Snowshoeing: Ile aux Raisins Trail

This is a 9 km snowshoeing trail with 35 m of elevation gain located in the Iles De Boucherville National Park. The drive from Montreal is about 30min. The cost is 8.75$ if you don’t have a SEPAQ Anual Card and you need to purchase your access online ahead during the pandemic, they will turn you down at the entrance if they are sold out. The departure for this trail is at the main parking.

The trail is easy and with 35 m elevation gain flat the whole way. It’s a very easy trail, perfect for beginners or with kids. Some portions of the trails are shared with Fat Bikes but wide enough to accommodate both safely. Some portion are very windy so on a cold day think of covering your face properly. You should also think of a way to carry your snowshoes if you want to remove them, a lot of people use the trails and it gets hard pack. On my outing I ended up hiking it, you can always check the snow condition on their website and there’s lso an app for the SEPAQ Parks called SEPAQ SNOW where you can get the snow conditions from all the parks for all the different winter sports. Here’s the download link, it’s available for both Apple and Android and it is pretty cool to have if you use the parks often Conditions de neige – Sentiers de ski de fond et raquette – Sépaq (sepaq.com)

There are not many view points like I mentioned but what it lacks in views is replaced with animals and birds. There’s a lot of deer in that park and on this outing it was not different as we saw 8 of them together and a few other ones by themselves. Lots of birds species as well but since I’m no expert I won’t call out the varieties we saw. What was also pretty cool was a work in progress made by some beavers on a pretty large tree.

The trails are well indicated and maintain, and they also have 3 other snowshoe trails in the park that range from 1.5km to 4km. This park is nice since it’s really close by but views are limited.

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