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Published: January 11th 2011
Church at Rivierre à Pierre
Pretty much every town in Quebec, no matter how small has a beautiful big cathedral. Unfortunately their congregations are quite small now so upkeeping them is a problem.Rivierre à Pierre is a small town about 35 km NW of St. Raymond. Roughly translated it means River of stones. The area is a granite mining area and there is a large granite plant in town. It is pretty neat because all the picnic tables at the public parks are made of different colored granite. Nobody burns those for firewood! Many of the houses in town have granite steps, railings or even polished granite facing, and all the street curbs are granite. Even here in St. Raymond the curbs are granite instead of concrete. The curbs are one of the things that surprised me in town when we first arrived, and before I knew there was a granite mining area nearby. On this weekend in October when we visited, the river was overflowing its banks and the little tourist center's picnic tables were in water. Just 3 days earlier when I had been up there taking fall pictures the water was high, but I had stood at the edge of the river past the picnic area to take photos across the river of the church. What a difference a couple days
Granite Picnic Tables in flood
Hard to believe that 3 days earlier I stood out by the fence behind the picnic tables (way at the back of the photo) to take a picture of the church. make when it had been raining heavily for a week. It is funny because they even uses pieces of cut granite along the sides of the road for errosion protection in some areas. I stopped at one place and picked up a perfect set of granite book ends. They were cut square and smooth on 4 sides with a rough angled face on the other (like half a cube). A very neat set of free souvenirs. I picked up some other square and rectangular pieces and the boys have enjoyed using them for building blocks. There is a great variety of granite colors in them.
This time we went to visit the waterfall and set of rapids just upstream from the town. With the river in flood the waterfall was very impressive. It was thundering through the little gorge and had overflowed its banks, past the wooden railing into the viewing area. You could see from the squashed vegitation that water levels had already dropped from its peak. I'm not sure what the falls normally look like as even when we returned in the winter (see the Jan 2011 entry), the water level was higher than normal. It should
Chute de la Marmite in flood
view of the fall from the bridge at the top. be pretty wild here in the spring. There are several nice little log picnic shelters around the falls so perhaps next time we bring a lunch.
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