GETTING TO THUNDER BAY

26th – 30th September GETTING TO THUNDER BAY

I felt a strong sense of Ontario as home as we approached Kenora. I had never been this far north before but the landscape of the Canadian Shield felt stirringly familiar to me.
Kenora is situated on Lake of the Woods, the second largest inland lake in Ontario. One third of the lake extends into Minnesota. The map of the area looks like a jigsaw puzzle of land and water, with islands and bays and rivers and creeks, and the town taking hold where it can. We had to negotiate some major roadwork as we bumped our way to a campground in the late Thursday afternoon.
The days were getting shorter and colder, the early mornings were dark and it was definitely more difficult getting out of bed in the morning. We spent one day in Kenora, browsing gift shops and the local museum, where we were surprised and interested to find a traveling exhibition of the submissions to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This commission was formed to look into aboriginal abuse in the residential schools, and the displays included many photos and letters and recordings submitted mostly by victims of abuse. Working toward reconciliation is distressingly difficult and tenuous, and since that time in Kenora, the chairman, Justice Harry LaForme has resigned, citing difficulty working with the 2 other members of the commission.

It was a full day’s drive from Kenora, through the wilds of Northern Ontario, and the small but significant towns of Dryden, Ignace, Upsala and others, to Thunder Bay. I was struck by the remoteness of these frontier communities, far from the heavily populated southern corridor that I’m familiar with. These are hardy folk, hunters and fishers and boaters who drive 4-wheel drive trucks and know how to cope with the harsher extremes of the Canadian climate.
The black spruce and tamarack of the boreal forest stretched on and on for miles and miles, framing the highway with the earthy green and bedraggled look of trees accustomed to withstanding long cold winters. In the rockier, drier areas there were stands of whispering aspens and white birch, their colours beginning to change to warm yellows, catching the light in the warm sunny early fall day.
The boreal forest is a “world-wide band of conifer-dominated forest that stretches across Russia, Scandinavia, Alaska and northern Canada.” This eco-system, apparently stores more freshwater in wetlands and lakes, and carbon in trees, soil and peat, than any other.
A steady stream of transport trucks towered over us as they barreled past in both directions along this Northern Ontario highway.

By mid afternoon we reached Kakabeka Falls on the Kaministiquia River, 25km west of Thunder Bay. These impressive broad falls drop 130 ft. into a dangerously eroding gorge, with rocks that contain some of the oldest fossils in existence. The water in the river is a deep reddish brown due to the rusty nature of the native ironstone in the area.
There is a legend of this area which tells of an Ojibwe chief who “upon hearing news of an imminent attack from the Sioux tribe instructs his daughter, Princess Green Mantle, to devise a plan to protect her people. She entered the Sioux camp along the Kaministiquia River and, pretending to be lost, she bargained with them to spare her life if she would bring them to her father's camp. Placed at the head of the canoe, she instead led herself and the Sioux warriors over the falls to their deaths, sparing her tribe from the attack. The legend claims that one can see Green Mantle when looking into the mist of Kakabeka Falls, a monument to the princess that gave her life to save her people. Other versions of the legend say she came across the Sioux herself, and later jumped out of the canoe ahead of the falls and swam to shore, leaving the Sioux to go over the falls, then ran back to the camp to warn her people.”

We arrived in Thunder Bay ready to stop and spend 3 nights in a KOA campground.