Day 6 – Kakabeka Falls

Day 6 – Kakabeka Falls

We got up to a cloudy/hazy almost sunrise this morning.

The lake was calm and fog hovered just above the distant islands.

Our route today would complete the stretch of Lake Superior shoreline that we will traverse.  A drive of about 135 miles to Kakabeka Falls just west of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

We head west from Rossport on Highway 17…the only highway we’ll travel from Wawa to International Falls.

Someone commented to us about the poor roads in Canada.  That really hasn’t been our experience.  Some of it is like the picture above with a little bit of roughness, but more of it is recently rebuilt road…like this.

The scenery along the route was quite nice.  Up and down the hillsides, rock walls, and a view of the Lake Superior shore here and there.

We pulled off into a scenic lookout and visitor center as we neared Thunder Bay.  I could see the breakwall of what I assumed to be Thunder Bay harbor in the hazy distance.  The large structures have to be the loading facilities for the lake freighters.

We passed by Thunder Bay and arrived at Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park about noon.  After checking in at the contact station, we walked down to get a look at the falls which were right at the park entrance.

The falls compare in size to Tahquamenon.  We noticed a visitor center and more viewing areas on the other side of the river but decided to set up camp and return on the bikes…which we did.

The campsite is very large.  One of the nicest we’ve seen.  It’s an easy 200 feet between the campers here…

…and I can’t even see the people behind us.

So we rode our bikes DOWN to the visitor center, (somehow it didn’t seem like that much of a hill when we drove up in the RV) and started off on a trail down the river.

 It offered a better view of the falls than we had along the other shore.

I noticed some kids along the base of the sheer cliff just downstream from the falls.  What were they up to?

They’re fishermen, of course.  I remember making a comment during the last trip about fishermen and their safety habits.  These kids had to walk a long way from downstream access to get here.  First access looks to be somewhere around the downstream end of that island.

Now, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story”.

I had in mind to get to the river during our little hike.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get that far.  The temperature got to 80° and the humidity twice that amount.  It was ridiculous.  So we opted to skip that part of the trail and just return to the RV.  Remember the hill that we nearly wore the brake pads off the bikes on?  Well, we had to climb that sucker with our Schwinn.  Never was there a more inefficient mechanical device.  Two people and their dog passed us and beat us back to the campground.  Every place we’ve been in Canada has been on a hill.

So tomorrow is an unknown.  We’ve seen the falls so there’s not much else to accomplish.  Rain is forecast which is even a bigger issue.  Maybe we’ll take a hike in the woods if it isn’t too wet, or a trip into Thunder Bay.