The final park that we had set our sights on visiting in north-western Ontario, before heading back east was Quetico Provincial Park.
Quetico is renowned for its rugged beauty and is known primarily as a great destination for paddlers, with many canoe routes that can be enjoyed throughout this large park. There are more than 450,000 hectares of protected land and thousands of waterways that are connected. It is Ontario’s first wilderness-class park and has more than 2,000 back-country campsites, open year-round.
We stayed at the Dawson Trail Campground located on French Lake. There are two areas, Chippewa and Ojibwa, in this campground. Very nice facilities were available in both areas. We also noticed there were three ‘rustic’ cabins available to rent.
We started off at the Quetico Information Pavilion which is a great focal point to begin enjoying the park. Just off this building is a fully accessible trail. This Pickerel River Trail with the Sheila Haney Boardwalk follows the Pickerel River to the French Lake Day Use area. It has a very nice beach and a grassed area. Panels along the trail focus on the importance of nature and our need to embrace it in our lives.
One of the hikes that Claudia and I chose to do while at Quetico is the Paul Kane Trail. Kane was known for depictions, in sketch and oil, of his early travels in the North West. One of his famous paintings is named French River Rapids. On May 24, 1846, Paul Kane joined the Hudson Bay Company spring fur-trade brigade at Fort William. As they canoed westward, Kane sketched and kept notes of their travels. His Journal would later be published in 1859.
He wrote in his journal: “We made an early start, reaching the French Portage by breakfast-time. Here we lightened the canoes of the principal part of the baggage and carried it across the portage, a distance of three miles, in order that we might be able to send the canoes round by the river, which had now become very shallow, to meet us at the further end of the portage.”
The trail itself is a smaller component of the French Portage Trail, a five-kilometre, two-hour hike rated ‘strenuous.’ Thankfully the Paul Kane section was quite doable. To access it, we had to drive out of the park, travelling a short distance east on Hwy 17 into a lane and small parking lot.
The trail that we followed started off being quite narrow but it opened up to a much wider state further along. Plaques along the way describe the trail’s history both as an important portage route and, later, a logging area. One interesting structure viewed along the path was sections of a wooden culvert, resembling barrels, that had been used when a section of the trail was part of a logging road.
Eventually, we came to a descent which led to a section of the French River. We had to clamber over a large area of rocks which we later realized may have been from a dam that was installed at one time to raise the water level of the river. A wooden walkway led to a plaque in front of a large rock face.
The plaque explains the rock face forms the backdrop for Paul Kane's painted masterpiece, French River Rapids. The location of the famous painting was confirmed in 2008 and 2009, when the Royal Ontario Museum conducted archaeological surveys of this area.
Claudia had walked ahead of me and when I looked up, she was sitting, quite comfortably on the platform at the end of the trail where, it is most likely, Paul Kane would have to have been when he sketched the original scene. Of course the view has changed, but the rock face is still visible from this position. It was great experiencing this moment in history in a beautiful area of Ontario.
