Lake Superior Provincial Park
Lake Superior Provincial Park is one of the largest provincial parks in Ontario, covering about 1,550 square kilometres along the northeastern shores of Lake Superior between Sault Ste. Marie in Algoma District, Wawa in Northeastern Ontario, Canada. Ontario Highway 17 now runs through the park; when the park was established by Ontario in 1944, there was no road access. Traces of ancient volcanic activity can be seen in rock outcrops near Red Rock Lake and several other sites. For more than 2000 years, this was long an area of occupation by various cultures of indigenous peoples; the oldest artifacts found here date to 500 BC. At Agawa Rock, near the mouth of the Agawa River, there are pictographs created by the early Ojibwe people of this region; the figures are painted on the rock with a mixture of powdered hematite and animal fats and are estimated to be 150–400 years old. The records are visual representations of legendary figures. Selwyn Dewdney was the first scholarly figure to discover the pictographs.
The first written description of these pictographs was published in 1851 by American ethnologist, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. As United States Indian agent in Sault Ste. Marie, he conducted extensive studies about the Ojibwe people, aided by his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, half-Ojibwe and the daughter of a major fur trader in the city. While the Ojibwe were forced to cede their lands to the Canadian government under an 1850 Treaty in exchange for reserves and annuities, they have preserved hunting and fishing rights to former territory. In the 1940s, the Lake Superior Provincial Park was established, it took over an Ojibwe fishing village known as Nanabozhung within the boundaries. From the late 20th century, the Batchewana First Nation of Ojibways, whose traditional territory included the village known as Gargantua Harbour, had long agitated to regain road access to the village. One of its reserves is Rankin Location Indian Reserve No. 15D in Ontario and members have fished at Gargantua Harbour.
In 2007 some 200 members, led by Chief Dean Sayers, restored a road to the village along a park trail, without a work permit. After trying to negotiate with the band, the Ministry of Natural Resources filed charges against it in 2008, saying that the First Nation had damaged park property; the First Nation contended this was a traditional fishing and ceremonial area and construction of the road was necessary to exercise their Treaty rights. In March 2015 Justice Logan dismissed all but one of the eleven counts in the case. In his decision, Logan upheld that a Treaty right existed for the Batchewana First Nation to use Gargantua Harbour for commercial fishing and agreed that the road was necessary to get to the shore, he upheld the Band for obstruction, requiring a fine to be paid. Recreational activities in the park include canoeing and hiking, swimming, hunting, educational programs, wildlife viewing, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. Hiking Trails The 11 hiking trails located throughout the park can be accessed from Agawa Bay, Crescent Lake, or Rabbit Blanket Lake campgrounds, or from Highway 17.
The Coastal Trail reveals the beautiful Lake Superior coastline. It is demanding and can take between 5 and 7 days to complete; the Coastal Trail is part of the long-distance Voyageur Hiking Trail. The 11 trails offer a wide variety of distances and difficulty from short half-hour hikes to multi-day trips. Orphan Lake Trail is a moderate difficulty trail that has a variety of terrain over an 8 km loop and takes 2–4 hours to complete. Pictographs A short trail leads to the Agawa Rock Pictographs, they are located on a sheer rock face on Lake Superior. Several of the pictographs can be seen only from the water; the park office is located in the northern part of the park at Red Rock Lake. Senior staff, including the superintendent, can be reached at the park office between 9 am and 4 pm during summer months. Agawa Bay has 152 campsites. There are two comfort stations located in the campground equipped with showers, laundry facilities and flush toilets. An amphitheatre is located in the campground, presentations here by park staff are a common occurrence in the summer months.
All the campsites are within walking distance to Lake Superior. There is a premium for campsites located beside the beach. Permits are obtained at the Agawa Bay gatehouse. Firewood and ice is available for purchase at the Agawa Bay gatehouse. Agawa Bay is the location of the park's visitor centre where information can be obtained about the park and surrounding areas. There are a gift shop open to the public from May through September; the visitor centre has a display area orchestrating the history of the park and the influence that Lake Superior Park had on the fur trade, the Group of Seven artists and shipwrecks in the region. There are trailer storage opportunities available, but arrangements must be made with senior staff located in the northern part of the park at the park office; the visitor centre has received a number of awards for its design. Crescent Lake had 46 campsites and was located 2 kilometres off of Highway 17 beside Crescent Lake. Rabbit Blanket Lake has 60 campsites. There is one comfort station located within the campground equipped with showers, laundry facilities and flush toilets.
The campground is located beside Rabbit Blanket Lake. Firewood and ice can be purchased at the park office. Due to its size and location, the park lies in both the Eastern forest-boreal transition ecoregion and the Central Canadian Shield forests region. Its
Canadian Register of Historic Places
The Canadian Register of Historic Places known as Canada's Historic Places, is an online directory of historic sites in Canada which have been formally recognized for their heritage value by a federal, territorial and/or municipal authority. The Canadian Register of Historic Places was created as part of Canada's "Historic Places Initiative". Commencing in 2001, the Historic Places Initiative was a collaboration between the federal and territorial governments to improve protection of the country's historic sites and to "promote and foster a culture of heritage conservation in Canada"; the CRHP and the Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada are the two major tools developed to assist in achieving the initiative's main objectives. The CRHP was launched in May 2004 as a single access point for members of the public to learn about historic sites across Canada, it is a work in progress, as of 2011, the CHRP included 12,300 of the country's estimated 17,000 designated historic sites.
The directory was designed to be both flexible, in order to accommodate information from the wide range of heritage authorities across the country, as well as uniform, so as to provide a consistent means of searching and a consistent form of documentation for sites regardless of location or heritage designation. Historic sites that have been recognized by more than one level of government for differing reasons, are linked in the directory. For example, the CRHP contains two listings for the Halifax Public Gardens in Nova Scotia, these two listings in the CRHP are connected in order to highlight the many heritage values that have been ascribed to this particular site; the Canadian Register of Historic Places does not have its own criteria for inclusion in the directory, but relies on federal, provincial and local designations of historic sites. A site must be designated by one or more of these levels of government in order to be eligible for inclusion in the CRHP; the CRHP does not replace existing heritage designation programs in place across the country, nor does it replace local, provincial and federal databases, some of which are available online.
The CRHP is not a designatory or regulatory mechanism. Inclusion in the directory does not confer historic or legal status, nor does it impose legal restrictions or obligations. Inclusion does not affect how the designating level of government manages its own heritage designations or policies. Given that the CRHP is publicly available on the internet and provides locations details for historic sites, a number of sensitive and/or sacred First Nations sites have not been included in the directory in order to lessen the likelihood of vandalism and other forms of damage by visitors; the CRHP partner governments are working on other tools through the Historic Places Initiative in order to recognize sites related to Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Heritage conservation in Canada Lists of historic places in Canada Official website
Canada
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres, making it the world's second-largest country by total area. Canada's southern border with the United States is the world's longest bi-national land border, its capital is Ottawa, its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto and Vancouver. As a whole, Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its land area being dominated by forest and tundra, its population is urbanized, with over 80 percent of its inhabitants concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, many near the southern border. Canada's climate varies across its vast area, ranging from arctic weather in the north, to hot summers in the southern regions, with four distinct seasons. Various indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Beginning in the 16th century and French expeditions explored, settled, along the Atlantic coast.
As a consequence of various armed conflicts, France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces; this began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom. This widening autonomy was highlighted by the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and culminated in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with Elizabeth II as its queen and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the federal cabinet and head of government; the country is a realm within the Commonwealth of Nations, a member of the Francophonie and bilingual at the federal level. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic freedom, education.
It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries. Canada's long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. A developed country, Canada has the sixteenth-highest nominal per capita income globally as well as the twelfth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index, its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks. Canada is part of several major international and intergovernmental institutions or groupings including the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the G7, the Group of Ten, the G20, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. While a variety of theories have been postulated for the etymological origins of Canada, the name is now accepted as coming from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning "village" or "settlement".
In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona. Cartier used the word Canada to refer not only to that particular village but to the entire area subject to Donnacona. From the 16th to the early 18th century "Canada" referred to the part of New France that lay along the Saint Lawrence River. In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada collectively named the Canadas. Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the legal name for the new country at the London Conference, the word Dominion was conferred as the country's title. By the 1950s, the term Dominion of Canada was no longer used by the United Kingdom, which considered Canada a "Realm of the Commonwealth"; the government of Louis St. Laurent ended the practice of using'Dominion' in the Statutes of Canada in 1951. In 1982, the passage of the Canada Act, bringing the Constitution of Canada under Canadian control, referred only to Canada, that year the name of the national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day.
The term Dominion was used to distinguish the federal government from the provinces, though after the Second World War the term federal had replaced dominion. Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada include the First Nations, Métis, the last being a mixed-blood people who originated in the mid-17th century when First Nations and Inuit people married European settlers; the term "Aboriginal" as a collective noun is a specific term of art used in some legal documents, including the Constitution Act 1982. The first inhabitants of North America are hypothesized to have migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 14,000 years ago; the Paleo-Indian archeological sites at Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves are two of the oldest sites of human habitation in Canada. The characteristics of Canadian indigenous societies included permanent settlements, complex societal hierarchies, trading networks; some of these cultures had collapsed by the time European explorers arrived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries and have only been discovered through archeological investigations.
The indigenous population at the time of the first European settlements is estimated to have been between 200,000
Rouge National Urban Park
Rouge National Urban Park is a national urban park in Ontario, Canada. Most of the park is located in Toronto's suburban district of Scarborough, while parts of the park are in the bordering cities of Markham and Pickering. Since 2011, Parks Canada has been working to nationalize and nearly double the size of the original Rouge Park. Parks Canada is planning to add more trails and orientation centres and improved signage and interpretive panels and displays throughout the park. Parks Canada introduced new educational programs to the park, including Learn-to-Camp, Learn-to-Hike, fire side chats, other complimentary programming. Once established, the park will span 79.1 square kilometres. Parks Canada manages 46 square kilometres of this area. Water from glaciers melting 12,000 years ago formed ancestral Lake Ontario, which covered this entire area. A large ice lobe 20 metres thick, blocked the lake from draining eastward, leaving water levels high as the lake drained south to what is now the Mississippi River.
The ice lobe retreated, draining the lake to the St Lawrence River and forming the Great Lakes as we see them today. Glaciation occurred; the small decrease to the former temperatures caused big changes to the landscape. Changes in average annual temperatures now may seem small, but they could cause major changes to the natural environment in the near future. Outcrops of rock formed during the last glacial period found in Rouge National Urban Park are important to geologists studying seismic activity, in particular the risk of earthquakes in the GTA. Faults are visible indicating significant earthquake activity between 13,000 years ago; the human history of Rouge National Urban Park goes back over 10,000 years. Palaeolithic nomadic hunters, Iroquoian farmers, early European explorers, the multicultural suburban population that one can see around the park today are all part of this history. Since humans began living in the area of the present Great Lakes-St Lawrence Lowlands in Ontario, many groups of people made the lands and waters now protected in Rouge Park their home.
The river and its valleys, uplands and wetlands, along with the animal and plant species that lived here, sustained small nomadic groups, on larger, permanent settlements long before the rapid urbanization of the 20th century altered the landscape dramatically. Inspired by the scenery of the Rouge, F. H. Varley, one of the renowned Group of Seven painters, captured the banks of the Rouge River in Markham on canvas during the 1950s as a lasting memory of their beauty; this was an original portage route along the Rouge River to the Holland River, linking Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe. This route was created by Indigenous Peoples, used by early European traders and settlers; the Rouge River route is not marked by a federal historical marker, but the western branch of the route, following the Humber River, has one acknowledging both forks of the route. The Toronto Carrying-Place Trail was designated a National Historic Event on the advice of the national Historic Sites and Monuments Board in 1969.
Bead Hill is an archaeological site of an intact 17th century Seneca village and was designated a National Historic Site in 1991. The site includes the remains of an Archaic campsite, dating about 3,000 years old. Minimal excavations have been carried out, the site includes a protected midden, thought to contain a wealth of material; because of its sensitive archaeological nature, it is not open to the public nor identified in the park. Its National Historic Site designation was prompted by imminent development plans that could have encroached on the area; the original Rouge Park was established in 1995 by the Province of Ontario in partnership with cities of Toronto and Pickering and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. The original park consisted of 40 square kilometres of parkland in Toronto and Pickering. Parks Canada first committed to work towards the creation of Rouge National Urban Park in 2011, following a review of the former regional Rouge Park's governance and finance, which recommended the creation of a national urban park.
In laying the groundwork for the park's establishment, Parks Canada has consulted and collaborated with over 20,000 Canadians and 200 organizations, including Indigenous People, all levels of government, community groups, conservationists and residents. The most well-known part of the original Rouge Park, near the Toronto Zoo and Rouge Beach areas, remain open and are managed on an interim basis by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority in partnership with Parks Canada and municipalities; as Rouge National Urban Park becomes operational, former Rouge Park lands will transfer to Parks Canada and become part of the much larger Rouge National Urban Park. Most remaining'Rouge Park' lands were expected to transfer to Parks Canada in 2017. Once established, Rouge National Urban Park will be the largest urban protected area in North America, it stretches from Lake Ontario in the south, north to the post-glacial Oak Ridges Moraine in the north. April 1, 2015, Transport Canada transferred the first lands that would make up Rouge National Urban Park to Parks Canada - 19.1 km2 in the north end of the park in the City of Markham.
On May 15, 2015 the Rouge National Urban Park Act came into force, formally establishing Rouge National Urban Park. The park is open with free admission to visitors 365 days per year. There are over 12 kilometres of rustic hiking trails in the Toronto and Markham areas of the park, though Parks Canada has pl
Finlayson Point Provincial Park
Finlayson Point Provincial Park is a provincial park in Temagami, northeastern Ontario, just west of Ontario Highway 11. It offers access to the Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Provincial Park. There is a plaque in the park honouring English naturalist Grey Owl. Official website
Sleeping Giant Provincial Park
Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, established in 1944 as Sibley Provincial Park and renamed in 1988, is a 244-square-kilometre park located on the Sibley Peninsula in Northwestern Ontario, east of Thunder Bay. The nearest communities are Pass Lake, in the township of Sibley, located at the northern entrance to the park, Dorion, located 35 kilometres NW, in the township of Shuniah; the seasonal community of Silver Islet is located on the southern tip of the peninsula. The primary feature of the park is the Sleeping Giant, most visible from the city of Thunder Bay; the park occupies most of the lower portion of the peninsula excluding the area around the seasonal community of Silver Islet, a portion of Thunder Cape, designated as the Thunder Cape Bird Observatory. The eastern portion of the park is lowlands, while the western half is terrain composed of cliffs and the mesa–cuestas which make up the Sleeping Giant formation. At its eastern edge, it will touch the future Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area.
The Sibley Peninsula is 10 kilometres wide. It projects into Lake Superior from the north shore, separating Thunder Bay to the west and Black Bay to the east; the peninsula can be separated into two physiographic areas -- lowlands. The highlands dominate the western half of the peninsula, rise to 380 metres above the surface of Lake Superior; the lowlands of the eastern portion of the peninsula rise to only 75 metres, over an area 3 to 6 kilometres wide. With the exception of diabase dikes and the large diabase sill that forms the upper portion of the Sleeping Giant, the peninsula is underlain by sedimentary rocks, which strike northeast and slope towards the southwest, forming a cuesta; the varied terrain and the effect of Lake Superior on the peninsula's microclimates provide habitats for a wide variety of plants and animals. Plants found in the park include 23 species of orchids including small round-leaved orchid, one of Ontario's rarest species, as well as 22 species of alpine arctic disjuncts.
Wildlife found in the park includes a wide variety of mammals. The most dominant species are black bears. Close to 200 species of birds have been recorded at the park, about 75 species are known to nest in the park; the park is home to a few species of amphibians and reptiles, many species of fish. Sleeping Giant Provincial Park offers numerous recreational activities; the park has more than 100 kilometres of the longest being the 40 kilometres Kabeyun Trail. Summer programs include guided nature walks and group campfires, films at the park amphitheater. Other activities include boating and cycling; the park grooms 50 kilometres of cross-country ski trails in the winter. The park has several camp grounds more than 240 camp sites; the main camp ground is at Marie Louise Lake. An additional 40 camp sites are located through the park along its interior trails; the park has a picnic area and beach, boat ramps, as well as indoor washroom and shower facilities and a laundromat. Canoes, paddle boards, mountain bikes can be rented from the park store.
Sleeping Giant Provincial Park is part of the Natural Heritage Education program. Primary interpretive themes include the Sleeping Giant formation; the program is administered from the visitors centre at the Marie Louise Lake campground. Ontario Parks Sleeping Giant Background Information Queen's Printer for Ontario. ISBN 0-7794-3989-9. Retrieved on 26 September 2007. Official website The Friends of the Sleeping Giant Firstpeople.us - The legend of the Sleeping Giant
Georgian Bay Islands National Park
Georgian Bay Islands National Park consists of 63 small islands or parts of islands in Georgian Bay, near Port Severn, Ontario. The total park area is 13.5 km2. Prior to the creation of Fathom Five National Marine Park, Flowerpot Island was a part of the park; the islands blend the exposed rocks and pines of the Canadian Shield with the hardwood forests found further south. The park can only be reached by boat, it is part of the Georgian Bay Littoral Biosphere Reserve. It is home to mammalian species such as woodland caribou, white-tailed deer, black bear, wolf packs, bobcat, raccoon, beaver and gray fox species and red squirrel; this park provides habitat for 33 species of reptiles and amphibians, including the threatened eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake. Some of the more isolated islands provide nesting areas for colonies of terns. Beausoleil Island is the largest island in the park and it offers island tent camping and day docking, heritage education programs, hiking trails. Wheelchair accessible sites and reserved campsites are available at the Cedar Spring campground on Beausoleil Island.
National Parks of Canada List of National Parks of Canada Official website
