Some people like climbing rocks; others prefer jumping off them. At 61 metres high, Great Canadian Bungee’s The Rock is the highest bungee jump in North America. Overlooking a spring-fed lagoon in Wakefield, Quebec (about a half-hour drive from Ottawa), the rebound alone is higher than any other jump on the continent.
You might be wondering why anyone would strap themselves to a heavy elastic band and leap into thin air. Since its invention in New Zealand in the late 1980s (the same country that has given us jet boats and plastic bubbles to hop inside and roll down hills), bungee jumping has proven to be a perfectly safe method of convincing your brain you’re about to die, thereby releasing adrenalin and endorphins when your death is rather pleasingly delayed.
I’ve enjoyed this sensation on four continents, including the world’s highest commercial bungee jump in Macau, and I can confirm that at no point does it become any less terrifying. The trick is to jump off the platform quickly, before your brain has time to make the entirely rational argument to back away from the edge and proceed to the nearest bar.
Once you take the leap, you won’t be entirely conscious until you’re somewhere on the rebound, blood rushing to your head and adrenalin marinating your overstimulated cortex. In Wakefield, you might also find your head wet from the refreshing soak if you requested a water dip.
Few adventures promise to bring you within a hair’s breadth of your demise. That relief has created a bungee-jumping industry, and one of the hairier thrills on the Great Canadian Bucket List. Three, Two, One …
START HERE: canadianbucketlist.com/bungee
Boat to the Mingan Archipelago
Five hundred million years ago, a warm tropical sea covered what is today the St. Lawrence Lowlands. It would have been swell to relax on its beach, although good luck finding poutine, cheese, or even potatoes for that matter. Over the course of millions of years, fossils, sediment, and seabed were compressed into rock, which was then exposed when the sea receded, ready to be carved and eroded by ice age glaciers, wind, rain, rivers, and waves. Time-machine forward to the present day and you’ll find the largest concentration of erosion monoliths in the country.
Almost a thousand islands and islets lay scattered east to west across 150 kilometres of Quebec coastline, moulded into overhangs, caves, arches, flowerpots, and cliffs. Protected as the Mingan Archipelago National Park Reserve, the area is accessible via boat tours from the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from towns such as Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, Aguanish, and Havre-Saint-Pierre. The boats vary in terms of their size and destinations, but typically visit several of the more dramatic islands, with parks interpreters explaining the festooned cliffs, fossils, tidal pools, and the area’s unique geological history.
START HERE: canadianbucketlist.com/mignan