House of Loca: James Bay Motorcycle Trip

Not a lot of miles today, but a lot of activity. Today we toured the Robert Bourassa hydroelectric plant, rode to James Bay, and visited the village of Chisasibi.

Robert Bourassa Hydroelectric Plant

In the 1970s, Québec made a big commitment to hydroelectric power, shunning the popular move to Nuclear power. Today that decision seems to have been the right one as their series of hydro plants produce a lot of clean electrical power. They even produce a surplus that they sell to the northeastern United States. They manage to do this because the US and Canada have alternating peak power usage periods. Québec uses more electrical power in the Winter for heating and we use more in the summer months for cooling. In the summer they sell their surplus to us, primarily in the New York state area.

The natural lake terrain up here in Québec is called the Taiga and Québec operates a series of eight hydroelectric plants in this region. There are many more plants further south, including the Eastmain project that will reduce the powerful Rupert Rapids to a trickle next year. The water for these eight plants runs downhill from the east and hits all eights plants in series. There is a fairly impressive distribution system to get all this power down to Montreal and Québec city.

After a short video presentation in the media center, we rode a bus into the power plant. The Robert Bourassa plant is an underground power plant, literally cut into the bedrock of the Canadian shield. Our tour guide led us into the plant where we were treated to an extensive tour of the 16-generator plant. The plant uses a large reservoir as a controlled water source. The water is gravity-fed into the turbines 137m underground to produce power. The water supply is further regulated as required by an very large spillway. There are pictures of this below. We saw the spillway from both the top and bottom. The pictures may fail to portray how very large this structure was.

James Bay

After the tour we saddled up and rode out to James Bay, passing the village of Chisasibi, a Cree village just east of James Bay. Don's wife had provided us each a small bottle to hold water from James Bay. James Bay is technically part of the Artic Ocean, and since this is as close as any of us are likely to get to the Artic, we all brought a souvenir home. There was little excitement riding on the 10 mile gravel road from Chisasibi to the bay, but everyone keep the shiny side up.

Village of Chisasibi

As soon as we pulled into the Chisasibi cultural center for lunch we stopped and asked a local man a question. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Cree do not speak French. They speak English and Cree. They have maintained their native tongue and use an alphabet developed in the 1800s. He had no accent at all, and could have passed for an American easily. It was the first time we had heard English spoken without a French accent in days. I later found out that the relations between the Cree and the Frenchies is not a rosy as the people in Radisson had lead us to believe. I did have one uncomfortable moment when two small Cree girls took the tip from our table and followed me outside the building to ask me for more money.

The top of the spillway. The lake at the top of the spillway is 30m deep. It is comprised of ten steps in the form of a staircase. This picture was taken from the bridge that runs across the top. The bridge sits on top of the spillway water release gates which allow water overflow from the reservoir to flow down the staircase. The staircase formation dissipates the force of the water so it can flow smoothly into the river below.