The Unofficial Guide to Mont Tremblant: Hiking

One of the many lookout points

My hiking posts have been by far the most popular on my blog, where I've chronicled the excursions we've done in the National Park as well as the Mont-Tremblant mountain itself. While these are two major hiking destinations, there's a deserving but lesser known destination to try out: the Domaine St.Bernard.

The Domaine is a 1500-acre park, which I have written about in this post. We have been coming here for years for hiking, swimming and cross-country skiing. The hikes don't have the sweeping 360-degree vistas you get on top of Tremblant...the "mountains" at the Domaine are much smaller. But our Thanksgiving 2019 hike on Mont St. Bernard was so great, I need to tell you all about it.

The unfortunate part of this post is that I left it too long to actually sit down and write it so I have lost much of the detail. That said, I can at least tell you how to get started and show you what's in store. This route starts with a couple minutes on the Grande Allee, a wide road cut out of a planted pine forest. After you pass the children's maze (which is a whole other story), look on the right for the entrance to R1, Hirondelle. It's a nice single-track path paved with pine needles.

The first five minutes or so are fairly flat, and then the gradual ascent begins. The trails are exceptionally well marked and the footpaths are well worn, so it's easy to find your way through the woods. Based on the timestamps of my photos, you'll be rewarded with lookouts within about 20 minutes of starting out on the trails. The pics below give you a sense of what you'll encounter along the way. One highlight that we want to make sure you know about (and can be missed) is a beautiful view of Lac Tremblant. At a middle point in the hike, you'll encounter a rather steep section of trail with flat rock under foot, perhaps 40 metres long. When you're at this point, if you turn around you'll see an opening in the trees that reveals Lac Tremblant in the distance. We discovered this by accident the first time we hiked it - we walked right past this spot and only noticed the view when we doubled back.