While we didn’t ride any snowmobiles today, we did have quite the adventures!

Started the day in the ‘Diamond Willow’ amethyst mine digging for treasures. There are numerous amethyst mines in the area including the largest amethyst mine in North America. Several of them allow you to ‘pick’ through the tailings looking for amethyst crystals. The ‘Diamond Willow’ is free to enter and gives you a 2 gallon bucket and lets you fill it for $21 with all the crystals you want. The other mines charge admission and grade each piece you find and charge you appropriately (sometimes up to $40-$50 for each piece). Being the frugal travelers we are, we opted to fill a bucket at ‘Diamond Willow’. It was quite the adventure, they dig/blast the amethyst rock out of a huge vein and dump it on the surface every day. They pick through the new rocks and take out any spectacular pieces, but the rest is left for the visitors. We spent over an hour turning over rocks, digging through piles, breaking pieces apart, thanks to Brian bringing a sledge and chisel. Found a number of really nice smaller pieces and a few large pieces that will decorate our yard once we get them home. It was lots of fun, but very dirty work as the mud in the area sticks to everything (including Brian’s pants).

Then it was north to Ouimet Canyon Provincial Park, a place we’ve seen before, but had to come back to again. It’s a strange place, in a reasonably flat area (some small hills) there is a very deep canyon that suddenly appears. It’s hard to describe, so look for the pictures to see the canyon. We had a nice lunch in the park before the hike to the canyon rim.

On the road out of the canyon, we came across a black bear just strolling down the road. He was coming toward us, so we had a great chance for some pictures. He was very unconcerned about our truck or us.

On the way into Thunder Bay yesterday we saw some signs on the highway for the ‘Fort William Historic Park’ and we made the choice to go to it rather than the “Sleeping Giant Provincial Park’ (we’ve been to the park before). Turned out to be a great choice! It’s a historically recreated fort depicting the year 1815 and the North West Company. It was extremely interesting and the interpreters playing the different roles in the various buildings did a spectacular job and explaining life in the fort and what was happening in the area. There was a native encampment just outside the fort and they were making baskets and teepees out of birch bark. Inside the fort we saw all the different trades and got to see historically accurate recreations of the life of a voyageur. Unfortunately we only had a little over 2 hours, guess we’ll have to return and spend a full day sometime. 

After a quick dinner at Tim Horton’s (we had to do it once), we headed off to Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park. It is the second largest waterfall in Ontario (Niagara is the highest) with a drop of 130 feet. It was most impressive and surprisingly empty after dinner. There were incredible amounts of water pouring overmthe sudden drop and the noise was deafening .Tomorrow we head south into Minnesota and leave Beautiful Ontario behind.