Escape to Val d’Or

Taking the Trans-Canada Highway 117 from Montreal, you will pass through Mont Tremblant and Mont Laurier before heading North for a six-hour jaunt to the Lac Simon Reserve. Taking the road in this season is always a pleasant experience. The weather is beautiful, the colors of autumn dance on the retina in sprays of fire and fawn.

The road unfolds like a long snake through forested landscapes that stretch as far as the eye can see on either side. The hours pass, hypnotic vision scandalized by the dull noise of the wind rushing through the windows. We finally reach the Vérendrye wildlife reserve. Cut with a knife, the track cuts through forests of spruce, birch and wild blueberry thickets like a vertical line. But behind the rows of conifers of the boreal forest lie the open pit mines and the devastation that surrounds them.

It is in the heart of this wildlife reserve, southeast of Val d’Or, that we find the most destitute community, without water or electricity, Kitcisakik, located on the edge of Lake Victoria. This small village of three hundred people, without reserve status, is still dependent on firewood and has only one sanitary block, with drinking water supplied by the pumping station.

But things have been changing since 2022 thanks to the strategic “development” of the mining companies, with Eldorado Gold Quebec ready to enter into an agreement with this community and the Lac Simon community¹https://tvaabitibi.ca/2022/11/15/engagement-dentente-entre-eldorado-gold-quebec-lac-simon-et-kitcisakik/. In May 2023, the Minister of Crown-Aboriginal Relations, Marc Miller, met the chief Penosway²https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/791813/une-entente-cadre-est-signee-entre-kitcisakik-et-ottawa, to talk about future challenges. But while electrification should be complete by 2025, access to water is still an unresolved issue.

The sun was setting when we reached Lake Simon. Too late to go around the reserve… We headed for Val d’Or, where I had booked a hotel room.This site, whose name evoked the legendary quest of turn-of-the-century prospectors, was true to life. The road passes close to an open-pit mine at the entrance to the town. The town has been designed in the style of a mining town, flanked by a long main avenue, Third Avenue, lined on either side with shops, restaurants and chain hotels, with a few itinerant natives in the vicinity³55% of homeless people come from Aboriginal communities, due to overcrowding on reserves, and are fleeing violence and drug abuse ; a panorama that attested that we were indeed in a typical mining town of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, a region of western Quebec.

Known for its mineral-rich basements – gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc – Val d’Or was founded in the 1930s and has more than 5% permanent aboriginal residents. Many Algonquin guides, prospectors and drillers are linked to the history of “Ozawaconia Odena”, the “Valley of Gold” as it was originally called.

It was Gabriel Commanda, an Algonquin trapper who sparked the gold rush in northern Quebec. In 1920, he indicated to Robert C. Clark, an American prospector, the location of the Lamaque gold veins, the mine that

propelled the expansion of Northern Quebec and the privatization of its hunting territory…

Val d’Or is covered with active gold mines and expansion projects, including Goldex on the western edge of the city, Kiena in the middle of Lac de Montigny to the northwest, Eldorado Gold to the east, Canadian Malartic thirty kilometers away and Akasaba West in the Lac Ben area to the east.

According to the Coalition Québec meilleure mine, mining titles have climbed 37.2% in two years on the Abitibi-Témiscamingue territory.

A claim is a title granting the exclusive right to search for mineral substances, in other words, to explore for minerals, acquired for less than a hundred dollars; this work includes deforestation, drilling, overburden stripping…

By 2023, there were over 302,000 active claims, a figure that had soared in two years; claims that could even spring up in the middle of tourist areas. This reality, which gives one the shivers in this period of vulnerability of the planet, is not a fact confined to this region because it affects all of Quebec, threatening the lakes and ecosystems…

On the way back, we stopped in the forest. This stop made me realize the infinite variety of plants in the boreal forest behind my lens, and the abundance of wild blueberries in this season.

This forest is essential for the northern hemisphere, as it absorbs massive amounts of carbon and produces oxygen. It is primarily populated by softwoods and shrubs, including black spruce, jack pine, sugar maple, willow and aspen. There you’ll find wooded peat bogs and marshes, decomposing soils with sphagnum moss and mosses,

flanked by Laricin larches that shed their needles in autumn, and cladonia spruce stands on which caribou feed. Lichens, fungi and micro-algae cover the ground and the decaying wood.

Footprints were clearly visible on the sandy soil, attesting to the presence of small game, mammals and rodents in the area. Black bears frequent the area, and one was reported in the vicinity of Lac Simon in 2021.