Located midway (180 km) between Quebec's two largest cities, Quebec City and Montreal, and 50 km. north of the St. Lawrence River, La Mauricie National Park encompasses 544 square kilometres in the heart of the Quebec Laurentians. Its landscape is a vast rolling plateau broken by numerous lakes and rounded hills and etched by waterfalls, streams and narrow valleys. Its dense coniferous and deciduous mixed forest was, for 8000 years, home to a sub-group of the native Algonquin people known as Attikameks. Wildlife typical of the boreal forests is abundant here. Established in 1970, the park protects a representative sample of the Canadian Shield - the central portion of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Precambrian region - one that exhibits a continuous transition with many species meeting either a northern or southern limit here.