The approach to Saguenay is worth every mile—our ship traced the path Jacques Cartier first sailed in 1535, navigating North America's only navigable fjord, a great graben carved 200 million years ago and sculpted by glaciers into something otherworldly. For 105 kilometers we sailed between cliffs that soared 350 meters overhead, the dark waters plunging 270 meters beneath our keel.

We docked at La Baie, the agricultural settlement founded in 1838 that grew into a timber town when the Chicoutimi sawmill opened in 1842. The Innu peoples knew this fjord for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and that ancient presence still whispers through the landscape. Tadoussac, eight years older than Quebec City itself, was already a thriving trading post by 1600—the first French settlement in New France.

I took a zodiac tour where beluga whales surfaced beside us—white ghosts in obsidian water, feeding in the same waters their ancestors have known for millennia. These belugas are why the fjord became a national park on June 8, 1983, protecting both the whales and this geological wonder.

Later I visited the Cap Trinité statue of the Virgin Mary, erected in 1881 and still watching over the fjord from her perch on the cliffs. Sainte-Anne church held me spellbound with its painted interior—folk art that speaks of the faith that sustained these communities through hard winters and harder labor at the pulp mills built in 1898.

I finished with poutine topped with wild mushrooms at a local café, the kind of meal that connects you to the land—simple, honest, exactly what you want after a day of beauty and history.