Day 8: From Quetico Provincial Park to St. Ignace: 630 miles
There is so much to tell and share and since we have not been in WiFi land. I will need to reconstruct the story in bits and pieces. Both Barb and I are sooooooo tired, but we're ediing photos tonite from our queen sized beds after driving all day long so we are basically fried. The entire north coast road of Lake Superior today was breathtakingly beautiful and wild....almost totally undeveloped except for provincial parks. The first 250 miles were partially enshrouded with fog moving inland from the water on our right as we drove east. Two big crows appeared at sporadic intervals...one on either side of the road as if somehow watching over us. We thought they were MaryDee and Allen--our dear friends from north Idaho cheering us on.
The painful part was not being able to stop and explore since we need to be back in Brattleboro late Sunday night. We traveled King's Hwy 17
View Larger Map all day (630 miles) hitting the road at 8:30am after packing up at Ojibwa Campsite #100 in the Dawson Trail section of Quetico Provincial Park. At Quetico we hiked the WhiskeyJack Trail which seemed to me like a cloud arboreal forest since it was so verdant....just packed full of sphagnum moss, club moss, ground pine all forming a thick cushion on the forest floor. The mixed conifers and deciduous trees were thick and all types of fungi were poking out from under the duff...and visible en masse everywhere you looked (the rangers said it had been a very rainy summer). Here are a few picts ....I think the orange balls covering this leaf is a slime mold. Barb took a photo of me peering out from behind a felled evergreen at the beginning of the trail. It was as if we were walking through a hobbit forest glen from one of Tolkien's books.
We were able to inflate the portable Yukatat kayaks we brought along for 2 days of trial and error on French Lake and the Pickerel River at Quetico. We floated and paddled among the rocks, reeds, turtles and loons meeting only a few other 'water' people since it was late in the season. Most of Ontario's provincial parks close for the season on Sept 13th, so we were glad to be there with perfect weather helping make our stay a bit less harrowing than our thunder/lightning/downpour experience at Theodore Roosevelt (to be continued).
We were searched at the border which was a bummer but we had nothing to hide. However, explaining who we were and what we did for a living and how we know each other, where we lived, etc etc. was more than a bit confusing for the poor homeland security guys. After we went through we realized it was the anniversary of 9/11....and as you might remember a bunch of the guys who flew on the planes out of Boston got into the country from Canada, so who knows? Maybe security was heightened today....
I am signing off....it's way too late (again) and we have a long day of driving tomorrow....Buffalo or bust!!!!!!!!!! xoRuthie