At 8:30 we set out to hike to the Edmund Fitzgerald Lookout. The ship Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a terrible storm in 1975. The storm was so fierce the ship broke in half! Looking at Pancake Bay, it is hard to imagine. Canadian singer, Gordon Lightfoot, wrote a great song about the incident.
The hike is rated moderate for a 4-mile out and back hike gaining 383’ for 1.5 hrs. We made it two hours by spending 30 minutes or more at two lookouts at the top. The walk is through a pretty forest with lots of Canada’s native birds – the mosquito. We didn’t have any bug spray and didn’t wear a bug suit. We were the first to the top where there are two beautiful overlooks of Lake Superior and Pancake Bay.
After sharing an apple, we headed back down. What makes it a moderate hike are all the roots and muddy areas, so you must watch every step. Several muddy areas had slippery logs to walk across. Happily, we made it back down, and I was dripping in sweat. It was chilly when we started and I stupidly had on a cotton T-shirt and a cotton fishing shirt – bad choices as it heated up. Many hikers has on shorts and T-shirts. The national birds are going to have a good time.
Back at camp, we had lunch and took a 30-minute nap. At 74 degrees and sunny, we opted for an hour or so on the beach. There was a little bit of a breeze, but a perfect beach day really. Not that it was crowded yesterday, but there were fewer people today. We explored an atlas-like book of southeast Ontario. I had this book from 12 years ago, and it still proved helpful. It boggles the mind to look at all the lakes and rivers in Canada, and to comprehend how it was explored and mapped, mostly by canoe.
Looking at the maps, we noticed the trans-Canada hiking trail, as well as a lot of long distance hiking trails. There are hundreds, probably thousands of canoe trails with campsites along all over the place. A train travels through parts of this, and people load their canoe and gear on the train, getting dropped at their destination. I can only imagine!