From the February 1995 issue of Car and Driver.
First, you should know that the road to Moose Factory, Ontario, is not a road. This is a fact of history and geography. And there were no roads to its neighboring village Moosonee, either, when the Hudson’s Bay Company settled there in 1673.
Second, there exists maybe 15 miles of byways between these two villages, and only about a quarter-mile of them are paved (or were before freeze-up—the tarmac reverts to gravel slurry during spring thaw).
Third, Moose Factory is so remote that it is excused from Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act. This means that neither drivers nor vehicles need be licensed. It is a local custom, however, to frown on permitting children less than three years old and three feet tall to use the family vehicle. These infants are, however, encouraged to pilot four-wheel all-terrain vehicles up and down Moose Factory’s mud-slick streets, but only at wide-open throttle.
To reach Moose Factory and Moosonee is not easy. From our lavish Hogback office complex, we drove 775 miles in the direction of the North Pole, at which point the road ceased being a road and began being spruce trees. Then we chained our four-wheel-drive trucks atop one-and-a-half railroad cars (six chains per vehicle, each tightened with a “Johnson bar,” an item we somehow neglected to bring along) and allowed the Polar Bear Express (a train that runs from Cochrane, Ontario, and is anything but express) to carry us 200 miles farther north. Again, this distance was easy to gauge; the track stopped being a track and began being spruce trees. This causes the train to halt at the mouth of James Bay, which feeds Hudson Bay, which washes the edges of Arctic pack ice.
3rd Place: Ford Explorer
Although the Ford Explorer has been the best-selling sport-utility vehicle since its inception in 1991, it brought up the rear in our last SUV test (March 1994). On the road and off, the Explorer was the least enjoyable to drive. For 1995, the Explorer has received its first major makeover, but it wasn’t enough to move it to the head of the class in Moosonee.
HIGHS: Stylish dashboard with dual airbags, lots of elbow room.
LOWS: Short-lived front-seat comfort, off-road clumsiness, leering chrome-plated front fascia.
VERDICT: Works best as a foul-weather station wagon.
The 1995 Explorer gets a new unequal-length control-arm front suspension, which replaces Ford’s famous ”twin I-beam” swing axles. The control arms add steering precision and straight-line stability that the Explorer did not have before. The suspension also allowed an impressive 57.3-mph clip in our emergency lane-change test, where we found we could not beat the power-steering pump as we could in past Explorers.
The Ford’s off-road behavior is still its Achilles’ heel, despite a new ”Control Trac” four-wheel-drive system with a computer-controlled multi-disc clutch that dials up automatic engagement of the front wheels when rear-wheel slip is sensed. On curving washboard surfaces, the steering goes numb with understeer that is difficult to predict, perhaps due to delay in the Control Trac system. Turn off those roads and into the woods and the Explorer lunges in and out of mud bogs and holes, tossing passengers (particularly their heads) abruptly from side to side.
The Explorer’s new front fascia looks, well, controversial to our eyes. We didn’t find the Explorer’s complicated power seats very comfortable for long drives either, because of poor lumbar support. But the Explorer is fleshed out in other areas. It’s the only sport-utility at its price to offer dual airbags. Of the three vehicles tested here, it alone featured adjustable shoulder belts, rear-seat stereo controls, and separate head restraints. There’s even a tissue box in the console. And as the charts indicate, the Explorer is the most voluminous of the three, especially in the rear-seat and cargo areas.
When used exclusively as an on-road station wagon—what the vast majority are used for—the roomy and feature-laden Explorer fights the good fight. Every Great White North inhabitant we spoke to thought this truck was the best thing since Tim Horton’s donuts, so it earned a perfect “10” in the “moose factor” column. If the Explorer wins you over similarly, just remember to buy a back-support pillow from Pep Boys, and stay away from the muskeg. —Don Schroeder
1995 Ford Explorer XLT
160-hp V-6, 4-speed automatic, 4442 lb
Base/as-tested price: $23,915/$25,625
Interior volume, front/rear/cargo: 56/49/42 cu ft
Towing, as tested: 4000 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 10.7 sec
1/4 mile: 17.9 sec @ 76 mph
100 mph: 43.5 sec
Braking, 70-0 mph: 199 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.67 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 18 mpg
The crude roads of Moosonee and Moose Factory are maintained by the Swampy Cree Indians of the Moose Band Nation. Historically, the art of road maintenance has not come naturally to the Swampy Cree. Some members have developed a creative facility with the municipal roadgrader, but you have to deploy a helicopter to appreciate their talents—which we did.
In C/D‘s quadrant of the North American tectonic plate, Moose Factory is as far north as we can travel in a Chevrolet Blazer, Ford Explorer, and Jeep Grand Cherokee. Well, actually, we might have made it a little farther if the muskeg (the “Northern Exposure” term for “bog”) and the half-mile-wide Moose River had attained its annual frozen Dilly Bar countenance, but we were a week too early for that. In any event, northern Ontario historian John Milne warned: “Last winter, I destroyed my company Cherokee at the end of a long, long drift down the ice road across the Moose River. I hooked a pressure ridge [there’s four feet of tide here, so the ice is rarely smooth], setting a height and distance record for sport-ute catapulting on ice.”
Moosonee and Moose Factory are both tiny tracts carved out of an astoundingly flat landscape of 30-foot-tall trees. From the air, you can see the curvature of the Earth. The wet, incessant wind off James Bay makes this outpost damnably unpleasant during the six months of winter, when temperatures of minus 41 Fahrenheit are not unusual. But the annual 89-inch snowfall is not excessive by Arctic standards.
The place constantly reminds you how far north you have ventured. For example, although both villages are in Ontario, the map’s legend stipulates that nearby islands lie within the District of Keewatin in the Northwest Territories. In Moose Factory, one of the streets is named Mook-I-June-I-Beg. Another reminder: We passed a store that sold ferrets for $29.99. Associate Editor Marty Padgett had to be restrained. “I want to be the first to claim a live ferret on my expense report,” he said.
For the 1400 or so Cree Indians here, life is forlorn. The place used to be part of our Distant Early Warning Line, with six-story radar domes aplenty, but the Russians no longer seem inclined to invade, and satellites monitor them better anyhow. The military thus withdrew, along with its money, leaving behind dented mobile homes and row after row of 1950s-era military-issue Cracker Jack houses with twisted propane spigots causing random concussive fireballs. Moosonee and Moose Factory have emerged as something of an artificially sustained movie set, with the Cree thriving not on what they can trap but on “moisturized chicken,” L.A. Raiders fashion wear, a daily trainload of tax-free Players cigarettes, and color TV beamed from Toronto. Sadly, the best-looking building in Moosonee is an alcohol rehab center.
The ride up there on the Polar Bear Express is a five-hour trip, unless the engineer stops to pick up lost hunters, or stops to pick up eight loads of logs, or stops to examine the pieces of the locomotive engine that just blew up. Our engineer did all three. Nonetheless, there are many interesting sights, not counting the Labatt’s Ice in the bar car. There are, for example, remote-controlled dams belting out some 500,000 random volts to Ontario’s power grid. One of them, the Otter Rapids dam, is operated not by persons on site but by VHF and microwave signals tapped out 30 miles distant by gentlemen who, while attempting to pick up the adult Channel “J” on their satellite dishes, could inadvertently unleash 400 million gallons of 34-degree water on unsuspecting down-stream beavers whose dams are not as sophisticated. There is also an endless diorama of frost-wracked black spruce, sphagnum moss, ground lichen, sedges, dwarf birch, and tangled tamarack. And beyond that, one of the planet’s most panoramic views of nothing.
2nd Place: Chevrolet Blazer LT
After a twelve-year run, Chevy finally replaced its smaller Blazer (and the GMC Jimmy) with a new model that brings GM within a bumper-length of best-in-class.
The Blazer’s attractive new clothes didn’t turn many heads during our 1350-mile enduro, but they hide substantial revisions to this truck’s platform. The Chevy’s body felt stout even on the roughest road , and its pushbutton four-wheel drive was nearly as adept as the Grand Cherokee’s system at tackling the quarry pits and muddy potholes of Moosonee.
HIGHS: Stout but shapely new body, peppy but parsimonious V-6, polished ride.
LOWS: Interior plastic, elfin-sized rear seats and cargo hold.
VERDICT: After a lengthy hiatus, GM’s sport-utility is back in the big leagues.
On the frost-weary roads to and from Cochrane, the LT model’s premium suspension, with its expensive deCarbon shock absorbers, provided the smoothest ride of the three trucks.
The 195-hp Vortec V-6, now the standard Blazer powerplant, carries over unchanged. It propels the Blazer to 60 mph in a spirited 9.1 seconds. In every acceleration and passing test, the Blazer dusts the Jeep and the Explorer and it beat them in observed fuel economy by 1 mpg.
For $26,969—highest price of the three—the Blazer LT came nearly as well equipped as the Explorer. Although the Blazer does not offer the Explorer’s passenger-side airbag, its tab did include a CD player. After 14 hours of driving one day, nobody complained about the leather-clad power seats. Editors also liked the Blazer’s new simple and readable gauges. Unfortunately, this truck suffers from the same problems that plague many other recently introduced Chevys: over-investment in cheap-looking hard plastic on the dashboard and door panels.
The Blazer’s second-place finish was more a result of the Grand Cherokee’s superior off-road prowess, not to mention the Blazer’s lack of back-seat and cargo room. This truck’s split-fold rear seats sit less than a foot off the floor, and their size—the seatbacks are just 20 inches high—make them better suited for kids than adults. The Blazer’s cargo area is also the smallest of the three.
If room in the rear is of less importance to you than power and a smooth ride, your next conversation should be with a Chevrolet dealer. —Don Schroeder
1995 Chevrolet Blazer LT
195-hp V-6, 4-speed automatic, 4146 lb
Base/as-tested price: $25,975/$26,969
Interior volume, front/rear/cargo: 56/46/16 cu ft
Towing, as tested: 5500 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 9.1 sec
1/4 mile: 17.0 sec @ 80 mph
100 mph: 30.0 sec
Braking, 70-0 mph: 218 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.67 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 19 mpg
Moose Factory huddles on an island in the Moose River—a mile-long trip by water taxi, winding around sand bars. When the ice breaks up, the place sometimes floods. This explains the drain holes in the floor of the 135-year-old St. Thomas Anglican church, which might otherwise float off its foundation and become a tourist attraction where not even the toddlers’ all-terrain vehicles could reach it.
The Cree in Moose Factory are here because, well, because their previously nomadic forebears grew attached to the consumer goods and activity offered at the Hudson’s Bay store. It opened on this site 322 years ago. Back then, the enterprise was known as the “Company of Gentlemen Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay,” but the more forward-thinking of its employees realized that such a storefront sign would require a hellish amount of neon, hence the shortened ”The Bay” appellation Canadians know today. As it happened, Hudson’s camp became the first permanent English-speaking settlement in what we now call Ontario.
Despite the intervening 322 winters, a few of the storekeepers’ structures still stand—40-foot-square white clapboard houses with red, steeply pitched roofs designed to shed snow. Standing big as you please nearby are graffiti-stained bronze cannons, dated 1843, littering the yard of the latest Company staff house, built 145 years ago.
The arrangement back then was simple. The Cree swapped animal pelts—fox, bear, badger, mink, marten, and “grizzle foxes”—for life’s necessities, at least if you count purple beads a necessity. Here is the barter schedule, as of 1774:
1 beaver pelt= 3/4-pound colored beads
1 beaver pelt= 12 dozen buttons
1 beaver pelt= 20 fish hooks
1 beaver pelt= 1 shirt (white or checked)
For life’s real necessities, such as a gallon of brandy, more sacrifice was required: four beaver pelts.
In addition to the Hudson’s Bay Company (today called Northern Stores and selling not a single beaver pelt but a superb selection of TV dinners and toilet paper), Moosonee also attracted archrival Revîllon Fréres Trading Company. This firm eventually attained fame as Revlon, the musk peddlers who later afforded an F1 ride for Peter Revson and also supplied much-needed employment for Catherine Deneuve, who is not known to winter here.
Both Moosonee and Moose Factory are knee-deep in wildlife. In the brackish bay are beluga whales, which we did not see, plus bald eagles and seals and the occasional polar bears who eat the seals, which we also did not see. There are moose, of course, one of which bolted before the Explorer and looked for all the world like a brown boxcar on stilts. Plus timber wolves, a pack of whom not long ago loped into town and departed with a local pet.
In this matter, the wolves acted as public servants. Both villages are awash in huskies, malamutes, and curs who howl incessantly. One blue-eyed husky, with the chest musculature of Arnold, leaped through our Ford’s window as the vehicle was moving toward Hannah-Sailor Street. The beast landed on photographer Dick Kelley. He graciously exited a half-block later (the dog, not Dick).
1st Place: Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo
“The sports car of the bunch.” That was the unanimous opinion of the three editors who logged enough miles in the Grand Cherokee to know the difference between a real moose factory and a Boyd Coddington-style bovine chopshop.
HIGHS: Appealing power, usefully compact dimensions.
LOWS: Awkward part-time four-wheel drive, baggy front seats.
VERDICT: Walks like a good sedan, can hike when it needs to.
The most agreeable combination of power and size propelled the Grand Cherokee Laredo to the No. 1 spot. Its 190 horsepower is just 5 hp shy of the benchmark Blazer and 30 ahead of the Explorer. Plus, it’s the lightweight of the group: its 3762-pound curb weight makes it significantly lighter than either the Chevy or the Ford.
Though it can’t outrun the torquey Blazer to 60 mph, the Grand Cherokee’s adequate power is delivered smartly through Jeep’s clean-shifting transmission. Add to this the best brakes and the highest cornering numbers of the bunch, and the Jeep emerges as the most reasonable imitator of a pleasing sports sedan.
The Cherokee’s interior is not as large as the Explorer’s, but four Jeep occupants will find plenty of space front and rear. The front seats feel like bags of flour, but the rear cushions are at least as shapely as the Ford’s, and they offer more foot and knee space than in the Blazer.
At this price level, the Jeep comes not with the ritzier electronically actuated four-wheel drive of the Explorer and Blazer, but with the simplest Jeep four-wheel-drive system (not intended for dry-pavement use) called “Command Trac.” Power can be applied to all four wheels by pulling on a console-mounted lever. The other two SUVs in this test engage all-wheel drive with the simple push of a button on the dash. Nonetheless, the Jeep handled our light off-roading so easily that we mostly left it in rear-wheel drive and played tail-out games in the gravel.
Dislikes? The optional full-size spare tire is mounted in the rear cargo area, taking up valuable stow space (dealers offer a tailgate-mount kit). There’s no passenger airbag. And the side defoggers need a fan-speed boost to do their job properly. Still, even without the attractions of V-8 power and full-time all-wheel drive, the Grand Cherokee earns its off-roading merit badge with a scout’s honor. —Martin Padgett Jr.
1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo
190-hp inline-6, 4-speed automatic, 3762 lb
Base/as-tested price: $25,706/$26,193
Interior volume, front/rear/cargo: 54/46/40 cu ft
Towing, as tested: 2000 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 9.7 sec
1/4 mile: 17.3 sec @ 78 mph
100 mph: 35.0 sec
Braking, 70-0 mph: 182 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.73 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 18 mpg
Some of the wildlife possesses neither genus nor species. We are talking sasquatch, here. Its prints were photographed 24 miles from Moose Factory only a week before our arrival. Well, it might not have been a sasquatch. Maybe a bigfoot, or possibly Shaquille O’Neal. Whatever it was, it left a spate of 17-inch-long footprints with humanoid toes, and it kept at least two Cree hunters up all night in anxious foment. An Ontario Ministry of Resources employee, who did not wish to be identified, said the footprints were likely the handiwork of an Alaskan brown bear the size of Trump Plaza. However, Joe Crawford, the kindly Scot proprietor of Moosonee’s Osprey Inn, insisted it was the spoor of something far more dangerous. Namely, “a lunatic who fashions massive feet out of plywood and stomps around in the mud and snow so that tourists like you [he looked at me when he said this] have something pointless to discuss.”
A food staple in Moosonee is french fries soaked in gravy, topped with melted Velveeta. This is probably not a Cree recipe. Actually, it turned out to taste good. But, just to be safe, we had earlier assigned Padgett to prepare retaliatory rations. Marty expended way too much energy on this project. Using a felt-tipped pen, he wrote on plastic Baggies the names of his creations. Here are three:
-Turkey and swiss on white: Anna Nicole’s Twelve-Step.
-Ham and swiss on pump: Rodney’s Hyundai.
-Baloney on rye: The sandwich formerly known as Prince.
Padgett also customized our trail mix with mustard powder, pillow pretzels filled with peanut butter, and more raisins (“nature’s little earth movers,” he glowed). We scattered this amalgam near emaciated seagulls, who, not surprisingly, seemed to prefer the aforementioned french fries.
In my survival pack, an unnamed member of our party deposited a selection of human-skull temporary tattoos and a button that declared: “God grant me the serenity to know when to change my underpants.” The latter is of some value, ace guide John Milne pointed out: “I know trappers nearby who wear the same underwear all winter, but they don’t sweat much and they swap their T-shirts, long underwear, pants, and wives at New Year’s.”
Local ER medical technician Geoff Hutchison says: “A lot of folks here, they’re just saving a big enough nest egg so they can move south. But until you do, life can be hard, lonely, and boring. You sort of feel proud just to survive here.” Which is one reason that pinkish college-boy tourists like us should not pose the question, “So, if this is Moose Factory, where are they assembled?” We made this mistake and learned only where moose are disassembled. This was at a hunting camp, where, mid-lunch, we had an all-too-intimate view of a 1200-pound moose whose legs were being cut off with a wood saw. You have to do this in order to haul the carcass home on your Ski-Doo trailer.
Not many people know that.