Clearing Montreal out from under the fog

FOG covers the entire world in fog and nothing removes it except walking. Montreal gives you a compact, gridded island to work on, and about five months a year when doing so is genuinely pleasant.

A grid tilted around a mountain

Montreal is on an island, and the island has a hill in the middle of it. Mount Royal is not large by mountain standards but it is a real climb, and it forces the street grid to bend around its base. Everything north and east of it, through the Plateau and Mile End, is a regular grid tilted to the river. Downtown sits between the mountain and the water on a slope that you notice on every north to south street.

The Plateau is the walking heart of the city. Rue Saint-Denis, Boulevard Saint-Laurent and Avenue du Mont-Royal run through it, lined with three storey buildings and the exterior spiral staircases that only really exist here. Blocks are short, the streets connect, and there are back lanes behind most of them.

Old Montreal is different, a small dense knot of cobbled streets by the river that predates any grid.

A route that covers a lot of it

Start at the Old Port, walk west along Rue Saint-Paul with its cobbles and stone warehouses, through Place Jacques-Cartier and up past the Bonsecours Market. Then turn north on Boulevard Saint-Laurent and just keep going. Saint-Laurent runs straight up through Chinatown, across Sainte-Catherine, past the Quartier des Spectacles and on into the Plateau.

Cut east at Rue Rachel to Parc La Fontaine, loop the pond, and come back down Rue Saint-Denis. That is around eight kilometres and it takes you from seventeenth century cobbles to downtown to the densest residential streets on the island in one continuous line.

The other good one is the Lachine Canal path, which runs from the Old Port southwest along the water to the Atwater Market. Flat, car free, and a clean straight spoke on the map. For altitude, the trails up Mount Royal from Avenue du Parc reach the lookout in about half an hour of steady climbing.

The underground city, and what it does to a map

Montreal has an extensive underground pedestrian network linking metro stations, malls and office towers beneath downtown. It is genuinely useful in February. It is also underground, which is the one place a phone cannot get a clean position, so time spent down there does not translate into cleared streets the way walking outside does.

If you want downtown filled in properly, do it above ground. Sainte-Catherine Street is the main east to west spine, Rue Sherbrooke runs parallel further up the slope, and the cross streets between them are short. Pick a warm day and walk the grid.

Winter is long, and summer is a different city

The honest version is that Montreal has a hard winter. Snow from around December to March, temperatures well below freezing, and sidewalks that are alternately ploughed, slushy and icy. Long walks in January are a choice, not a default, and the map will show a quiet stretch in the middle of every year.

Summer is the reverse. Sainte-Catherine and Avenue du Mont-Royal close to cars for long stretches, terraces take over the pavement, and the whole city moves outside. Between May and October you can cover a great deal of ground.

The good news for a fog map is that the island is finite and the grid is regular, so the city percent moves in visible steps rather than crawling. Neighbourhoods like Mile End, Outremont, Verdun and Saint-Henri each fill in over a walk or two.

FOG keeps recording with the app closed and the screen off, which matters when the phone is inside a coat pocket for four months of the year.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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