2007/09 Ontario trip - Sleeping Giant |
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The road west from Pukaskwa was more scenic with hills giving a view over the lake and many islands. The tree colours were still mainly gold from the birch, too far north perhaps for oaks and maples. Rain obscured much of the scenery as we approached the Nipigon area.
Then we saw a lynx, our first ever sighting in the wild. It was sitting at the side of the road as if it were waiting to cross. I tried reversing back to it and shooting a picture out of the window at the same time, but failed, obviously a technique I need to practice. A big truck came along and scared it away. The picture here is from the zoo, just to give you an idea of what it looked like.
We took a short side-trip to the park at Ouimet Canyon, a great gash in the 
volcanic plateau, very different from Pukaskwa’s granite. It was dark and wet, and the canyon itself is black cliffs and boulders, but I managed to take a few pictures. I’ve glued a whole sequence together here, as there is no way to get the whole canyon in one shot. Theories are that the canyon was formed either by the plateau’s cracking under the weight of glaciers or by the glaciers’ meltwaters at the end of the Ice Age.
The floor of the canyon gets little sunshine and winter’s ice persists under the moss. Arctic plants survive there, hundreds of miles south of their cousins. I couldn’t verify this as there is no easy way to get down there, short of a parachute.
There is no camping at Ouimet, so we continued on past the amethyst mines to Sleeping Giant,
a park that borders Thunder Bay, also on Lake Superior. There was no sign of the legions of porcupines we’d seen on our last trip there in the springtime, though there seemed to be plenty of deer and grouse around.
There were few campers either on such a wet weekend, so we ended up with our favourite campsite, at the tip of peninsula, poking out into Marie Louise Lake. We were surrounded by water on three sides with a view across the lake to the Sleeping Giant hill formation. From where we were, the Giant looks rounded and human-like. On an earlier trip, I’d hiked along the Giant and I can report that the other side has sheer cliffs dropping into Lake Superior, probably a scary sight for someone in a small boat on the lake.
That campsite can be horribly exposed when the wind blows down the lake, but on this evening there was no wind and we had a long enough break from the rain to start a campfire, cook outside, and then watch the sun set behind the Giant. Then the storm came and we sat inside, watching lightning blasting the hills and the rain and spray beating our peninsula.
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