Climbing Mont Caribou in winter: the view from the summit is superb!

It took a team outing to introduce me to a place I’d never been before for a snowshoe outing. And it was a wonderful discovery!

I’m really looking forward to discovering this new place for snowshoeing, more specifically the Sentiers pédestres des 3 Monts de Coleraine.

The last time I went snowshoeing in the mountains was several years ago. We climbed Mont Chocolat in the Parc du Massif du Sud with a couple of friends. But today, it’s in the Thetford sector.

The hike is about 4 km long. 2 km to get there, and 2 km on the return. We’ve picked the perfect day, with temperatures of around minus 15, minus 20 celsius and a beautiful blue sky. We got all dressed up, put on our snowshoes and off we went!

Being an ecological reserve, we made sure to stay on the trail, which was very well signposted and easy to follow. The first 300 meters are fairly flat, so we warm up our muscles gently.

What awaited us next was a climb of around 1.7 km to the summit of Mount Caribou, apart from a few sections that allowed us to take short breaks. As I was busy chatting to colleagues (in a queue) and enjoying the beauty of all those snow-covered pines, I didn’t really realise that it was going uphill all the time.

Honestly, it was on the way down that I noticed that the climb had accounted for most of the journey and that it was a bit steeper in places.

The trail is described as intermediate-difficult (we did a section of trail no. 6 – the little loop).

Just because a hike is short doesn’t mean it doesn’t provide plenty of beauty, pleasure and satisfaction!