Hiking Trails in Canada...

A broad lake. Cascading, tumbling rivers. A crow keeping lookout on an ancient pine. The crack of breaking wood. A loon’s wail. And at the end of it the trail, there it appears. They name it the “Sleeping Giant.” An appropriate name for a sleeping giant block of a stone, sitting in silence and unmoving, petrified in time, as though frozen in perpetual sleep.

This is what Ontario’s northwest regions have to offer as you go on a trip to its vast and sprawling outback of forests, rocks, and water. The area is made mostly of rolling hills, so when you go, expect to be greeted by the vision of rocky cliffs cut by rivers all cascading down for a tumble into one of Ontario’s 250,000 lakes.

The biggest lake is Lake Superior, another appropriate name. Spanning 600 miles along the boreal forest, hiking around the Lake guarantees walks through whole forests of pine, birch, maple, and spruce.

If you want great places to investigate in Lake Superior’s shore, don’t miss the northwest in your plans. Start at Thunder Bay on Highway 11/17, you can continue to the trailhead by traveling the Lake Superior Circle Tour. Here, you can have a beautiful, leisurely motor aside the coast of the huge lake and get magnificent views of the calm waters before you even formally start your hiking trip in Canada.

There are three provincial parks in Ontario. The Sleeping Giant is only one of the three. In addition there is the Ouimet Canyon and Rainbow Falls, Incidentally, all these parks showcase the best of what Superior country has to offer, both along the inland and the shore.

The parks are easily accessed from the road, so when it comes to choices for outdoor adventures, there are virtually no restrictions. If your Canada hiking trip is larger and longer, you can combine these parks or choose your own adventure and get the true flavor of the forces of nature presented for you here.

How the Sleeping Giant got it’s name.

The rich variety of wildlife you see in the Park is amazing. But not quite as amazing as it was in the early 1900s when caribou walked the forests. Timber-logging, however, soon led to the reduction of their numbers. But in their place came white-tailed deer and moose. There are also the elusive timber wolf and black bear, the lynx, red fox, and porcupine. A plethora of birds thrive in this region and enthusiasts experience their choral greeting to the sun each morning like a ceremony to start another day abandoned adventure.

One of the advantages of hiking trails in Canada, or just hiking in general, is you get to visit regions you would not normally expect to visit. So if it is your first visit to a certain place and you fall in love with it, you want to know as all it. Canada hiking enthusiasts who are in Ontario’s Sleeping Giant Provincial Park for the first time find themselves curious about the name. How did it get such a funny name?

The locals say the Park actually got its name for a series of mesas built of sedimentary rock and covered by more resistant igneous rock that make up what resembles a massive stone figure in repose. The Park offers Canada hiking enthusiasts gently sloping eastern lowlands, high cliffs, valleys, quick-running streams and inland lakes.

Jerry Preston