Beauréal Reserve
Region : Lanaudière (Qc)
Start : Parking lot
Distance from start : Short
Parking : Big Parking lot
Fee : Free (maybe 5$ when project is complete)
Trail Markings : Badly marked
Difficulty : Easy
Washroom: Dry stall at beginning
Map : Click here
Website : www.beaureal.ca/
Date of hike : September 24, 2014
Finding the place
This isn’t the fist time this has happened to us. Many small-town parks put on their website : just go to town and you will see the posters / somebody will tell you / etc. Again, as soon as we got to town on the main street, we didn’t see the posters… what a surprise!!
The park is not downtown, it’s straight to the west.
– Once at ste-julienne, Take the 337 west to Montée st-françois
– Turn right, soon after, at chemin McGill
– For GPS purposes, the parking is accross the street from 2534 Chemin Mcgill
Tree games
Just outside the parking, there are some low altitude tree games.
They are very well kept and fun. There even is a tirolienne…., tall people may have a little more trouble with this one.
The trails
Now comes the reason you made it here. You wanted the trails. The tree games were fun but they don’t inspire as much. At the beginning, there are a couple of big indicators with the names of the trails and directions to the view point.
We started by going to the viewpoint, 0.3 km from the start. Unfortunately, the lovely pictures they posted on their website are a little old. The trees in the slope in front of you really grew out and getting a good view is impossible.
Once you get there, you really have to open your eyes. You can either go back on the path, where you saw all those trail head markers or you can continue. Unfortunately, if you are not a VERY observative person, you will very likely miss the trail continuation. Its hidden behind the piknik table plateau. Its very hard to find and we didn’t even think it was a real trail. We followed it anyways, figuring we weren’t very far (this isn’t the adirondacks!).
Turns out, that was the trail and saw a trail head for Méditatif. Lucky us.
We took the trail which wasn’t at all identified from that point. It’s actually a beautiful little trail in the woods. It’s very short and we got back to the “main trail” about 20 minutes later. Oddly, the trail marking for the one we were on now indicated L’explorateur.
Confused, we went to Méditatif to see where we went wrong. 25 minutes later, we were back at the l’Explorateur trail marker.
After our “hike”, we concluded that this project’s priorities lie in selling the lands (to the east one the map) in order to build very expensive houses. Once they sell those lands, hopefully, they will invest their profits in the park.
Happy hiking!