Printemps au Charlevoix/Saguenay

The Saguenay river region is the location of the earliest French fur-trading posts in Quebec on traditional Innu land. The river drains Lac St-Jean and empties into the Fleuve St-Laurent about 130 kilometers from its source. Later appropriated by the French as a scenic get-away for wealthy Quebeckers, the area is marked by deep fjords, idyllic rural vistas and little human settlement. Winter lasts long into the spring, but when the warm temperatures hit, the break-up of the ice is a glorious display of ice flows set against hillsides rising straight up from the water's edge. The Charlevoix region was and is to this day a very popular draw for landscape artists. People like Charles Comfort, Alexander Young Jackson, and Tom Thompson created works of art inspired by the area. The one blight in the region is the enormous Rio-Tinto (Alcan) aluminum smelter which has been spewing waste into the Saguenay river since the late 1930's, contributing to the poisoning of the St-Lawrence Beluga, at one time considered the "most polluted mammal on earth". (NY Times, January 11th, 1988).