The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘You have basically come to peak Canada’
Backcountry, canoes, bushplanes, indigenous guides… Northern Ontario is the best place to grasp the essence of the country, says Sarah Baxter
For the past few years, Mario Gionet has been having the same dreams – of his grandmother, by a fire, in a clearing of cedars. “She gives me my teachings,” Mario said as we walked in Hiawatha Highlands, mist rendering the deep forest appropriately dream-like. “She speaks in Ojibwe, and I’m speaking it too.”
This is odd, because in waking life Mario can’t, much. Though 50, he is only now learning the language of his ancestors. “It’s hard,” he admitted. “The words are so long!” (“Blueberry pie”, for instance, has 66 letters: miinibaashkiminasiganibiitoosijiganibadagwiingweshiganibakwezhigan.)
“I never used to remember my dreams,” he continued. “I think it’s because my mind is much more open now and I’m finally learning about my culture.”
Mario is of a generation of Indigenous Canadians whose parents were sent to residential schools, brought up estranged from his heritage. Now, he is not only embracing but sharing it. With his partner Cheyene Nanie, he has launched Walk Among the Trees, which offers hikes laced with both tradition and honesty: medicinal plants and identity crises. It makes the experience eye-openingly authentic.
“We can share what we know and what we are learning,” Mario said. “And I don’t mind people seeing that struggle in us.”
“Our parents were more ashamed; they couldn’t talk about things,” Cheyene added. “Now, we are breaking that chain. Recently I realised, I didn’t lose my culture; it was just sleeping.”
Hiawatha Highlands is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, the ancient bedrock that shapes half of Canada. It is also on the outskirts of Sault Ste Marie. “The Soo”, as the city is known, lies in Northern Ontario’s Algoma Country, between Lakes Superior and Huron, at the edge of Canada itself: Michigan is visible across the roiling St Mary River. But, despite being so close to the United States – or maybe because of it? – this region might be Canada at its most Canadian. I would come to find out.
The Soo’s story is very Canuck. It was a gathering spot for First Nations peoples long before French missionaries and fur traders arrived in the 17th century – and way before the Sault Ste Marie Canal opened in 1895, the last link in creating a navigable waterway from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. The canal is now a National Historic Site; most of the original machinery still operates the enormous lock – 250ft long, and 44ft deep – though purely for pleasure traffic these days. Watching the great trough empty in a blink, I’m not sure I would fancy paddleboarding through it.
The Soo is also home to the hangar-size Bushplane Heritage Centre, which celebrates airborne exploration and protection in this vast nation. The irrepressible guide Tim Murphy showed me around the various historic craft used to fight wild fires. Grimly, this couldn’t have been more topical: Canada’s 2023 season was the worst recorded, with 6,669 fires destroying 18.5 million hectares. The museum charts the extraordinary innovations over the years, from fabric-winged Noorduyn Norsemans to the development of roll tanks, which
After an unhurried breakfast of bacon, pancakes and maple syrup, Ryan taught me to fish (I caught a stick)
pilots fill with water by skimming lakes with extreme precision. I questioned modifications to the iconic Beaver, however, which included ashtrays for every passenger.
Next, in the Soo’s Art Gallery of Algoma, I was introduced to the Group of Seven. This early-20th-century collective set about capturing the essence of Canada through contact with nature – and its members were repeatedly drawn to the landscapes of Northern Ontario. Their bold, emotion-filled, impressionistic paintings of the region helped shape the artistic identity of a burgeoning young nation.
I soon encountered this cohort again. Driving north from the Soo, I pulled over at Chippewa Falls. Here, an information board in the shape of an artist’s easel – one of several on the Moments of Algoma Group of Seven trail – marked where AY Jackson painted the rapids. Water chuntered over the billions-ofyears-old pink granite and a fisherman was casting a line. I had put myself in a very Canadian picture. I had also put myself at the heart of the country: Chippewa marks the halfway point of the Trans Canada Highway; both Victoria and St John’s were now 2,300 miles away.
The coast-to-coast highway was completed in 1962, easing travel by car. However, it is the canoe that really defines the country, binding Canadians to nature, each other and their heritage. I was heading into Lake Superior Provincial Park, 600 square miles of lakes, islands-in-lakes and indigenous pictographs, where sugar maples give way to boreal forest, to give one a try.
First, getting there. The section of Trans Canada Highway from Chippewa through the provincial park is arguably one of the country’s most spectacular drives, the road toying and twisting with the shores of vast lakes, endless trees and ancient rock. But there was barely any traffic. The busiest spot was
Batchawana Bay, where I stopped – as I had been urged to do – at Voyageur’s Lodge for its apple fritters. “They taste of delight!” said a sugar-lipped guy standing outside. I ordered one: hot, fresh, heavy as a steak. It took me the whole 90-minute drive north to my canoe rendezvous to eat it.
Dusting fritter bits off my lap, I met Shana and Ryan of outdoor operator Forest the Canoe at the turn-off to Mijinemungshing Lake. They were going to take me on a one-night backcountry adventure. Mijinemungshing (“where loons feed”) is the park’s biggest lake, with a handful of well-scattered camping pitches. We loaded up two boats and pushed off, paddling into fair skies, dark waters and silence – it was July but there didn’t appear to be another soul there.
We soon hauled up on a small isle and set up our tents; there was a fire pit, a picnic table and, hidden in the trees, a thunderbox (bush loo). Basic. But then Shana brought out the “canoe-terie” – a spread of local smoked trout, cheese and pickles served on an upturned canoe, on our own beach – and life felt more five-star. She had forgotten the coffee filter funnel, so Ryan fashioned one out of birch bark.
“The canoe is part of the national consciousness, but we are always taught about them from the coloniser perspective,” said Ryan, who is part Mohawk, as we paddled out again in the late afternoon, gliding past bays and beaver dams. “The canoe is an ingenious Indigenous invention. When settlers came, Indigenous people taught them their ways – the settlers would have died otherwise.”
Our mini-adventure contained no such peril. Shana and Ryan had brought enough food to feed a flotilla, the water lapped gently, the fire ban had just been lifted so we could spend the evening chatting around the campfire. I felt Canuck-ness sinking in deeper every time a Canada jay whispered. The night was cloudy – a shame, as the park’s Dark Sky Preserve is one of the darkest. The day dawned damp, but Shana and I “took a bath” anyway: a lake swim verging on the transcendental, with light rain skimming sideways and no one for miles.
With no urgency whatsoever, we breakfasted – bacon, pancakes, maple syrup. Ryan taught me to fish (I caught a stick). Then we packed up and pushed off, taking the long way back to the jetty, via tiny islets and archipelagos of lilypads. It was a wrench, leaving what felt like a private wilderness. Fortunately, my final stop, a few miles up the road, provided a gentle reintroduction to civilisation.
Rock Island is a greenstone peninsula jutting out where the Michipicoten River pours into Lake Superior. David Wells, a keen canoeist, came to paddle here in the 1990s, and it blew him away; he bought a cottage. Now, in a contagiously laidback fashion, he runs Naturally Superior Adventures and Rock Island Lodge, so that others can paddle and overnight here too.
It is a kind of cut-off jean-shorts, endless water-and-trees, super-nice place to be. Over the communal dinner, a fellow guest, from Toronto, summed it up: “You have basically come to peak Canada.”
I wasn’t sleeping in the lodge itself, but rather a geodesic dome on the beach – any closer to the lake and I would have been in it. Indeed, soon I was: guide Tate took me kayaking on Superior. The world’s largest freshwater lake, it is more like a sea, with its own weather and whims. Thankfully it was calm as we paddled north. We indulged in property porn – there were some jaw-dropping houses on the shore. Then we nosed into a cave and pulled up on a long, sandy beach.
“If there are five people here we think it’s busy,” Tate grinned. Today, there was no one at all, just some driftwood and another Group of Seven easel sign: AY Jackson painted the exact view I was now taking in. He had a strong desire to paint the Canadian landscape, and travelled widely, up to the Arctic and from coast to coast. However, it was right here that he chose to buy a summer cabin, which he owned until his death in 1974. Well, if North Ontario was good enough for a founding father of Canada’s artistic identity, it was certainly good enough for me.