Algonquin to Pancake Bay (Ontario)

July 10 – sunny and warm, rain late in the evening, ~2300km from home

Got an early start and went to see an exhibit on the Canoe and Canadian Culture before leaving the park. We headed west out of the park and then cut south to the Haliburton Forest to visit Erin, Scott’s old Wolfville roommate. She is doing field research in the privately owned forest where they have lots of recreation trails, a wolf research center, a forestry research station, and they selectively harvest trees using horses. We had a great visit with Erin, who showed us around her field station and the area of the forest where she is doing her research on bracket fungi and their effect on yellow birch health in an area that has been selectively harvested. We got to see the hydraulic lift they use to do research in the tree canopy!

On our way down to see Erin we got a real taste of Muskoka cottage country...the radio station was even advertising the Globe and Mail delivered to your dock. Scott was more excited about the Canadian Shield rocks (including banded gneiss).

After our visit, we started north again and made supper in a picnic park outside the Township of Perry. When we got back on the road it was getting dark and raining. Not having any place we wanted to stop and not keen on setting up the tent in the rain, we kept driving. Around 1030 we pulled off into a carpool parking lot between North Bay and Sudbury and shoved all our gear back so we could recline in the seats and sleep – not the most comfortable sleep we’ve had but not as bad as we thought it would be. We made a pair of killdeer unhappy though - they had already claimed the carpool lot as their own.



July 11 – warm and sunny, ~2750km from home

Woke bright and early to the sound of transport trucks. We got on the road and stopped at a picnic park outside of Sudbury to make breakfast, brush our teeth and change. At the picnic park there was the “Jane Goodall Reclamation Trail,” where you can walk back and see an area destroyed by pollution that they limed and reseeded, next to a hill that they didn’t reclaim (a barren rock wasteland)...crazy. Lots of barren polluted areas along the highway next to Sudbury.

We refrained from stopping at Science North or Dynamic Earth and the Giant Nickel, but we did see the Super Stack, a huge smokestack that was above the clouds even though it wasn’t that cloudy, so we felt like we had a decent Sudbury experience. All the way through Sudbury and after we were looking for Erica, another of Scott’s Wolfville roommates, who is cycling from Victoria, BC to Halifax.

We stopped to make lunch and steal internet in Blind River (we assumed it was the same Blind River from the Neil Young’s song “Long May You Run” – at least we had the song stuck in our heads the whole time we were there). After we passed Sault Saint Marie we started to get a feel for the rugged Lake Superior coastline.

We finally came across Erica in a maneuver of complete luck, biking just North of Pancake Bay Provincial Park. We aborted our plan to keep going and went back to Pancake Bay and camped with Erica and her biking partner Mary-Ann. A second nice roommate visit in as many days.

The beach at the park was beautiful, long and sandy with big rolling waves. Except for the lack of seaweed on the shore and the nonexistent ocean smell we could have been on a Southshore Nova Scotia beach. Apparently you can see where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down from the beach, which made it a bit creepier at night.