Sleeping Giant Provincial Park had some nice areas to it, but it is going into our been-there-done-that bucket. The campground is nice, the trail we hiked last night is nice, the road in was 20 miles long and bumpy, and the cell service is terrible to nonexistent. This park is a rather large peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior but there are very few ways to actually access Lake Superior without hiking for many miles.
We did get some glimpses of the Big Lake. On our way out this morning, we stopped at the Joe Creek Nature trail, which ended at Lake Superior. Only a half-kilometer long, it follows Joe Creek, a lovely little babbling brook, through very dense forest. The undergrowth is so thick here and the trail so narrow that the vegetation has grown together from both sides of the trail, requiring us to push through. They didn’t tell us we would have to bring a machete. It would have made the bushwhacking easier.
And the trail ended at Lake Superior alright; it opens out into a short marsh and then the lake itself. No defined shoreline, just the end of the trail looking over the last remaining trees and brush to the lake.
Next was another short trail to an overlook, this time looking toward Thunder Bay. Nice view above it all, wish it weren’t so grey and misty.
Just a short distance from this trailhead was a store selling amethysts. The Thunder Bay area has the richest and highest quality amethyst vein on the continent and this store was one of several that sells amethyst products to the public. We struck up a conversation with the lady in the store. I’m not sure she gets a lot of traffic through the store as she seemed starved for conversation. It was kind of hard to get a word in edgewise. But she did tell us about some nearby amethyst mines that allow public foraging and then gave us some tips of what to look for. When we finally managed to tear ourselves out of the conversation, we made the Diamond Willow Amethyst Mine our next stop.
These mines allow you to prospect for your own gemstones. What actually happens is they blast the current vein periodically, pick out all the good stuff to use or sell themselves, then scoop all the rubble (the tailings) into several piles around the public area. Pick your pile and dig for amethysts among the large piles of rocks. They sell it by the bucket, forty bucks for a full bucket, about three gallons in size.
Pretty good racket: mine all the good stuff out, allow the public to come in and take care of a lot of the discarded stuff and pay forty-bucks for the privilege. Ok, I’m getting a little sarcastic...
But people do find stuff and we found a few of our own, not the spectacular specimens found in their stores for five hundred bucks, but definite crystal structures. The only problem is, some of those nice crystal structures come with several pounds of rock attached. I managed to bust some off by banging it against another rock, but that risks breaking the crystals themselves. In the end, we had a full bucket of a few larger rocks and a bunch of smaller stuff that I managed to break off.
The mine provided a place to clean and sort your haul and we were able to reveal some of the beauty of the crystals out of the muddy coating.
Some of the larger ones I will probably attack with a wet saw when I get home to take some of the extra rock off.
This was a lot of fun and now we have about 30 pounds of rocks squirreled away in the RV. Kinda reminds me of the old movie The Long, Long Trailer starring Lucille Ball. In this movie she collects rocks and more rocks until the trailer gets stuck because it’s so heavy. I will have to put a limit on the amount of rocks we take aboard.
We are currently parked at an overlook in the town of Nipigon, Ontario. Nipigon sports the northernmost freshwater port in North America, so we are at the northern tip of Lake Superior. This overlook apparently allows overnight parking so we will try it out. We looked at a camping area at a fairgrounds in Red Rock, but we were told that a big folk festival starts tomorrow and we may have difficulty leaving when 2000 people are arriving. So we are here, boondocking at an overlook.
Only 84 miles driven today. At this rate, we’ll be home by Thanksgiving.
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