Jacques-Cartier National Park

Jacques-Cartier National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Jacques-Cartier is the nearest real wilderness to Quebec City, its entrance at kilometre 74 of the highway to Saguenay, about forty minutes' drive north of the old town, and like the other parks that the province of Quebec calls national, it is a provincial park, run by the agency Sépaq, to which the Parks Canada pass does not apply; visitors over seventeen pay a daily access fee, bought online or at the gate. There is no public transport, which is the reason for the tours sold in the city: guided half-day and full-day hikes with a naturalist, transport, snacks or a lunch, in summer and at the peak of the autumn colours, and in winter snowshoeing and cross-country or backcountry skiing excursions, with the equipment supplied.

With a car, the visit organises itself around the Discovery and Visitor Centre, ten kilometres inside the gate on the valley floor, where there are the rental desk, a shop, and the start of the main trails. The river is the heart of the park: from mid-May to early October Sépaq rents canoes, kayaks, inflatable rafts, mini-rafts and tubes, with a shuttle bus that carries paddlers upstream so that they drift back down to their cars, on stretches graded from flat water for families to lively class two and three rapids for the experienced. The best-known hike is Les Loups, eleven kilometres return with a climb of about 450 metres to two lookouts over the bend of the valley; the Éperon and the Scotora trails are shorter and steeper, and L'Aperçu is an easy riverside stroll. Cabins, yurts, ready-to-camp tents and campsites are booked through Sépaq.

Visiting Jacques-Cartier National Park: what you will see

The park was created in 1981, after a decade of public argument, and covers about 670 square kilometres of the Laurentian massif, within what was once the much larger Laurentides wildlife reserve. It exists because of a fight: in 1972 the provincial electricity company began work on a plan to dam the Jacques-Cartier river and flood its valley for a pumped-storage scheme, and a citizens' campaign, one of the first environmental victories in Quebec, stopped it in 1975. What was saved is one of the most beautiful glacial valleys in eastern Canada, the Vallée de la Jacques-Cartier, a trench with steep, forested walls up to 550 metres deep, cut through a high, rolling plateau of ancient Precambrian rock by ice and by the river, which winds along its flat floor for some twenty-six kilometres within the park, between rapids and calm, tea-coloured pools. The difference in altitude produces two forests: in the sheltered valley, a mixed forest of sugar maple and yellow birch, which in late September and early October turns the valley walls into one of the great foliage spectacles of the province;

on the cold, windy plateau, 800 to 1,000 metres up, a boreal forest of black spruce and balsam fir, with lakes and peat bogs. The moose is the emblem of the park and is frequently seen in the evening at the riverside, feeding on aquatic plants in summer and coming to the salt-rich mud of roadside pools; the rutting season, in late September, is the subject of guided outings. Black bears, wolves, of which the park once ran howling evenings, lynx, red foxes, porcupines, beavers, river otters and white-tailed deer live here, with Atlantic salmon, which have been restored to the river by trucking them past the dams downstream, brook trout and Arctic char in the lakes, and more than a hundred species of birds, including spruce grouse, boreal chickadees and ospreys. The Wendat and the Innu used the valley as a route between the St Lawrence and Lac Saint-Jean, and guided the Jesuits along it in the seventeenth century.

Jacques-Cartier National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year, with the valley road ploughed in winter as far as the visitor centre. The river season runs from about mid-May to early October, with high, fast water during the snowmelt in May and warm, low water in August; blackflies and mosquitoes are at their worst in June; the autumn colours peak in the last days of September and the first week of October, when weekend places in the car parks must be reserved;

winter, from December to March, brings deep snow, temperatures of minus ten to minus twenty-five, a hundred kilometres of snowshoe and ski trails, and heated huts. Reserve the daily access and any rentals online for summer and autumn weekends. Allow a full day. Quebec City is forty minutes south, the Wendake Huron village on the way, Montmorency Falls and the Île d'Orléans east of the city, and the Saguenay fjord two hours north.