Live data from Hacker News

Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

jamesbayroad.com

71–80 of 97 posts

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#71
post #67
post #42

> Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada. Not to belittle the remoteness of this road, but I just find it interesting that the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada is further south than most of Sweden (not to mention Norway or Iceland, which also have very extensive road networks). Another reminder of how important the Gulf Stream is for…

There’s that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.

>There’s that and of course the sheer lack of people who live in that vast wilderness larger than Sweden.

If you're referring to just Northern Quebec, then sure, the area is maybe a bit larger than Sweden, but if you're referring to northern canada, meaning all of its territories above the provinces, then that's a whole different thing. You could fit much off central and western Europe into that region with room to spare.

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#72
post #42

> Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada. Not to belittle the remoteness of this road, but I just find it interesting that the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada is further south than most of Sweden (not to mention Norway or Iceland, which also have very extensive road networks). Another reminder of how important the Gulf Stream is for…

> Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada.

There's always so much room for pedantry with statements like that. If eastern Canada includes Labrador (which it generally does), the town of Nain (which is further north) has roads that people drive cars on: https://maps.app.goo.gl/b1saMzzXKDQrHZQy6

Nain isn't connected to the rest of Canada's road network though, so it depends if one really means something like:

"this is as far north as I can take a long road trip in eastern Canada" or "this is as far north as I can be in a car, on a road, in eastern Canada, even if it is just a 1km ride from the airport on one side of town to the hotel on the other"

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#73
post #25
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably want contiguous rather than continental. Continental does include Alaska but not Hawaii or US territories.

You're right, and I edited my comment accordingly, but I asked Google and got this interesting AI response, so I guess a lot of people on the internet make the same mistake, since AI just echos its training data: The term "Continental United States" (CONUS) generally refers to the 48 contiguous states plus the District of Columbia, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. It encompasses the landmass of the United States located…

You would have been better off asking Wikipedia: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_United_State...

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you're ever lost, you just walk? (Assuming nothing kills you in nature) Edit: Wait, no. You could be extremely unlucky and be walking parallel to the closest road, lol.

Nerd snipe: given a compass and dropped in a random location what is the best strategy (based on direction assuming no clues from terrain) of finding a road. E.g. strategy might be 1000 steps south then 1000 east, repeat. Nerd snipe 2. Same without a compass or any sense of direction. Assume you can accurately make a 90 degree turn and count steps

Go find water and then try to follow where it flows. Look at the scenery and try to determine whether you're in a valley or on a plateau or in the mountains.

Compasses are pretty useless without a map or a terrestrial view of some sort, as all you can do with them is shoot a bearing relative to magnetic north, or if your compass includes a declination adjustment a bearing to true north, provided you know the declination beforehand. It's often printed on topographical maps for this reason.

If you're on top of something then you can use the compass to get somewhere you can do dead reckoning. Usually there's little landmarks every 10 or 20 feet that you can stay on a bearing to. But if you can't see any topography from where you're at you'll have to infer it somehow. So another strategy might be to head uphill if you can ascertain there will be some kind of view there.

A lot of what you'd do depends on the terrain you find yourself in.

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#75
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming nothing kills you in nature Weather is the only likely natural hazard outside polar bear country (and to a lesser extent grizzly country because grizzlies are less likely to see you as food). And if you are in polar bear country weather is extreme. But as the saying goes “there is no bad weather just poor clothing choices.”

If you’re lost in the wilderness, hunger and thirst are the real concerns.

Sorry for the huge response to your passing comment but:

Not really. Statistically, the things that most often kill people lost in the wilderness are exposure and following that, accidents that outright kill or weaken the body's ability to deal with the weather and thus accelerate exposure effects. You do not need freezing temperatures to die of exposure. Even being exposed to mild cold, but continuously, and particularly if wet or partly submerged in water, will eventually bring your body down to hypothermic temperatures.

Hunger is barely a factor because you can go without food for an exceptionally long time before you weaken severely, let alone die, and though we need water to live quite soon, it's rarely impossible to find unless you're in a very arid place. In either case, if the weather is bad and you're under-dressed, that's what will kill you well before you need to worry about dropping from hunger or even thirst.

As for wild animals, they're your single lowest worry, despite being the things that tend to most scare people about the wilderness (thank our ancient hunter/gatherer instincts for this, since they led to us not immediately fearing things we'd adapted ourselves to handling well, like weather and sources of nutrition, but continuing to fear the things we couldn't easily control, like lurking beasts).

Generally, you'd have to be incredibly unlucky to be the victim of something like a bear or puma attack and forget completely about attacks from any other animal, since they're nearly unheard of.

Just to be clear, with most of the above i'm referring to North America or at least to some sort of northern or southern temperate region that may include deserts, forests, prairies, etc, and not tropical conditions or wildlife.

In tropical conditions, and especially jungles, the calculus changes quite a bit, with exposure being less of a risk (though one can be surprised by unexpected cold, as has happened to me in outright jungles deep inside central America where you wouldn't fucking expect to feel really cold, but holy shit!.) Certain kinds of wildlife also become much more of a danger in tropical places, though with few exceptions, the really problematic ones won't be the big predators. Instead you can genuinely worry about smaller things that sting or bite with venom.

Edited for way too many spelling mistakes.

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#76
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a way to get cheap tourists from invading?

Well, I mean, the touristic potential of a gravel road with 666 km of taiga scenery is a bit limited (if you have seen the first 20 km, you can probably imagine the remaining 646 pretty well). And I say this as someone who has been to Iceland recently...

But when there's only four houses every hundred km, a dozen dumb tourists become a very big nuisance.

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking in a spiral pattern (where the layers of the spiral are close enough that if you look toward the center, you can always see the point where you were on the previous layer) will guarantee that you eventually see all points on any given radius.

You're not wrong, but this is proof that Id rather be stranded in the wilderness with an archeologist than a CS major (I'm assuming). An archeologist would walk down a gradient until they find a stream and therefore a fluvial network to a human settlement. Your answer gets me killed.

"Easy, we just A-star this thing and walk for a maximum of 273 days."

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#78
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc. It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.

Yes, and no one sane invests into agriculture around Moscow when there's much more warmer and fertile land down south. Factory farms and greenhouses? Yes, certainly, but this is driven by the food demands of a massive metropolis next door: move east or west far enough to offset this benefit and you will see scenes of rural decay.

Plenty of people invest in agriculture around Moscow. That's why Russia is one of the leaders in food exports.

To be fair, the bulk of the most productive Russian agricultural lands actually ends around Moscow's latitude.

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated by these. Who are the people operating these places? Where do they live, what's their lifestyle? Who are the customers, what are their stories?

I don't have a definitive answer, but there's probably demand for these outside of adventure tourists trying to get to some of the most remote road-connected points in the world. The James Bay Road exists essentially as a service road for a bunch of hydroelectric infrastructure that's part of Quebec's James Bay Project. I've never gotten past planning a trip up, but I gather much of the traffic on these roads are tra…

Similarly, the Sultan Industrial Road is a private logging road that saves a few hours of driving on the Trans-Canada between Wawa and Sudbury.

However, amenities, and the likelihood of getting timely help, is low. Take your pick.

Re: Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

#80
post #73
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, and I edited my comment accordingly, but I asked Google and got this interesting AI response, so I guess a lot of people on the internet make the same mistake, since AI just echos its training data: The term "Continental United States" (CONUS) generally refers to the 48 contiguous states plus the District of Columbia, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. It encompasses the landmass of the United States located…

You would have been better off asking Wikipedia: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_United_State...

I think you missed my point. My point was that it's a common error, as surfaced by the AI.
Post reply on HN