On The Road Again - and the tracks!

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Wet! We’ve had more than our fair share of rain since leaving Sudbury. On Thursday we decided to stay overnight in the Sault and take the Agora Canyon train trip the next day. LOTS of green! This would be an excellent trip in the fall, but really, in the summer, we don’t recommend it. Yes, the canyon is lovely but there is an awful lot of featureless green seen on the three-hour train ride each way.

The trip around Lake Superior has been just as beautiful as we both remember it, but plagued by rain. Sunday night found us in Wawa, pushed into a motel by a storm that lasted all day and made photography in any of the parks impossible. (But we missed the hail!) I’m beginning to rearrange my thinking about photographs because of this. I started the trip with a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to shoot. That is a path that seems to lead to frustration. So I’ll take my photos where I find them and try to erase the preconceptions of what I “want” as I go. I’ll try to include a few of the more interesting “found” shots each time I post.

Monday brought us a bit of excitement. The local tourist blurb suggested that it might be fun to hike to Jackfish Station, a ghost town left by a mining concern that ran dry. “ Find the yellow sign 23.7 km east of Terrace Bay, turn right on the gravel road, follow it down to the train tracks, and then walk along the tracks for 15 minutes to the town.”

NOTHING WAS SAID ABOUT TRAINS! So there are Dar and I casually wondering if the tracks get used much and noting that the set of rails beside us seem to be surprisingly polished. See the little rock cleft just behind Dar? We were half way into it when we both screamed “Train!” and ran backwards into that little indent just across from the shadow behind Darlene. This was exciting. Seeing a train go by from four feet away gets the blood coursing through the veins.

And if you’re wondering how much lead time you get on a set of curving tracks, the answer is about 20 – 30 seconds. We know this because the second time it happened, we were ready for it. And we were able to get about 12 feet away – oddly, this seems to be much greater than 3x4 where trains are concerned.

The second train did, however, dampen our enthusiasm for track-walking. With no ghost town in sight we turned around and headed back to the car. Dar quickly perfected the track hiking technique of left-right-left-right-pivot-checkbehind-pivot-left-right…and so on.

And now, with our adrenaline levels still a little high, we decided we could push on to Sleeping Giant campground. Although the guide book billed this as “rugged” and serene we found it to be – after a hell of a long, slow drive off the highway – the most populated, open, least private of all the camps visited so far. It was apartment style living applied to camping. The good news was that although people surrounded us on all sides, it was remarkably quiet at night. And the next day we were rewarded with some very young, very close White Tailed deer on the way back to the highway.

And finally, if you are reading this and wondering why I haven’t sent you an e-mail, it is because my Palm crashed five minutes before we left and I have absolutely no addresses with me. If you’d like to hear from me, send me an e-mail at iancowling@sympatico.ca.