tells the story of the late Jacques Duhoux, a legendary outdoorsman who lived off-grid in the Uapishka mountains for decades. His friend and neighbor Guy Boudreau has also been the subject of a few entertaining amateur film shorts, which are available on YouTube. For more information on the ecology of the Uapishka mountains, consult the dedicated chapter in the Eastern Alpine Guide, edited by Mike Jones and Liz Willey.
The original print version of this article was headlined “High Impact | Our traveling reporter takes in the sights on a 660-mile Québec road trip. Destination: Manicouagan, one of the planet’s largest meteor craters.”
This article is part of a travel series on Québec. The province’s destination marketing organization, Alliance de l’industrie touristique du Québec, under the Bonjour Québec brand, is a financial underwriter of the project but has no influence over story selection or content. Find the complete series plus travel tips at sevendaysvt.com/quebec.
This article appears in October 14 • 2026.
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