Wild Fire Impact

[ChrisWright]

Hope everyone has had a great off season.  What are everyone's thoughts on whether the summer wild fires will impact trail openings this winter.  I am considering a run to CLOVA from the south and then back to the east, but wasn't sure about trails being opened.

[Cableguy]

I was on a motorcycle adventure the first week of September and didn’t see any recent fire damage in the Parent, Clova, and Casey areas. All the fires from this year appear to be North of Chibougamau on the Road Du Norde and North of Matagami along the Billy Diamond Highway(James Bay Road). The worst of the fires were in the area of the Cree village of Wemindji and the first 250 miles of the Trans Tiaga Rd. Shouldn’t be any problems with any of the snowmobile trails, none of the federation trails go that far North.

[ChrisWright]

Thanks for the insight. 

[PISTON LAKE CRUISER]

I read an article last week that was saying that the 23 year old mayor of Chapais was resigning. She said that the forest fire created decisions this past summer have left her with PTSD.

[towing]

On 11/14/2023 at 9:32 AM, ChrisWright said:

Hope everyone has had a great off season.  What are everyone's thoughts on whether the summer wild fires will impact trail openings this winter.  I am considering a run to CLOVA from the south and then back to the east, but wasn't sure about trails being opened.

It is right that most of the fire damege have been on norther areas but yes Clova, Senneterre, Lebel sur Quevillon Chapais and Chibougamau have been affected by the fire. Even no villages have been destroyed they all have been evacuated at some moment in june and July because the fires were at only few miles from them.

At the moment, no snowmobile club have made comments about this. The possible problem I see is not some trail damage cause directly by the fire because most of the trails are on summer roads that are already reopened in those area but after the fires most of the burned area are harvest by the wood cutters to get out the wood that is still usable. This process need to be done as soon as possible after the fire before insects ruined the wood quality. I would think those operations have already been done by now but having this year 20X the burned area than a "normal '' year may have complicated the puzzle for those who do that task... so I would expect we may have to deal with logging in some area especially in the beginning of the winter.

We will know more on this in the next weeks but by now no bad news ...

 

Edited November 16, 2023 by towing