10 Day Road Trip to Northern Ontario
Aleksandra Radic
If you’re looking for an awesome road trip in Ontario, look no further! We have been meaning to drive to Thunder Bay (and back) from Toronto since last summer and we finally made it happen. Thanks to Covid-19, we had an excuse to explore more of Ontario this summer, and we were not disappointed. Here’s a breakdown of our 10 day road trip. You can watch the video below (scroll to the bottom)!
TORONTO TO SUDBURY
Our first stop was Sudbury. Since we didn’t really want to drive more than 4 hours at a time, we decided to spend the night here. There’s not a whole lot to see in Sudbury, but the Hilton Garden Inn is a decent place to spend the night. A few good places to eat include Tucos Tacos, Beard’s Coffee and Bakery and Salute Coffee. One thing to keep in mind - A LOT of things are closed on Sunday and Monday so keep that in mind. The drive from Toronto to Sudbury is 4 hours.
SUDBURY TO SAULT ST. MARIE
Our next stop was Sault St. Marie which is about 3.5 hours from Sudbury. If we had time, we would have loved to visit Manitoulin Island, but we decided to save that for another trip. Unfortunately, since we left Toronto, we had lots of rain which kind of put a damper on things BUT we knew the sun had to come out eventually, so we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
DID YOU KNOW?
Manitoulin is the largest fresh water island in the world. It has over 100 inland lakes, some of which have their own islands! It’s current name is the English version of the Ojibwe name Manidoowaaling, which means ‘cave of the spirit”. It was named for an underwater cave where a powerful spirit is said to live.
The most common languages on the island (in 2016) were English (80.8%) and Ojibwe (11.2%).
The island is considered sacred by the Native Anishinaabe people, who identify as the ‘People of the Three Fires’.
source: Wikipedia
SAULT. ST MARIE
Sault St.Marie is a cute town, with some good restaurants, cafes and lots of trails for cycling! We only stayed here 1 night, at the Microtel Inn and Suites, but we had a chance to visit a nice spots. You can walk along the waterfront and check out Mill Square. It kind of reminds me of a mini Distillery District on Toronto.
Since we love our coffee, we enjoyed Scott’s Coffee, Shabby Motley Handcraft (this place had the amazing coffee and probably the best vegan burger we’ve EVER tried)! If you’re looking for good ice cream, check out Ice Cream Parlour. :)
From Sault St. Marie to Lake Superior Provincial Park
From here and onwards, the drive gets really beautiful and slightly more difficult. I would avoid driving on these roads at night if possible. Also, there are no gas stations from just outside of Sault St. Marie until Wawa, so make sure you gas up before the drive!
Our first stop along the way was Chippewa Falls. This is a good place to have a break, check out the falls and do a hike if you’re up for it. This is one of the places where The Group of Seven stopped on their artistic journey and created some of the most memorable paintings in Ontario’s Algoma Country. Look out for the easel and paintings!
After a short break and continued on our road trip. If we had more time, we would have like to check out the following places as well, but we’ll have to save them for another time:
- Batchawana Bay
- Edmund Fitzgerald Looking (in Pancake Bay Provincial Park)
We did make a short stop at Pancake Bay to check out this beach. We would love to come back and camp here!
Beach at Pancake Bay, Ontario
From here onwards the drive takes you right along Lake Superior and it’s absolutely stunning. If you have time, stop at Alona Bay Scenic Lookout.
AGAWAY BAY CAMPGROUND
We camped at Agaway Bay for 1 night, which was definitely enough. We realized that we need at least 2 nights in each place! This was one of our favourite campgrounds because it was right on the beach and pretty private compared some other campgrounds.
There are a lot of hiking trails in the area, so your best bet would be to go to the Park Visitor Centre and get a map and go from there.
One of the things we missed but wanted to check out were the Agawa Rock Pictographs. The paintings on the rocks are said to date back to the 17th and 18th centuries and are slowly fading due to erosion. It was raining so much that day, we just had to skip it. Next time!
Our rental car :)
KATHERINE COVE AND BATHTUB ISLAND
A short drive from our campsite was a beautiful place called Katherine Cove. Here you will find an amazing sand beach, with shallow, crystal clear waters and the ideal place to swim/sun tan if you ask me! This was a great spot for me to take out my DJI mini 2 drone and play around with it.
OLD WOMAN BAY
Old Woman Bay was next on the list and it was one of our favourite spots in Lake Superior Provincial Park. It’s really close to the Agawa Campground, so you can easily go there for the day. You can also camp at Rabbit Blanket Lake Campground. There is a good trail called Nokomis Trail, which leads you to a beautiful view of Old Woman Bay. We decided to relax on the beach for the majority of the time and take pictures, of course. :)
And of course, I made sure to take out my drone and take some photos and videos of the area. :)
From Old Woman Bay, we continued our trip and stopped in Wawa to get some gas and snacks. Our next stop was Neys Provincial Park and if we had more time we would have loved to spend some time at Pukaskwa National Park. Unfortunately, 10 days is just not enough to see and enjoy everything.
NEYS PROVINCIAL PARK
We camped for one night at this park because we didn’t want to drive all the way to Sleeping Giant Provincial Park in one shot. We are so glad we stopped here because the park is a hidden gem. It was quiet and beautiful. We had a really nice campsite with private access to the beach. When we first arrived, we set up our tent and when we went to check out the beach it was sooo foggy. You could barely see a thing!
By the next morning, it cleared up and we were able to do a short hike and get a nice view of the bay.
DID YOU KNOW?
- During World War II, 35,046 prisoners of war and Japanese-Canadians were held in 26 main camps in Canada. The north shore of
Lake Superior was the site of three such camps: Neys, Angler, and Red Rock.
- You could find sub-Arctic plants here as well as a rare herd of woodland caribou.
- Neys has some impressive geological formations. It is home to one of the hardest and rarest mineral complexes in North America.
Source: Wikipedia
There are quite a few trails to hike in the area, but we chose the Lookout Trail (2km) because we knew we had a loooong hike waiting for us at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. It was a short but moderately difficult hike and some really nice views at the top.
Aguasabon Falls and Gorge
These beautiful fall were our next stop. We only spent about 45 minutes here but if we had more time, we would have checked out Casque Isles Hiking Trail. We also stopped at Terrace Bay for lunch, at Drifters Motel and Restaurant and we highly recommend it. The food and service were fantastic!
SLEEPING GIANT PROVINCIAL PARK
The drive from Auguasabon Falls to Sleeping Giant Provincial Park was about 2.5 hours (about 1hr from Thunder Bay). Our plan was to camp here for 2 nights - on Marie Louise Lake. Ugh…we LOVED it here so much! If only we had more time. We definitely packed a lot of stuff in 10 days and I think that we would probably come back to this park and stay for 5 nights next time. Our campsite was very private, quiet and we had direct access to the lake.
We spent the evening just relaxing by the fire, having some good food and stargazing from our tent. Ahhh…so many stars!
The next day, we took it easy and got ready for our LONG hike to the top of the giant! Mike has done this hike a couple of times, and it’s been on my bucket list for a long time, so I was really excited and looking forward to it! The hike (round trip) was about 22km long and it took us about 5 hours. We stopped a lot to take photos, but if we challenged ourselves, we probably could have done it in 4.
We parked at Kabeyun Trailhead and followed the signs to get to the Top of the Giant. The first 6-7km were really easy and flat and then it got a bit more steep and challenging. Overall, the hike wasn’t too difficult, but it was LONG and definitely worth it. By the end of the hike, i felt like i lost half of my toenails. Luckily, they were all there. :)
We finished the hike around 4pm and we were pretty sweaty and dusty by the time we came down. Luckily, we were able to use the showers in the campground before heading to Quetico Provincial Park.
QUETICO PROVINCIAL PARK
From the Sleeping Giant campground to Quetico Provincial Park, it was about a 2.5 hour drive. As we got closer to Thunder Bay we saw a couple of deer, foxes, a bear and had a really close encounter with a moose! We read a lot about this park and since it's an internationally recognized wilderness paddling destination, we figured we might as well check it out.
At some point on our drive, we actually crossed into a different time zone so we went back an hour! Wow. I couldn’t believe how far we drove! The other thing that we noticed was that the sun was out much later so it wouldn’t really get dark until 11pm and even then it wasn’t pitch black until a bit later.
We got to our campsite pretty late and we were starving. We started making a fire and were excited to cook our steak and veggies, only to be told by a park ranger that fires were prohibited. We felt so stupid, because we had no idea that fires were banned. We arrived so late to our campsite that we couldn’t check in until the morning, and so nobody warned us about it. So we had to cook the steak on the stove and eat in the car because the mosquitos were out of control!!!
We stayed at the Ojibwa Campground, which was a little bit too crowded for us, but we had direct access to the lake.
We rented a canoe for a couple of days and explored the area. We found a small island where I worked on my tan and Mike went fishing. I also figured this was a good place to play around with my drone.
Beautiful view of French Lake.
THUNDER BAY
The drive from Quetico Provincial Park to Thunder Bay was about 1 hr 45 min (163km). Since we had some expedia travel points to use up, we booked a room at the Delta Hotel Marriott which was really nice and located right on the water.
There are some nice parts of Thunder Bay, but also some very sketchy areas. It also felt very abandoned in the downtown area, but we couldn’t figure out if it was because of Covid or because it’s normally like that.
A few good coffee shops we found were: The Habit Coffee and Bakehouse, St. Paul Roastery and Calico Coffeehouse. There was also a really cute coffee shop by the hotel and marina, called Windy Shores Cafe which had amazing cortados and delicious treats!
Terry Fox Memorial
The memorial is located just outside of the city and right off the highway, so it’s an easy stop if you want to check it out. In case you don’t know, Terry Fox is was a Canadian athlete, activist and humanitarian. One of his legs was amputated due to cancer in 1980, and so he embarked on an east to west, cross-Canada run to raise money for cancer research in a Marathon of Hope. He had to stop the run in Thunder Bay because the cancer had entered his lungs. This is where the memorial was built.
OUIMET CANYON
We also went to check out the Ouimet Canyon which was only 60km from Thunder Bay. It’w worth checking out and the cliffs are very close to the parking lot, so you don’t have to do much hiking to get a nice view. The gorge is about 100m deep and geologists think it was formed 1 millions years ago when glaciers came through northern Canada.
Here are some interesting things about the canyon:
It has rare alpine flowers that are normally found one thousand kilometres further north.
It’s named after the former railway station of Ouimet
There is a suspension bridge nearby which is Canada’s longest suspension bridge (600m). There you will also find the country’s longest, highest and fastest zipline!
There is also a really beautiful Ojibwe legend about the canyon:
"A long time ago, before Nanabozho created the Chippewa people, the earth had many giants. Most of them had been evil and were slain by Nanabozho. One called Ouimet had renounced the evil gods and remained on earth. He became a good giant and helped Nanabozho when he wished to raise a mountain or make a new lake.
One day Ouimet was playing with the fish when Naiomi, the daughter of Nanabozho, paddled by in her canoe. Ouimet fell instantly in love with her, and followed her everywhere!
Naiomi liked Ouimet and encouraged him to display his strength. One day Ouimet was moving a mountain for Naiomi when a peak broke off, struck her on the forehead and killed her. Ouimet, fearing the wrath of Nanabozho, hid Naiomi's body in a shallow lake. Fearing she would be found, he caused the rocks to rise up and roll over into the lake, forming a great shield.
Unable to find his daughter, Nanabozho sent everyone looking for her, but no one could find Naiomi. Later, when Nanabozho was striding over the great shield created by Ouimet, he felt vibrations from under the rocks. Reaching into the sky, he grasped a thunderbolt and drove it into the rocks, splitting them in two and creating a wide canyon. And he discovered his daughter's body.
Nanabozho buried Naiomi in the bottom of the canyon and from her grave grew the rare and beautiful flowers found only in the canyon. To punish Ouimet, Nanabozho turned him into stone and placed him on the canyon wall to watch over the grave for eternity.
If you listen by the canyon rim in the morning, you may hear Ouimet footsteps as his spirit walks the canyon floor caring for the grave of his loved one. If you are brave enough to peek over the edge, you may even catch a glimpse of him as he moves through the morning mists." - W.Lowry
KAKABEKA FALLS
Kakabeka Falls are just a short 30 min drive from Thunder Bay, so we figured it would be worth checking out. Kakabeka Falls is actually a provincial park where you can camp, fish and hike. These falls are actually the second highest in Ontario!
On Our Way Home
The next day we started our road trip back home. We stopped for short breaks along the way, in particular Terrace Bay for a nice meal and we spent one night in Sault St. Marie in Sudbury to break up the drive. We had such a good time and I highly recommend exploring Ontario north of Sault. St. Marie. There is so much to see and explore, especially if you love the outdoors! We will definitely go back, but maybe we’ll fly into Sault St. Marie next time, so that we have more time in the north. Can’t wait! :)
Check out the video from our road trip!