James Stoness | Stoness Travel Blog

Chugging Along the Smokies

One of the nice things about RVing is the opportunity to take an extra day here and there and enjoy other recreational facilities. With that in mind, you might like to try a train ride

along the edge of the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. Depending upon your choice of tour you might find yourself on a 4 ½ hour trip through the Nantahala River Gorge, or winding along the Tuckasegee River, or possibly thundering across the 238 metre Fontana Trestle.

Tours run from both the town of Dillsboro and from the Bryson City depot. The company not only has scheduled tours throughout the year, but also runs extra trains for special events such as Valentines Day, Mother’s Day, New Years Eve, and many, many other eventful days.

You might like to try the Gourmet Dinner Train and treat yourself to a four course meal, cocktails or wine and great service. Of course you could try a three course meal and enjoy their Mystery Theatre performances on the Mystery Theatre Dinner Train.

The staff of the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad is there to give you the best trip possible. You will find them all extremely friendly, and very helpful. If you have questions about the train, or the tracks, or the scenery, just ask.

The depot at Bryson City portrays the atmosphere of a busy old time station with all the hustle of people getting ready for a great journey by train. The live music performed outside added a sense of warm enjoyment for the passengers. When we were there it was fall and the station was decked out in pumpkins, corn stalks and other vegetables as well as some very beautiful pots of flowers.

For all the adult children boarding the train there is a special treat at Bryson City. Just across the corner is the Smoky Mountain Trains, a store dedicated to model railroading. Not only is it a fully stocked model train store, but it has museum in the back with a huge operating layout that’ll be sure to get your creative thoughts jumping.

If you are planning on leaving from the Bryson City depot you might like to visit the Cherokee KOA. This is a family oriented campground buried in the trees at the foot of the mountain. It has loads of activities and they have a shuttle to the train station. This is handy because parking at Bryson City Depot is scarce.

Take time to relax. Take a train ride, whenever you can.

Did I forget to mention the beauty and the mystery you see when you visit the Great Smoky Mountains. Misty, and blue they never fail to amaze me.

Happy RVing

For more than four decades James Stoness has travelled the roads of North America, photographing and writing about what he has seen. His travel articles and beautiful pictures have been published in several magazines and newspapers. He is also the author of five western novels. Visit his website at: www.stonessRvTravel.com

Water Power is King in Quebec

The increase need for energy is a direct result of our fast growing modern lifestyle.

Before the use of fossil fuels to produce energy, man used the force of moving water. At first the moving water turned wheels that turned other things like saws, and mill wheels for grinding grain. Later the water turned generators that produced hydroelectric power.

Hydro produced from rivers is a renewable resource. Except in unusual circumstances the river will continue to get its water from rain and melting snow, for years and years. One good thing about water is the fact that molecules of water entering a watershed will eventually pass through the system. The Province of Quebec is fortunate in having huge quantities of water in areas to the north where the population is low.

Outside of Quebec, it is not likely that many people know the magnitude of the James Bay project. Two rivers, the La Grande and the Eastmain Rivers, drain much of Northern Quebec westward into James Bay.

To harness the power of the water they built dams and eight generating plants on the La Grande. To get more water they diverted 90% of the Eastmain River’s flow into the La Grande system. All of this increased watershed almost doubled the flow of the La Grande River.

The electric power produced exceeded 10,000 MW. La Grande-2 dam and reservoir required the blasting of a huge spillway that steps down through the rock dropping the height of three Niagara Falls. Underground they carved out the world’s largest powerhouse. Entering this massive cavern is more like walking into a giant factory building. Everything is clean and tidy. The mighty generators seem to stretch endlessly into the distance. A close inspection of one of the generators shows the rotating of a huge shaft that connects the turbine to generator, and there is a slight tremor in the floor. This portion of the project can produce 5300 MW of electricity. The men on duty here are more like maintenance robots. The whole complex is run from a desk in Montreal.

The James Bay complex involves waters that reach back as far east as Labrador. This is an immense watershed covering the sub-Arctic region where winters start in October and may last until May. Although the region is sparsely settled it is the home territory of the Cree and the Inuit. Apparently they were missed out on the initial discussions and didn’t become aware of the project until Quebec Hydro started building a 700 km road to Radisson, near James Bay. This road was completed by 1974. In 1974 the Native Cree signed the Quebec Agreement to settle a score of land claims.

This is a well built highway, created to carry heavy generators and other parts to the project. Unfortunately, the first 300 kilometres were used by log trucks without any control on weights and they turned the flat road into a road with broken surface and bad bumps that require your RV to crawl at times. The north part of the road is good.

Thirteen large bridges cross a myriad of rivers, some with very attractive scenery, and some with very low flow because the river has been diverted to feed the main project of Phase I on the La Grande River. Eighteen thousand workers participated in the building of the dams, and high dikes that created the reservoirs. Hundreds of miles of hydro lines were built to take the energy south.

When you look at a hydro line corridor, wide and bare of trees, you wonder how the men could have removed so many trees for such a long distance. That’s an incredible project, but 14 years later it was mostly completed.

The eight dams and power houses mean that same molecule of water from the upper end of the watershed passes through several generators and produces power over and over again. What a vast project! Move over Paul Bunyan!

Happy RVing !

This will be one of the tours in a Touring North America guide book about Eastern Canada.

Rails to the Klondike

In the summer of 1896 a prospector named Skookum Jim discovered gold in Rabbit Creek which runs into the Klondike River, in Canada’s Yukon. The claims were registered at a camp called Forty Mile, because it was forty miles from Dawson on the Yukon River.

Miners from Forty Mile raced to the new site to make claims for themselves. Word got out but it was the arrival of a steamer in Seattle with a large quantity of gold the set off the gold rush. But it was a couple of years before the mob of prospectors descended along the Klondike River staking claims along 150 km of the river.

Getting there was the major problem. One of the popular routes would see a steamer sailing into the Lynn fjord, commonly called the Lynn Canal although there is nothing about it relating to a canal. They disembarked where the town of Skagway is located. From here

it was necessary to climb through the steep mountain gorge, over White Pass, into Canada. The trail was rough, narrow and extremely dangerous. Pack horses fell from the ledge and died by the thousands, and people perished too from the cold and hunger of the trail.

The Canadian government used the Mounties to enforce the requirement that the prospectors had to carry with them a tonne of supplies to carry them through the winter until they could fend for themselves. However, moving a tonne of supplies up and over the pass meant a lot of trips back and forth, and it was difficult to guard the supplies the burdened men left cached at the other side of the pass.

Entrepreneurs began dreaming of a railroad to carry people and supplies over the pass. Michael Heney, born in Ontario, Canada, teamed with financiers from England to build the impossible, a railway to the stars. Heney’s study of the steep canyon made him realize that a narrow gauge railway was what he needed. A narrow gauge could manage sharper turns than the wider traditional track and the roadbed was cheaper to build. From Skagway the tracks would climb to 900 metres in 30 kilometres with up to 4% grades and 16 degree curves.

Time was of the essence. If they were to capitalize on the traffic to the Klondike gold fields they had to be quick. Gold rushes traditionally did not last very long. Even so, it wasn’t until 1899 that tracks reached Bennet, and by the next year there were tracks into

Carcross. Even so, the gold rush was slowing, but the railway carried heavy freight to big mining companies. But the times became worse and the trains stopped in 1982.

The Lynn Fjord’s scenery brought an increasing supply of tourists on cruise ships and in 1988 the White Pass & Yukon Railway opened for business from Skagway to White Pass. Later trains reached Carcross. Passenger traffic reached 360,000 tourists during the 2010 tourist season.

It’s no wonder either. The train is one of the top favourite things to do while in Skagway. The views of the mountains from the train are terrific. The staff are pleasant and willing to explain about things that you are seeing. The sight of the old trail used by the early would-be prospectors brings exciting twinges of the hardships those people endured. The best reason for going, amidst all this history and beauty, is the relaxing ride!

Happy RVing !

This is in one of the tours in ‘Canada: Beyond the Far Horizons’ a Touring North America guide book).