Hiking: La Boucle du Mont des Trois-Lacs (Brompton, QC)

After a few weeks of rain and heat wave, we finally managed to get out for another hiking trip. This time, we went back to the same area as the previous hike to do the other trail in Brompton part of the Les Sentiers de L’Estrie. You can see the previous hiking recap HERE.

Brompton: La Boucle du Mont des Trois-Lacs

This trail is a fairly decent length at 4.8 km. Although its ranked Easy, its still pretty much our second hike of the year in heavy humidity weather. Luckily, we did go fairly early so the heat hadn’t hit and it was mostly cloudy as it was getting ready to rain. The hike itself is easy although its a lot of constant steep elevation. A lot of the path is like above where its climbing up steep rocky paths. Its a nice challenge as a second hike and didn’t feel too long. There are three lookout points along the path.

The first lookout point was pretty rewarding as it marked a good part of the beginning which was almost all uphill and was quite exhausting as the warm-up stretch. The view is a bit obstructed but still, the lake is visible and while its hard to capture on the camera well, the view was pretty decent.

The second viewpoint was heading towards the peak at the turn. There’s a pretty intense section going towards this point as well. Its some narrow paths and such. The view is a bit lackluster as this one took a lot of moving along different rocks on the slop to catch this view. We were a bit worried that this was the peak and the view that we were going to have to deal with as it left us wondering where the three lakes were.

Of course, after another fairly exhausting trail around the mountain moving uphill, we get to this final lookout point at the second half of the trail with a roped off boundary to look out at this view with its three lakes. If you look far enough, there’s even a fourth lake in the far distance.

The trail itself is rather surprising that it is an Easy level trail since there was such constant uphill trek and a few steep areas to go up and down on. The path is however fairly straight forward. Its mostly a forest trail with just bushes, trees and shrubs and not a lot of flowers or colorful plants. Its mostly just greenery .

For us, we’re trying to hike closer to home so the Eastern Townships is a good spot for us. I’m not sure if we’ll be coming back to Brompton area for this network of hiking trails since there’s only one more trail here that we haven’t done. I’m thinking we’ll move onto another area for the next one but not sure which one yet.

Hiking: Marais du Kingsbury & Mont Cathedrale

As Montreal starts reopening gradually (well, a lot of stuff is reopened at this point, except for a few things), the things we were looking forward to reopen the most is obviously the parks for hiking and such. Due to weather and the current situation, not all the parks are open but we did find quite a few to choose from. The husband decided that our best chance was to head further from the downtown area to the Eastern Townships to check out a trail part of Les Sentiers de L’Estrie. We’ve done a few other trails from that network before but this year, we’ve been thinking of getting the pass which would pretty much get back its worth if we do three more trails in the network and that sounds like a good deal (and doable, provided the reopening doesn’t launch a second wave of the pandemic).

First Stop: Kingsbury, Le Boucle de la Riviere

Kingsbury

The hiking plans didn’t quite go as we planned even if we did head out the time that we intended, early in the morning. Our first stop as planned was to go to Kingsbury and do a 7.2 km hike. However, the instructions weren’t too good and we soon realized 30 mins in that there was a sign saying that the suspension bridge had collapsed. This trail is pretty much a trail by the water and marshlands. Uncertain of whether there was a detour or not, we decided to go back to the car and head to the next location.

Collapsed suspension bridge

And we were off to the next location pretty much spontaneously. I suggested to go to the next hiking area in this network heading back the way we came so that at least we’ll start later on the actual trail for the day but lower the travel time back a little bit.

Second stop: Brompton – Le Mont Cathedrale

Things not going to plan was apparently the theme of our first hike as we had intended on doing another trail but got mislead to believe we were on the right trail when it wasn’t. Oh well..these things happen and we ended up doing a fairly decent intermediate level hike (not what we had planned since we’re obviously not in that great of shape with the lockdown and such). I’m not quite sure how long the trail actually was but it was quick elevation to Mont Cathedrale so it was rather tiring to do, plus the scene was really lovely.

If you look at the actual website, this trail is supposed to start at another parking location and then not only do the mountain but also a “Ruisseau Ely”, which we saw signs for but didn’t pursue it.

Overall, its a decent trail, in both cases. I’m going to say that this is one of the times where its less maintained than we’ve experienced before. I think its just the current times and the parks and the later than usual opening to not have addressed these things. We had a few hiccups in our plans but still, it was a decent few hours of hiking that we got out of it. Les Sentiers de l’Estrie has had a few places that we’ve done before like, Mont Chapman last year (that also had pretty confusing directions). That’s it for this hiking adventure! We’re looking up the next hike right now and will check in with the next one soon (hopefully).