Two Days in Nipigon

Thursday we drove along the shore of Lake Superior and came to Nipigon.

Canada 11 joins Canada 17 just east of this bridge over the Nipigon River. From here to Thunder Bay there is only one east-west road in Canada, and this is it.

Unfortunately, the little commercial campgound I found is basically a gravel parking lot just off the highway.

And we have been plagued by smoke. This is the sun in an otherwise clear sky just before 8 AM this morning. So a three night, two day stay is enough.

We made the most of it. Friday we drove into the little town and down to their nice marina on The Lagoon, an area just off the Nipigon River.

We walked down a trail…

until we couldn’t.

We drove north on a side route,

across several of these Bailey bridges,

to a lookout at the Alexander Power Generating Station. There are three power plants on the Nipigon River between Lake Nipigon and Lake Superior.

We then came back to the TransCanada Highway (11 and 17), went a few miles west and turned south to Red Rock, which sits where the Nipigon River flows into Nipigon Bay, a bay on Lake Superior. All the distant views were obscured by smoke.

It was a pretty little place with a nice marina backed by an impressive cliff. That rock didn’t look particularly red to me, but maybe it would without the smoke.

Today we decided to head north on Route 11, the northern branch of the TranCanada Highway through central Ontario. This is Helen Lake, one of a series of lakes formed by the Nipigon River.

Our goal was Lake Nipigon, but about halfway up we stopped at Pijtawabik Palisades to walk back to Cascade Falls.

The palisades were beautiful.

There wasn’t much of a trail back towards the falls.

And you could hear water running, but could barely see it. I guess other times of the year it’s impressive, but it wasn’t today.

It was a pretty area, though.

We drove on route 580 over to Poplar Lodge Park on Lake Nipigon. We followed the road until it turned into a two track, single lane dirt road. That’s as far north as we’re going to get this year, so I took a screen shot of our position.

Poplar Lodge was a campground with mostly seasonal people.

Lake Nipigon was pretty, but there was nothing for anyone who wasn’t camping.

We had passed a sign for High Hill Harbour, so we headed down that road.

Three miles later we came out here.

This was really quite a nice spot. Besides the boat docks it had a few campsites. There were only a couple of campers here, more our kind of place.

We went back a few hundred yards to where we’d seen a sign for the Lake Nipigon Shore Trail. Now this was a very nice trail.

Bud spotted these ghost plants along the trail.

It was not long until we came to the turn off to go up to the lookouts.

There were two well made lookouts about 0.3 mile apart.

The view from the first wasn’t too good, especially with the smoke.

The second lookout had nice views of the shoreline…

and an island. I think that’s the far shore visible, but hard to see with the smoke. Still, it was a pretty nice day.

All in all a decent stop but we’ll be glad to get back to a Provincial Park tomorrow.