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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

"The boonies", does that include Calgary? There is quite a bit of road traffic between Vancouver and Calgary via Kamloops and Banff. Or did you mean just West of the Rockies?

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Sorry, "boonies" might have been a bit of a callous choice of words. Reading more about it, it sounds like the folks at Abbotsford, Hope and surrounding areas are having a pretty lousy time right now.

To me the 'boonies' in Canada is west of Timmins, East of Wawa and North of Desbarats in Ontario, and anything North of Kamloops in BC. The roads in BC are very critical infrastructure, there aren't that many of them to begin with and there are a lot of choke points on the downslopes of mountain ranges where you have to pass through, unfortunately it looks as though that's where the road outages are.

Canada is an amazing country scenery wise, but it is also a very thin veneer of civilization on top of a very rugged countryside and it doesn't take much to turn it from workable into unconnected islands overnight. Let's hope that they manage to keep the power running and some way to keep those communities supplied because with winter on the way that can get ugly really quickly.

Canadians are usually pretty self sufficient but without roads I'm not sure how that would work.

> west of Timmins

Yep. Sudbury to Kenora is some lonely road with a few “no services next 150km” stretches

When I was young and poor and crazy, I did the Greyhound trip to/from the GTA to the prairies a couple times and that is just the most insane stretch of highway ever, so mind boggling how long it takes.

Lakes and rocks and lakes and rocks and lakes and rocks and trees and rocks and lakes...

Sleeping pills, muscle relaxants, reading the entire Dune series from beginning to end, and waking up finding that you've fallen asleep and snuggled up to the nice old lady sitting next to you.

I think pbourke is talking about roads substantially North of that. There are bush roads going west from Timmins all the way to Wawa, there is absolutely nothing there but trees, and Greyhounds don't drive there, in fact the only thing you find there that drives is hunters and logging machinery.

Sudbury to Kenora is usually done by the Transcanada. But yes, I imagine the roads north from there are seriously no-mans land.

I grew up driving around the forestry roads and cutlines of the foothills in Alberta with my canoeing parents, but that is far less isolated than northern Ontario. I always find it surprising.

I'd like to live up there somewhere, but my wife isn't game to the idea.

No, I meant the trans-Canada. That’s remote enough for me :)

the whole post was callous frankly

Heh, I think they meant everywhere between Vancouver and Toronto

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