Today we’re back online, so I’ll post about yesterday. Been forgetting to mention the lack of wildlife we’ve seen. Up until yesterday, we’ve only seen several bald eagles, 1 deer, a few chipmunks and some assorted song birds. Apparently yesterday was the day to change all that! On the way north from Cobalt we had a Canadian Lynx run across the road right in front of us, too fast for a picture, but it was awesome. At our campsite we listened to loons most of the evening and saw several as we left this morning. Then on the drive to Wawa, we saw 4 moose (or mooses?). The one pair was a mother and youngster about 15 feet from the road, but again not time for a picture (especially pulling the trailer). 

Yesterday, we started the day by getting some pictures with ‘Earl’ the 9 ton bison in Earlton, Ontario. Was actually one of the nicest sculptures we’ve seen, beautifully made and very detailed. Passed many fields of mustard, the yellow flowers are so pretty. We then drove up to Kirkland Lake to see the miner’s memorial, drop off a donation to the archivist at the Kirkland library and visit a gold mine. 

The miner’s memorial was very touching and beautiful, it’s sad how many miners have lost their lives over the years.

I had promised to drop off a donation at the Library after the archivist was helpful in trying to find out information about the Schmeler family, she was shocked when I stopped in.

The Toburn Gold mine is abandoned now, but has the deepest single-shaft, timbered mine shaft in the world. It goes down 7,238 feet! It was one of the richest gold mines in the area and at today’s prices they removed over 1 billion dollars worth of gold!

To get to where we were going next, we drove west through the town of ‘Swastika’, and in spite of the usage of that name now, when the town was named it was after the Sanskrit good-luck symbol, in hopes they’d find gold there. During WWI, Ontario tried to rename the town ‘Wilson’, but the residents wouldn’t have anything to do with renaming their town. They tore down the new sign and put up the old one with the message, "To hell with Hitler, we came up with our name first."

Next stop was Timmins where we hoped to see the Hollinger Open Pit Mine, unfortunately the gate was locked (and Brian had to back the trailer out onto a busy street). 

From there we headed west to Ivanhoe Provincial Park, where we camped in the Red Pine campground. There isn’t any cell phone service in the entire area, and we had to drive like 3 miles to post the ‘No Internet’ post😆.