North Bay Road Trip

North Bay is Julia’s hometown, so when we headed up to visit this summer we brought along our cleanup gear and our new crew shirts. It’s a long way from Guelph, but litter is litter, and North Bay is a special place for a cleanup: the area is beautiful and the town sits on a watershed divide.

The watershed divide means that the water on the west side flows into Lake Nipissing, then down the French River to Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. Water on the east side goes the other way: Trout Lake feeds the Mattawa River, which runs to the Ottawa River and eventually the St. Lawrence. Two lakes a few kilometres apart, draining to two different places. It’s the reason voyageurs portaged through here, and it also meant we could clean both sides of the watershed divide on one trip.

We were able to tackle a few sites during our visit:

• Duchesnay Falls: Duchesnay Creek tumbles down the escarpment into Lake Nipissing, so anything left here is bound for the Great Lakes. It’s a popular spot, and like most popular spots it collects what people leave behind. We cleared the garbage that had built up around the falls and trails. The falls sit on Nipissing First Nation land and are worth the walk on their own.
• Lake Nipissing: Same story at the boardwalk: a well-used waterfront with a steady accumulation of litter to clear.
• Trout Lake: The other side of the divide, and the headwaters of the Mattawa River. The litter here was a different kind: beach balls and plastic buckets blown off shorelines and docks by the summer storms and pushed out into the water.

What stood out, though, was not the garbage. It was the wildlife. Minnows filled the shallows, loons called across the open water, and the water lilies were in bloom. Lots to see and explore by paddle and on foot, and we’re happy we left the place a bit cleaner than we found it.