Quebec MRCG High Points

Showing Jeremy Blair's first ascent dates for climbed peaks

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List Description

Quebec is currently divided into 104 “municipalités régionales de comté géographiques” or “geographic regional county municipalities”, and they are they are the closest equivalent to U.S. Counties in the province. They cover the entire area of Quebec and do not overlap, and are of roughly the same size and population as U.S. counties.

These 104 “counties” are of two types: 86 MRCs (regional county municipalities) and 18 TEs (equivalent territories). The TEs include large city areas like Montreal and Quebec City, plus large northern territories like Kativik. See the Wikipedia link below for more explanation of this topic.

Statistics Canada, the agency that runs the Canadian Census, generally uses the MRCGs as Census Divisions (CDs) in their tabulations, so they are statistically equivalent to the counties in the Maritime Provinces and Ontario, and the Regional Districts in British Columbia. However, the Statistics Canada numbering scheme for CDs only allows for codes from 00 to 99 within a single province, so they are forced to combine several groups of the MRCGs into bogus CDs. Therefore, this list is not a Quebec CD high point list—it shows all 104 MRCGs, the real administrative authorities.

Enough bureaucratic talk—this is quite a large and varied list of peaks. It includes a high and rugged summit in the Torngat Mountains in the far north, above-timberline expanses of the Chic-Chocs in the south, gentle hills in the area east of Montreal, huge flat expanses in the St. Lawrence valley, and many remote knobs in the vast watery maze of the Laurentians and the Canadian Shield. By area, Quebec is the largest state or province in North America (bigger than Alaska) and there is a lot of terrain here to cover.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks must be offered to Don Desrosiers, who kindly shared a well-researched Quebec MGRC list he had been working on, and to Gabriel Couët, who provided a wealth of information about various summits. Also, thanks to Ben Lostracco, who has contributed lots of data about Quebec mountains to this site.

Primary sources for this list were the CanVec web mapping service data, the NTS 1:50,000 maps from MyTopo.com, and old SoftMap CD-ROM set for the southeastern areas of the province, and the generous help of the individuals noted above. I tried to synthesize all these sources and cross-check across them all, in many cases trying to track down high points in the mind-numbing lake-studded terrain of the Canadian Shield. I am sure that there are still some errors on this list, and any corrections are welcome.

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