Backpacking Bruce Peninsula

On the Friday after I arrived in Toronto, Danielle and I drove up to Bruce Peninsula National Park, on the Georgian Bay, about 4 hours north of Toronto.

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Well, in theory, it's about 4 hours from Toronto. A few wrong turns and an overheated engine compounded to make it closer to 6 for us. Frankly, though, our "wrong turns" took us on a rather enjoyable and scenic detour, and, while I was pouring water into the radiator, a guy stopped to see if we needed help who was such a perfect Canadian stereotype I really regretted that it would have been such a faux pas to ask to take his picture. Really, my trip would have been less complete without either experience.

As the day progressed, we scaled back our plans a couple times. The initial plan was to hike about 8km to a campsite for the evening. Plan B was to drive to a different trailhead and hike about 3km to a campsite. When we arrived at the park, at 7:00PM or so, we drove to a car camping campground, and decided that would be a fine place to spend the night. :-) Fortunately, during the trip, we also discovered that, due to a mis-communication we had a day longer than I thought we did for the trip, so losing a day of hiking didn't impact our plans. I also had plenty of food in the car, so adding an extra dinner to the trip was no problem. Sometimes living in your car is awfully convienient.

Saturday morning, we decided on Plan B for our route and set out on the trail for a 3km or so hike to a campsite. There is no dispersed camping allowed in the park. All camping is at designated campsites with tent platforms and composting toilets. I'm not a big fan of the approach, but it is, at least, pretty well done. The campsites are pretty well spread out, so you're not camping right on top of anyone or anything, and the locations are beautiful.

There were lots of sea gulls

Some of them flew around

Danielle on the beach near our first night's camp

Geoff on the beach somewhere along the trail

The Massassauga Rattlesnake I almost set my pack down on (double-click to zoom in)

The tent platform

After setting up camp (and laying around in the sun on the beach for a while), we day-hiked up to Indian Head Cove and The Grotto. The unfortunate part of this is that these areas are also easily day-hiked from the car-camping area, so there were about a zillion other people there. The Grotto is a huge sea cave, that is supposed to be really cool, but we didn't really check it out much because it was absolutely swarming with people. Indian Head Cove, by contrast, was not so busy when we were there, and it was gorgeous.

Pac-Man Heart

Indian Head Cove

There was lots of rock that begged to be climbed, though nothing was terribly tall. Much of it looked like it would fall apart in your hands, but was actually more solid than it appeared.

Climbing around near Indian Head Cove.
I found out later that "bouldering" is prohibited in the park. Oops.

The sun sets on our first day out....

The next day, we packed up and headed about 8km down the trail to another campsite. It was a pretty short hike, but, although the terrain was reasonably flat, it was pretty rugged.

This tree fascinated me. It was it's own little eco-system.
It was obviously full of insects, which the woodpeckers had feasted on.
There were numerous fungi growing on it, slugs crawling around.... It was great.

In many places, there were enourmous rock shelters in the sea cliffs. Also, there were frequently these chasms in the ground where the rock had split apart, usually bridged in places by tree roots, and dirt. In one place, there were a couple of these these chasms that opened out into the huge rockshelter below! It was kind of creepy to be like 50 feet from the edge of the cliff, look down, and see daylight through a hole below you!

Loons (I think) hanging out on a boulder in the bay.

The coastline.

Kind of a crappy picture, but the only one I took of Dani and I together.

Sunset the second night kind of kicked the first night's butt

It was pretty seriously awesome.

On the third day, we hiked out in the rain (which, conveniently, didn't start until we had made breakfast and packed up the tent, which had dried out nicely after the first night's rain. The drive back to Toronto was pleasantly uneventful.