The driver’s seat of our old Grand Cherokee was a good vantage point to spot the delivery box on my doorstep holding a tent to test for Backpacker Magazine. It’ll likely only amount to a line or two of copy, at best, but, hey, it’s still exciting to receive a positive reply to one of my queries.
My original major destination of this trip was The Coastal Trail in Ontario’s Pukaskwa National Park. It looks like a real beaut on the map—hugging the Lake Superior coast for 60 kilometers in a roadless craggy boreal wonderland until it dead ends on the lonely banks of the Swallow River. From here I was going to simply turn around and walk back, in lieu of dropping money I don’t have on a boat pick-up, but after calling the park learned a footbridge has been deemed “structurally unsound,” and that they were waiting on an engineer that very day. The Canuck sounding fellow told me to call back Monday, which I did, but they are still waiting for the engineer and the trail may be closed for some time.
Here’s a link to a photo of the bridge. It’s a gnarly looking thin thing, but where else other than Canada would a whole hiking trail be shut down to keep people from treading onto a bridge that may perhaps be unsafe? I would rather have the liberty to personally assay the span myself and risk a tragic plunge into the Willow River than be told the entire walking coastline has been closed to prevent the possibility of its failure.
Oh well, Lake Superior Provincial Park has another trail by the same name and similar distance, albeit unfortunately lacking the rare remoteness of Pukaskwa.
