Algonquin Provincial Park

Listen first. Somewhere out on the water, a loon calls. It is a long, rising cry that rolls across the lake and comes back off the far shore. Underfoot, the ground is soft with pine needles, and beneath that is hard pink and grey rock. The air smells of resin and cold water. This is Algonquin Provincial Park, and before any history at all, it is a place of sound, stone and shade.

Algonquin was created in 1893. That makes it the oldest provincial park in Canada. It sits in central Ontario, and most of it lies inside the Nipissing District. The scale is hard to hold in your head. The park covers more than seven thousand square kilometres of forest, rivers, bogs and lakes. Some counts put the number of lakes at over two thousand. Many of them have no road to their shore. You can reach them only by canoe, on foot, or by carrying a boat between one lake and the next.

That carrying has a name here: the portage. Paddlers lift the canoe onto their shoulders and walk a rough trail through the woods to the next stretch of water. It is slow, sweaty work. It is also the oldest way of travelling this country. Indigenous peoples, including the Algonquin Anishinaabe whose name the park carries, moved along these waterways long before any map drew a border around them. The routes you may paddle today often follow paths that are very old indeed.

Now look down at the rock again. This is the Canadian Shield, some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth. It is ancient Precambrian stone, scraped smooth by glaciers during the last ice age. When the ice melted, it left hollows, and those hollows filled with water. That is why there are so many lakes. It is also why the soil is thin. Trees here grow in shallow ground, often with roots wrapped around bare granite like fingers gripping a ledge.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. Algonquin is a protected park, and yet commercial logging still takes place inside parts of it. That surprises people. The reason goes back to the nineteenth century, when loggers came for the great white and red pines. Huge trunks were cut, squared and floated down the rivers in spring. The logging story never fully stopped. Today it is managed under rules, and much of the park, including the busy Highway 60 corridor, is kept free of it. Still, the forest you see is a working forest as well as a wild one.

If you want to understand that era, the park has a logging museum near its eastern side. A walking trail there passes old equipment and rebuilt camp structures. You can picture the camboose shanty, a log bunkhouse with an open fire in the middle, where crews slept through the winter. The men worked in deep snow and cold. In spring they rode the log drives, balancing on moving timber. It was dangerous work, and many did not come home.

Algonquin also changed Canadian art. In the 1910s, the painter Tom Thomson spent long seasons here, sketching on small wooden panels. He painted windblown pines, dark lakes and burning autumn hills. His work helped shape the style of the Group of Seven, the painters who came to define how many Canadians picture their own landscape. In July 1917, Thomson died on Canoe Lake, inside the park. How exactly he died is still debated. Some people accept that it was an accident. Others have suggested darker theories. No one can say for certain.

As you move through the park, keep your eyes on the edges of the road and the water. Moose live here. In late spring especially, they often come close to Highway 60, drawn by the salty water left behind from winter road treatment. Seeing a moose up close is a strange experience. They are tall, long-legged and quiet, and they can appear out of the trees without a sound. Watch from your car or from a safe distance. They are wild animals, and a startled moose is not something to approach.

Then there are the wolves. Algonquin is known for its wolves, which many researchers now treat as a distinct type, often called the eastern or Algonquin wolf. You will probably never see one. They are shy and range widely. But in some late summers, park staff lead public wolf howls. A crowd gathers in the dark, someone howls into the forest, and everyone waits in silence. Sometimes the wolves answer. People who have heard it rarely forget it.

The park has also been a long-running outdoor laboratory. Scientists have studied wolves, moose, fish and birds here for decades. One bird you may meet is the Canada jay, a grey, fluffy, fearless relative of the crow. It often lands near picnic tables to see what you might drop. Researchers have followed these jays in Algonquin for many years. They store food for winter in bark crevices, and they nest while snow is still on the ground. That is a remarkable thing for a small bird to do.

The seasons here change the place completely. Summer brings warm water, canoes and the hum of insects, especially in early summer when blackflies and mosquitoes are thick. Autumn is when many people come. The sugar maples turn red and orange, and the hills glow like coals. Winter is quiet and white, with snowshoe and ski trails and very few people. Each season shows a different version of the same forest.

Along Highway 60, short trails lead off into the woods, and several climb to lookouts over the forest. From the top of a rocky ridge, you can see why the painters came. Lake after lake shines between the hills. The forest seems to run on forever. Below you, a hawk may circle. Above you, clouds move fast, and their shadows slide across the treetops. It is a good place to stop talking for a while and simply look.

So take a moment where you are now. Notice the light on the water, or the way it falls through the branches. Listen for the loon again, or the wind in the pines, or the knock of a woodpecker. Feel the cold rock under your hand. When you walk on, you carry a little of this place with you — the smell of resin, the quiet, and the sense of a forest much older and larger than any single visit.