Réserve Faunique La Vérendrye

Route 117 runs north out of Maniwaki through La Vérendrye wildlife reserve on its way to Val-d’Or, and it’s one of those drives that recalibrates your sense of scale — nearly 300 kilometres through boreal forest with almost no towns, no services beyond a couple of rest stops, and more than 4,000 lakes scattered through the trees on either side of the highway. I’d read the number before driving it and still wasn’t prepared for what that density of water actually looks like from the road: lake after lake after lake, most of them unnamed on any map I had, black spruce and jack pine crowding right down to the shoreline.

La Vérendrye is a wildlife reserve rather than a national park, which in Quebec’s system means hunting and fishing are permitted under regulation alongside the protected ecology — the reserve manages moose and black bear populations carefully and is considered one of the better fishing destinations in the province for walleye, northern pike, and lake trout. We didn’t fish, but we stopped at Le Domaine, one of the reserve’s outfitting stations, for coffee and watched a family unload canoes for a multi-day trip into the interior with the specific, unhurried competence of people who do this every summer.

What stayed with me most was the caribou — the reserve holds one of the last remaining herds of forest-dwelling woodland caribou in southern Quebec, a population under real pressure from habitat fragmentation, and seeing one would have been a matter of significant luck. We didn’t see one. But knowing they were out there, somewhere in that enormous unbroken forest, changed how I looked at the trees going by for the rest of the drive.

When to go: Summer for canoe-camping and fishing, with outfitting stations along Route 117 renting equipment and cabins. Fall for moose activity during the rut, though this coincides with hunting season and requires care about which zones are open. Fill your gas tank before entering — services are sparse for long stretches.