Fire in Algonquin

As noted in an earlier post, wildfires often have a bad reputation.  Ever since the days of Smokey Bear and Bambi, people have been taught to fear forest fires and work to prevent them from, among other things, harming the poor animals of the woods.  While this is a noble intention, it can also be a bit misguided, as fire is part of the natural cycle and can help to regenerate the land.  We do, of course, want to suppress wildfires that threaten communities, even the ones that probably should have been built with more defensible space in mind.  No one in their right mind should say that we ought to have let Boulder, Colorado Springs and other Colorado communities burn down.  For that matter though, sometimes we build too far into nature's path, as in southern California's foothills, and set ourselves up for disaster.  In the realm of the wild, our mismanagement of fire conditions, such as in Yellowstone in the decades leading up to the 1988 fires, can result in calamity beyond what was naturally expected.  So to has Algonquin suffered from misunderstanding this natural resource, at least until recently.

With the coming of the timber interests came a desire to save the forest, either for harvests or conservation, as noted in the history of Algonquin we have explored.   Sadly, the desire to suppress all fires came in tandem with a grand increase of fires due to human carelessness.  Man seemed to be outdoing nature in the realm of fire starting until the 1930's, when aerial surveillance of the park began.   Eyes in the skies were able to call in fires rather quickly, and advancements in fire-fighting techniques have since put most man-made fires in their place.  Still, a careless flick of a cigarette or a forgotten campfire is all that it takes to start burning some underbrush and trunks, which if left unchecked, can transform into a crown fire under dry conditions.  When I was in my early teens, I got to see this happen first hand.

This blurry image was taken back in the 1990's by yours truly, who truly knew little about photography at the time.

A campfire had been smoldering (or simply not put out) by some campers long enough for the carpet of pine and spruce needles to catch on fire and some saplings and even large trunks started burning as well.  While this fire was detected and dealt with before it became more than just a nuisance, it was interesting seeing how even the smallest flame can take advantage of fuel and weather conditions to build into something a bit more problematic.  For that matter, it was also interesting seeing how the area was cleared of such fuels and the underbrush.  Those two spruces there did survive, and I intend to see how far they have come along since then, being relatively more exposed to the sunlight.

This is what many small scale natural fires in Algonquin would most likely be like.  Lightning would cause most of them, and the rains in such storms would often keep the damage in check.  Nevertheless, "dry" storms are not rare in the area, and Algonquin's combination of flammable pines and well-drained soils mean that somewhat arid conditions are never out of the question in all but the wettest years.  The higher western side of Algonquin would be less prone to these small-scale fires, owing to the 45+ inches of precipitation common to the region, as well as the less flammable mixed forests present there.  The eastern side, however, is a world unto itself, the lands there being largely coniferous forests growing on sandy soils with most years seeing as little as 25 inches of precipitation, conditions which are similar to the eastern High Plains, albeit with far less high temperature extremes.

The western area could expect to see a really good fire every 500 years or so, canopy opening events which were responsible for creating the pre-settlement conditions of towering White Pines sticking above the maples.  The pines would emerge from the charred, sun-baked soils before the maple seedlings, and the supercanopy would in turn attract lightning for future fires.  Smaller scale fires would reproduce the pine growing conditions on a smaller scale, offering clearings which could support a pine or two.  Other than wind events, this would be how the pines would make their way into existence without being smothered by maples.

The eastern area could expect a really good fire every 250-500 years or so, events that would actually be required to regenerate the Jack Pines.  Owing to the soil conditions and less precipitation, maples and other deciduous trees (minus possibly some oaks) would be left behind as the pines and some spruces would pretty much dominate the scene again.  Smaller scale fires would burn away ground growth, sometimes producing pine barrens/savannas, sometimes clearing the ground of fuel build up, actually preventing larger fires.

The last great natural wildfire which burned through everything from crown to ground cover that took out a good portion of Algonquin was apparently in 1780.  Growth scars on old growth pines (the supercanopy could have survived even a devastating crown fire) indicate that a broad area centered on the lower Petawawa Valley burned, leaving behind a smoke plume that winds carried over Quebec and New England, enough so that the sky was apparently as dark as night during the day.  This is called the Dark Day of New England and is responsible for a great amount of religious development and population migration.  People of the time imagine the dark skies as a sign of the end times approaching, which kindled growth in new American forms of Christianity, a post for another time.

How close is Algonquin to the next "big one"?  We can't be certain, especially since we still tend to put out large fires except in specially designated areas where burns are allowed to run their course.  Algonquin could benefit from a large fire, and the land is certainly able to host such an event.  That said, while the ultimate results of such a fire would be beneficial to the area, fire is still largely an accidental thing that occurs naturally under very specific conditions, to say nothing of the psychological impact it has on those who live, work, and play in the forest.  Like all natural forces, it is best respected, handled with care, and understood as a complex, rather than simple, agent.

Algonquin's Fabulous Beaches

Passing gifts left by both the continental ice sheets and their melt waters, Algonquin's beaches are wonderful stretches of golden-white sands which quickly darken beneath waters until they merge into the blackness of the lakes.  The sand has a consistency falling right into the realm of perfection between course and soft.  While most of Algonquin boasts lakes that have at least one nice beach, the best by far seem to be concentrated along the Fosmill drainage way extending from Lake Nipissing to a broad delta centered on Pembroke and the mouth of the Petawawa River.  In particular, Grand and Cedar Lake have what I consider to be the finest beaches in the world.

Both of the above pictures are McElroy originals, found at  http://www.mcelroy.ca/bushlog/20120629.shtml.  Both images are of a beach on Grand Lake.

Come back in September for some great Cedar Lake beach images!

They are the results of being in the right place in the right time as far as the glacial events go, and have been constantly helped with prevailing westerly winds grinding and replenishing the sand ever since the melt waters diminished.

The Northern Forests and Algonquin

A friend of mine asked what sort of things grew in "the north", by which he and so many others mean anything past where the chain hotels stop popping up and every other store advertises selling worms for fishermen.  He assumed that coniferous trees dominate in scenes such as this:

The Nipissing River not far from Cedar Lake.  Thanks again to the McElroys, where the picture can be found at  http://www.mcelroy.ca/bushlog/20110829.shtml.

Expect more pictures here in September!

By and large, they do tend to pop up far more than they do south of the 43rd parallel or so, at least in eastern North America, but it surprised him to find out that many pines actually peter out in the wet, boggy soils of the Boreal forests.  For that matter, it came as a surprise that some birches, willows, alders, aspen, and even some maples make it pretty close to the Arctic treeline, albeit most in stunted form.  Algonquin, in fact, has forests that are a mixture of these trees.

While often not considered true Boreal because it lies in an ecotone blending the Boreal world with the mixed-forests of the Great Lakes region, Algonquin does have notably similar soil and climactic conditions as areas to the north, owing to its higher elevations and the lack of a buffer it has against winter chill descending from the Arctic.  While the Great Lakes and north eastern extensions of the Appalachians can otherwise shield everything to the south and south east of Algonquin, the northern paradise itself lies in a direct wind path to frigid James and Hudson Bays, bodies of water which are responsible for extending tundra conditions far south of where they would normally exist, and giving a boost to Arctic outbreaks that can reach into southern Florida and central Mexico.  Poor Algonquin, without so much as a large lake or mountain range to block this onslaught, stands little chance of passing for anything temperate.

Remember how I said there are some maples that make it pretty far north, though?  Well, it turns out that the glacial tills and higher elevations actually work in the favor of such notable species as the Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum), which can range as far south as Texas.  In Algonquin, they reach their peak of perfection, forming a towering canopy over 100 feet tall and, along with the surrounding areas to the west and northeast, produce the best maple syrup in existence.  Sorry, Vermont, you just don't have the same intense contrast of Winter frigidity to sudden Spring release that makes these trees both thrive and unleash some really eager sap.  Nothing beats Ontario maples, and if you don't believe me, as the blog suggests, travel there!

Maples aside, there are some other trees that reach their pinnacle of perfection in Algonquin, notably the pines.  Our Eastern White Pines are among the finest in existence, and the reason for the creation of the park to begin with.

Oh, there will be lots and lots of pictures of these come September.

That said, you can still find your typical Boreal species here as well, namely lovely stands of Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) growing in bogs that look no different from stretches of land one can encounter near the tree line.  The difference is, they usually grow with a backdrop of the other trees mentioned.  While not the apex of the Boreal forest, Algonquin is definitely part of it, and far more than just a southern extension, which the Appalachians would better qualify for in parts.  Algonquin just happens to be a place where such a nice combination of growing conditions exist to support a diverse community of forests that can largely be classified as "northern" with some dashes of "southern" mixed in.  The healthy moose population certainly agrees.

Algonquin's Natural History: The Canadian Shield and Wisconsonian Glaciation

Most working scientific theories of the age of the earth suggest that the planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, though we have no conclusive evidence of anything on this planet to demonstrate that she is older than 4.2 billion years of age.  The oldest rocks we have are from one of the most stable and large masses of continental core of anywhere on the planet, the Canadian Shield.  Radiometric dating has been used to determine that some gneiss near Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada is close to 4.2 billion years old, pre-dating the creation of life itself on our planet.  Billions of years of erosion have mostly knocked away any great heights that would have covered what now juts up through the earth.

Come back in September for some pictures!

The portions that are exposed today are incredibly tough stuff, having endured travels over the globe, a lot of weather, multiple ice ages, and even being under oceans at certain points in time.  While they are hardly as grand as the Rockies or other such mountain ranges, what does remain of the Canadian Shield mountains, such as the Laurentians and Adirondacks, are far from unimpressive, considering as how they are often taller and more rugged than much younger mountains in the Appalachians and Ozarks, which have been worn down to the same size in a much smaller time scale.  In Algonquin, the mountains often have a prominence of about 700 feet, resting on a base of about 1,000 feet, enough to give a hefty hiker heart problems and enough to change weather patterns in the area, complete with a lusher western region and a drier rainshadow to the east.  We can only imagine what these would have looked like over a billion years ago, when they might have well exceeded 40,000 feet in height.

Come back in September for some more pictures.

Much more can be said about the Canadian Shield, but that is content best left for future posts.  The important thing to leave here is that Algonquin has very old rocks, young as far as the shield goes (between a billion and two billion years old, but there are probably much older rocks that have yet to be found in her depths), rocks that are often exposed and make the landscape very rugged, akin to much more vertical terrain like the Sierras or Rockies.  That said, Algonquin also has very grand forests, and most trees require at least a little bit of soil on top of the bedrock in order to survive.  So, what lies on top of the bedrock?

More rock!  Here and there are ancient traces of limestone from hundreds of millions of years ago.  Young by Shield standards, but remnants of a very different undersea tropical era for Algonquin.

Thanks again to the McElroys, who have a wonderful article on this little limestone peninsula on Cedar Lake at  http://www.mcelroy.ca/notes/brent_limestone_cliff.shtml.

Here we see some rock that looks out of place in Algonquin, but would very much be at home, say, in the Niagara Escarpment or in the Allegheny Mountains.  While the glaciers of several ice ages did a pretty good job of liberating the Shield rocks by scraping the ground bare, some areas managed to survive the onslaught.

That said, when the glaciers did retreat they left some stuff behind, sometimes ground up into a nice till and even dragged north from areas further to the south that they also did a number on.  Glacial till, as we mentioned a few posts back, makes for lovely forests and terrible crop field.  It is gray, sandy feeling, and often quite cold even in the summer and under full sun.  The glaciers left a bit more than till around, however, namely sand and water.  So what's the deal with those glaciers, anyway?

Source: USGS, at  http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/info/eolian/task2.html.

The last major ice sheet that covered North America is known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and was over 5,000 feet thick in some interior portions of its range.  For a long time, it would slowly advance southwards, melting a little in the summer, growing back bigger and better in the winter.  Whenever it melted it sent A LOT of water towards the ocean, normally either right into big blue or down the primordial versions of the Columbia and Mississippi rivers.  Along with immense volumes of water would rush small-grained silt, clay, and lovely, lovely sand.  The loess areas seen on the map below are the results of this material blowing around in the dry winters when the floods diminished.

Eventually, about 8,000 years ago, the Laurentide sheet kept melting north as the planet warmed up closer to where we sit today.  While the Mississippi continued to take quite a load of melt with it (you can find many rocks from Lake Superior almost all the way down the Mississippi on her banks), new outlets opened up, namely various predecessors of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed.  One of these outlets was through the north of Algonquin, and it cut all sorts of interesting lakes, canyons, and such in its path.  It also left behind sand, sand that is without a doubt the best in the universe.  It has such a lovely consistency and softness that it became the sand of choice at the recent Olympic games in London.  Britain might not have the sand for volleyball, but Ontario came through for them.

Come back for pictures of this amazing sand.  I will have lots of them.

Then the glaciers left... and were followed by conifers, birches, willows, and... cacti?

By the Way...

A busy day today finds me putting the posts off until tomorrow, but in the meantime, I can respond to an e-mailed question:

Q: "I thought Algonquin was a provincial park.  How come you kept referring to it as a national park?"

A: The 1893 piece of legislation creating the park was known as the "Algonquin National Park Act" even though control and responsibilities regarding the park fell largely under Ontario's jurisdiction.  While the concept of state and provincial parks was not entirely a novel one (Yosemite had actually been under the control of the state of California since the 1860's), the conservation movement made most of its political strides in both the United States and Canada largely under a helpful federal government.  The states and provinces tended to favor economic development and wanted to protect their interests against conservationists who usually hailed from areas far away from theirs.

The Americans, for example, were largely Ivy-league educated naturalists from the east coast.   You can see how someone in Oregon or Colorado would get upset about an "interloper" from that far away.  Conservationists were usually derided as "do-gooders" and idealists who wanted to interfere with the politics of the locals.  Needless to say, this problem also existed in Canada, the land of strong provincial freedoms.  Ottawa had their role in creating Algonquin, but the province had to be the one to carry the act through.  In 1913 the name of the park was changed to Algonquin Provincial Park, pretty much because it was in all but name.  That said, many people would continue to refer to it, as well as Quetico and Rondeau provincial parks as national parks well into the twentieth century.  When you think about it, the scale and fame of Algonquin are more in line with parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone than your average state park (this is not meant to be a slam on state/provincial parks, some of which are just as world class as the national sites).

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I am heading north to Algonquin on the 31st.  I have a fully loaded and ready camera with me for the trip, intent on making up for years of not liking cameras (I know, I know, silly me).  Be sure to check back on the second week of September to see August posts enhanced with fresh pictures!  I can't let the McElroys do all the work, after all.

"We Have a Vision for this Land"

We continue our journey through the human history of Algonquin, starting from where we left off here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-national-forest-and-park.html

In Canada and the United States, the conservationists faced an uphill battle against numerous interest groups that wanted to see them dead.  Early game wardens and rangers did indeed put their lives on the line to protect the lands and life they were assigned to guard, usually by poachers and rogue lumbermen out to let the governments know what they thought of their preserves.  On the legal front, newly created parks and reserves were often lobbied against by timber, mining, millinery, fur, and private land advocates.  Algonquin was unique in that its creation was actually encouraged by the timber industry, as the park was technically created to encourage better forest management.  In the United States, despite a rallying against the concept by American timber interests, the national forests and reserves were created for precisely this reason, and to this day they remain public lands meant for multiple use: resource management and extraction, ecological preservation, and recreation.

The last word is especially significant in understanding what Algonquin would become.  No sooner did the railroad come to Algonquin than tourists started clamoring for holiday options in the wilderness, including luxury hotels set in the middle of the wilderness.  While this might seem a bit at odds with what we envision state/provincial and national parks to be today, there were already grand hotels (to rival the finest accommodation in New York or even Paris) in parks such as Banff by the 1880's.   The truth was, the economic world of the turn of the 20th century still largely catered to the wealthy, and such people were hardly interested in camping in tents and frying up their own dinner, even when in hunting parties.  While this has not remained the case, the fact that early park recreation enthusiasts were wealthy meant that they had considerable influence over the development of parks across the continent.  They did want to see the park exist as a wilderness, for that is why they came to sit on the grand verandas of their fancy hotels.  They wanted to see nature in all her beauty, even if it was from the comforts of civilization.   Most of the larger parks in North America still contain at least one lodge of decent quality, even if Algonquin has largely disbursed itself of this heritage.  Still, my mother's family often raced to the other side of Cedar Lake to enjoy a great dinner and social evening at Kish-Kaduk lodge until the 70's, which now lies in ruin awaiting a possible reclamation as a zone of historic interest.

The economic situation of the continent would slowly change, but the legacy of influence that the rich would pass on to new generations of hikers, canoeists, fishermen, youth groups, and campers never got lost.  Even as the hotel era was slowly winding down, government programs were set in place to encourage cottagers to set up residences on the more accessible lakes.  Hundreds of people still maintain residences in Algonquin as a legacy of such promotional efforts, providing a valuable base of income to the park, as well as assistance to storm-bound canoeists and an extra, tax-free eye to assist the rangers.  While logging interests continue to be important in Algonquin, they are restricted to harvest areas where they cannot be seen or heard by park visitors.  Nearly every year, more and more areas of Algonquin are reverted to a wilderness setting as preserve zones are widened and new studies are set up.  The interest groups still collide at times.  Timber interests and cottagers are often seen as being "in the way" by conservationists who promote visions for Algonquin that seem largely ignorant of how it became preserved in the first place.  Algonquin survived thousands of years of human activity thus far, so hopefully it will be able to survive yet more politics on the part of industry, recreation, and conservation.  One thing is certain, and that is that this land ignites passion in the hearts of everyone who had ever been there.

Keep coming by for a look on what makes Algonquin special from a natural perspective.

"A National Forest and Park"

We continue our journey through the human history of Algonquin, starting from where we left off here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-inexhaustible-lumber-source.html

By the 1880's, immigrants and migrants alike were pushing into the previously undesirable boreal forest of the Canadian Shield.  There were many reasons for this, namely that such land was easily obtainable and cheap to purchase, but more importantly, because it now had links back to developed lands in the form of railroads and lumber company roads.

As was the case of where settlements in the United States tended to pop up, settlers favored cleared land, be it natural or the result of the timber industry passing through.   Like much of North America, northern Ontario has open grasslands, but they tend to appear as pine barrens, often dominated by Jack Pines (Pinus Banksiana) and Red Pines (Pinus Resinosa).  These were once reasonably common throughout the northern Great Lakes and Ottawa valley because the receding Laurentide Ice Sheet unleashed a torrent of melt-water that left behind plains of sand, the effect akin to what happens when you dump a bucket of water on a sloping beach.  Combined with a reasonably frequent fire regime (Jack Pines actually reproduce when their cones are opened by the heat from a forest fire) and the drier conditions provided for on the sandy plains, the forests were often rather open and home to grasses, sedges, and other fun ground cover.

Settlers initially moved into such areas and transformed them into farmland.  The soil was sandy, but it was still arable to a decent degree, and could provide decent pasture if the crops were struggling.

On the other hand, the mountains of Algonquin featured pine forests full of underbrush and maple forests with a rich carpet of seedlings, both of which were either on more of the glacier-gifted sand, or, especially for the maples, a relatively thin layer of "glacial till", this wonderful sandy-feeling gray dirt that grows majestic forests but is horrid at supporting agriculture.  This did not deter some settlers, who slowly moved into the margins of Algonquin as transportation kept getting closer.  As the McElroys point out, these individuals would go to great lengths to clear the forest and set up farms.

A stone fence in the Petawawa Research Forest.  The McElroys have a wonderful article and photos, including this one, at  http://www.mcelroy.ca/bushlog/20030917.shtml.

Settlers might have trickled in to Algonquin at this same snail's pace had nature not been trumped by the timber boom.  All of a sudden, new lands were opening, many completely clear-cut and newly accessible because of the lumber harvest.   Following valleys along the Madawaska, Bonnechere, Opeongo, Petawawa, South, and Oxtongue rivers, settlers started making their way further into Algonquin.  The timber barons became worried that their lands and easements would be encroached upon, conservationists became alarmed that one of the last wild and largely mysterious lands in southern eastern Canada would become just more farmland, and even agricultural experts wondered how much damage would be done if the headwaters of multiple rivers suddenly started becoming choked with run off.

Given that the most determined settlers were already pushing into the area even before the land was being cleared and roads were opening up, these groups started advocating for preservation.  Ironically, the timber barons were often the most vocal in keeping the area wild.  In a completely different turn of passions than were concurrently being unleashed in the United States, the timber industry advocated the creation of timber reserves and national forests!  Men such as Booth had little love for an Algonquin that would be allowed to go to seed and plow instead of regenerating forest, even if they were all in favor of the then-popular clear cuts.  Things were far from set in stone however, and the conservationists had an entirely different agenda in mind for Algonquin.  This was a land worthy of poetry and song, a land to be preserved in the manner of Yellowstone and Yosemite!  Sadly, some of the elements of the Canadian conservation movement were a pale shadow of their American counterparts, led by the environmentalist super hero Theodore Roosevelt.

Alexander Kirkwood, the chairman and commissioner of crown lands at the time of the creation of Algonquin Park.  Kirkwood was enamored by the wilderness he found there, but was also something of a pathetic naturalist.  He often described Algonquin as having open oak forests and grand populations of birds and animals that have never existed there.

Still, in a path toward preservation that was largely sparked by passion rather than sound ecological science, the Algonquin question was quickly given a Royal Commission.  In a rather Canadian move, a decision was reached by compromise and appeasement to all involved parties.  The headwaters were protected, lands were reserved for future timber contracts, and anything not used by the lumber companies was considered a game preserve.  Canada looked to be starting on a path of possible conservation along with the United States, with the same multiple usage intention that American national forests and parks were formed under (albeit with a very different genesis, to say the least).  On May 23, 1893, Algonquin became Canada's second national park (Banff was created in 1885).  What that meant, exactly, would be fought over to the present day.  Come by tomorrow as we conclude our historical journey and find out what players and elements took part in this search for meaning.

"An Inexhaustible Lumber Source"

We continue our journey through the human history of Algonquin, starting from where we left off here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-land-is-beautiful-but-also-savage.html

As early as the 1820's, the United States was starting to expand into the lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to seek out potential new timber areas to feed the growing appetite for wood.  By the 1860's, the need was accelerated by the Civil War, settlement on the treeless Great Plains and other prairie regions (that took off with the immigration surge of the 19th century), railroad construction, and the rise of the timber barons.  By the 1880's, these areas started getting clear cut to fuel both industry and construction demands in the growing cities of the Great Lakes and Mississippi and Ohio valleys.  The American conservation movement, which had been born of a desire to preserve bird populations, now started becoming concerned with the preservation of bird habitats; the eastern forests had already been decimated and were tokens of their former glory, and conservationists were afraid that the largely unspoiled western forests would be next.  They might well have been eradicated with efficiency had a new market not opened up with cheaper imports from Canada.

Though the threat of invasion by the United States in the 1860's concerned many Canadians (and was indeed the prime cause for Confederation in 1867), relations between the two sides had warmed considerably since the War of 1812.  Commerce between the nations kept increasing as the United States required more and more raw resources to feed its industrial and human needs, and Canadian timber interests were among the many commercial ventures that found business with the neighboring United States to be a bit more lucrative than with distant Britain.  At first, Canadian industry had little to offer the Americans that they were not producing manically themselves, but attention quickly turned to raw materials.

Well over half of Canada was covered in forest.  Much of her eastern boreal forests remained untouched, and the southern portions still contained towering virgin Red and Eastern White Pines.  Algonquin, a pristine wilderness less than 100 miles from major water and rail connections was full of these trees and open for business.

These were both taken in the last 2 years by, you guessed it, Bob and Diana McElroy.  They can be found on their picasa site here.  The top picture is along the Barron River, a tributary of the Petawawa River, while the second picture is from the Petawawa River as it exits Lake Travers.  These forests were among the first to be harvested in the 19th century timber rush, as they were easily accessible from the two major waterways.  They have made a lovely comeback, but are still just reflections of what they once were.

Timber barons such as J. R. Booth thus saw opportunity beyond the dreams of avarice.

Booth at a survey of his squared White Pine timber on his Canada Atlantic Railway.  Source: Library and Archives of Canada, C-046480.  

By the 1890's, Booth was the wealthiest and most influential lumber producer in the entire world, made so by harvesting the 150' + White Pines of Algonquin.  The problem was, he was not the only one harvesting every last inch of what remained of wilderness in northern Ontario and eastern Quebec.  By the time Algonquin had made him a very wealthy man, little was left of her virgin forests, and in the early 1890's, Canadian conservationists started looking at their own country as turning into the same sort of environmental war-zone that the United States had become.  In only a few dozen years Algonquin, the principal battleground of the war to save the wilderness of Canada, had been transformed from an earthly paradise that survived thousands of years of human contact into a stubby forest of eroding mountains.

Fortunately, there were men, including Booth himself, who saw what was being done to Algonquin.  Booth was not your typical tycoon; even as late as his forties he worked alongside his men felling trees and lived in the backwoods camp conditions with them.  Even as he was bringing down the giants and transforming the landscape, he was surrounded by it, and like so many others before him, changed by Algonquin.  When the call came to do something about what was happening to her forests and lands, he joined others in trying to save them.  Come by tomorrow to see this unfold.

"The Land is Beautiful, but Also Savage, Wild, and Far From the Comforts of Hearth and Home"

The story of human history in Algonquin continues from where we left off here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/i-never-imagined-i-would-see-land-like.html

The Algonkin continued to visit their sacred summer home every year as a slow trickle of French settlers and the births of the first true French-Canadians started visibly changing the St. Lawrence and lower Ottawa valleys.  By and large, the voyageurs bypassed Algonquin to head out to the boreal forests north of the Great Plains or south into the Mississippi-Missouri watershed.  We do not know why this is the case, but the good relations between the Algonkin and the French probably had a lot to do with it.  While arrangements could be, and often were, made with the various other Algonquian peoples such as the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Nipissings to hunt and trap in their lands, voyageur activity in the upper Ottawa watershed largely took place along the northern tributaries in the part of the Laurentian mountains that rose across the river in Quebec.  Perhaps Brule and Champlain made it clear that Algonquin was to remain inviolate.  We may never know, but we do know it remained a place unto itself even after the native peoples of Canada and the French-Canadians took on a new existence under British rule in 1763.

Settlement in Ontario by new colonists from the British Isles took place at a very slow pace, only really getting underway once the United States won its independence from Britain.  Americans who did not desire independence found themselves increasingly unpopular.  In some cases, hostility against them was taken to the point where even if they did acknowledge the emergence of the new sovereign entity they lived in, their homes and land were burned to a crisp and their lives threatened with violence if not outright death.  While some of these people, now called loyalists, were still passionate enough about a connection to Britain that they could only live under the rule of Westminster, many more simply found that the conditions for them had become intolerable.

Public Domain, a statue commemorating the arrival of loyalists into Ontario in front of McMaster university in Hamilton, Ontario.  Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnitedEmpireLoyalistsHamilton.JPG

They found themselves exiled, many settling in Nova Scotia, many making their way into southern and eastern Ontario.  The birth of modern American-Canadian relations was rocky, to say the least.  Had they continued to exist in such a chilly state, Ontario might have looked quite different today.  Why on earth, after all, would an agrarian colonial transplanted society ever even try to head north into rocky, cold lands that were the domain of the savages, French-Canadians, and the rough and tumble men of the Hudson's Bay Company?  Southern and eastern Ontario at least resembled something of what had been left behind, and with a bit of landscaping, could even appear to be a true little piece of England across the waves.  

Well, the first English-speaking Ontarians were compelled to move north yet again by the Americans, but this time out of economic opportunities.  Canada had already found an economic bastion in the timber industry, helping Britain and her allies achieve naval victory over Napoleon's forces by providing an incredible source of lumber for the allied shipyards.  One tree, more than any other perhaps in the history of the world, became an object of desire, the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).

100+ foot pines on the shore of Lake Travers, from a September 2011 trip by Bob and Diana McElroy.

The picture above can be misleading, as the White Pines sticking out above the canopy seem larger than they are due to the surrounding forest recovering from a violent wind event in 1999, but the visual impact is representative of how these trees appeared throughout their range before they were decimated by logging in the 19th century.  White Pines, many over 150 feet tall and some over 200 feet high absolutely dominated forests stretching from Iowa to Nova Scotia and south along the Appalachians into northern Georgia.  They seemed to be countless, and the large amount of harvest worthy timber from a single giant tree made the trees seem inexhaustible.  The American economy, however, has a way of turning plentiful natural resources into barren landscapes.

The need of the growing United States for lumber was the reason for both the near demise of the wilderness of Algonquin and its salvation.  The land that had survived as a majestic testament to the awe-inspiring power of nature had survived thousands of years of human activity that kept away from it out of awe, respect, and even distaste had finally met its match in the power of the saw.  Come by tomorrow to see this story continue to unfold.

"I Never Imagined I Would See a Land Like This"

Part one of our adventure can be found here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-land-of-our-savage-paradise.html

When the two other major European powers, the English and Spanish, came to North America, they largely did so out of an interest in conquest and settlement.  The spoils of conquest were initially a great prize and purpose for the Spanish in heading deeper into the lands of Mexico and Florida, but conquest, largely a means to an end of empire building rather than outright pillaging and piracy, took a back seat to establishing a thriving "New Spain".  The English, content to commit their piracy against the Spanish who had already done the primary work for them, took part in building a thriving "New England" in a series of colonies less telling of empire than of a transplanting of domestic hopes and dreams.  While many of her colonists came to plant tobacco and have a nicer estate than they could ever afford on Sheepshire-on-the-Thames, just as many came for a chance at a quiet life, free to live it how they chose, usually as dissenting Protestants.  The French, however, considered both conquest and colonization secondary to opening up a very lucrative commercial trade with the native peoples they encountered.  (That trade would be because of an encounter between the French and the Beaver, one of the most fascinating relationships between man and beast ever made).  Guess which system the locals liked more?

That said, 1608 was a very cautious year among both French and Algonquin alike.  Samuel de Champlain and his men arrived on the shores of what would become Quebec City with guns in hand, and the Algonkin and Montagnais were no less at the ready to come to blows over what looked to be a matter of potential battle.  Gestures were exchanged, the French gave "gifts" of trinkets to their new-found neighbors, and battle was deferred while both sides kept one eye on the other even asleep that night.  Houses and buildings of all sorts started being constructed almost immediately in order to allow the French to survive what Champlain knew would be an incredibly brutal winter.  As the men would later shiver and wish they had never left France, much less Tadoussac, Samuel kept to himself, making maps and looking outside his window wanting something more than just a crazed hunt for the Beaver.  Like so many North Americans before and after him, he looked west.

For a man who had never been to the Great Lakes nor even heard much about their existence, Champlain was incredibly accurate about his predictions regarding Canada's most attractive feature, extensive watersheds connected by easily portaged heights of land that permitted canoe travel clear to the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean, and the Rockies.  With Quebec profiting off his successful gamble that the Algonkin and their trading partners would come to his new "inland" trading post first, Champlain was able to set out for western lands at his leisure.  By 1611, he found Lake Ontario, the great lake that kept the Haudenausonee and Algonkin apart from one another.  By 1622, thanks to the Mattawa portage, he found Lake Superior.  In his travels, he lived and worked with his Algonkin guides as an equal (albeit with the French necessity/penchant of elaborate dress).

Public Domain, 

While his grand objectives and military exploits against the Haudenausonee are known quite well, and the modern image of the man largely amounts to just another imperialist, we would do well to remember that he did not view the native peoples nearly as brutally as did men such as Cortez, or with the fear deep in the hearts of the early American colonists.  While certainly not a saint, Champlain was definitely an explorer, and probably took more than a passing glance up the various tributaries of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence as he made his way inland.  He almost certainly took a few side trips up rivers such as the Madawaska, Petawawa, and Amable du Fond, even if only for a short while.  This was a man so completely enthralled by the people and land he had come across, a man who stood in silent awe when he saw the Laurentians towering above the mouth of the Mattawa river or the waters of deep blue Lake Superior which went far off to the horizon.  This was not a land of conquest or even commerce, but, as it had been for so many before him and so many to come after him, a land of wild beauty and a power of nature that would bring pause to the plow and axe alike.

He was also a man on a mission, however, and had to document the better known routes before he could explore rivers of his own desire.  Fortunately, he could live somewhat vicariously through a man he considered a son, Etienne Brule.

Public Domain

Brule was given a mission by Champlain: Travel with the Algonkin to the land of the Wendat and then live among them and learn their language and their way of life.  Between the years 1611 and 1629, he would spend much of his summer among both peoples, and while his voyages with them have never been deeply chronicled, spending summers with the Algonkin meant that he most certainly visited and stayed on the shores of the larger lakes of Algonquin that were situated on the paths of the largest waterways, notably Opeongo, Grand, and the great meeting point of the pine and maple forests as well as the Nippissing and Petawawa rivers, Cedar.  He was probably distracted enough by what he saw, as well as by the bountiful fishing, to ignore the huge concentration of Beaver that inhabited the mountain lakes and streams.  He is documented to have shared his experiences of the area with Champlain, apparently in detail and reverence, and even as he would continue to return to the shores of Georgian and Nottawasaga Bay to be with the Wendat, the fact that he returned to be with the Algonkin year after year and came home with less than an abundance of pelts meant that he was constantly drawn back to Algonquin.

Now this is definitely conjecture... Commercial ventures of the voyageurs reached deep into the heart of western Quebec and northern Ontario, but largely avoided Algonquin.  The area is extremely rugged in places, but no less accessible than the rivers of the rest of the lands around it.  It is quite possible that Brule and Champlain respected Algonquin and the sacred summer home of the Algonkin enough to leave it off the map.  Don't believe me?  The purpose of this blog and the purpose of these posts in the next two weeks is to share with my readers not only what our continent is all about, what there is to discover, but what sort of majesty can be found on our shores.  This objective is furthered by encouraging travel to the places we visit here in the blog, because nothing can substitute for a full blessing of the senses in experiencing the land for ourselves.  My friends, there is no place like Algonquin on this entire earth.  I dare say these men thought so.

Many after them would agree.  Some would leave it alone, some would embrace it as a cause to be championed, and some would see it as a land to be exploited beyond recognition.  Stop by tomorrow as we continue the story of Algonquin.

"The Land of Our Savage Paradise"

One can only imagine what the scene would look like: A huge face of ice stretching as far as eye can see, melting into great bodies of water drained by what would become the great rivers of our continent.  Hunting at the edge of the ice, as they had been ever since their ancestors had ventured into this land from another far to the north and west, generations of people noticed as the ice would keep melting away until new lands would be uncovered and slowly advancing spruce forests would encroach upon their open tundra hunting grounds.  Some would follow the ice, some would stay in the forests but then move north as the woods changed, and some still would remain in the changed forests and warmer climes, joined still by newcomers from further south who favored something a bit less warm themselves.  In truth, we really do not know what life was like so far back even into the history of lands where records were easier to come by.  We really do not have a great idea about what life would be like in the Ottawa and Petawawa valleys as the ice gradually melted further north.

The evidence we do have, however, gives us pieces of a story of a nation of people whom the French and those who came after them would call the Algonkins (Algonquins).

Taken from Francis Vachon's blog.  Monsieur Vachon is a photographer in Quebec with a bi-lingual blog that can be found at  http://www.francisvachon.com/blog/.

 By 7000 BC or so, these people came to a land that was already establishing itself into great forests of spruce and fir, but also for the first time pines, birches, maples, and hemlocks.  The land they came to was rugged, very hard to live in come wintertime, and in some places more rock than soil, which was often sand anyway.  Golden waters poured down mountainsides to fill large sandy basins and remaining pools of meltwaters which were as black as the night.  Little in the way of crops could grow here well, which would later be the salvation of the forests.  Wolves howled, bears roamed the woods, and the cry of the loon pierced the cool air of the land, a powerful reminder to the people that this land was the relic of something far more ancient, majestic, and mysterious than themselves.  The people did not stay.

Courtesy of Bob and Diana McElroy:  http://www.mcelroy.ca/view/v20070729.shtml.

They did, however, gather here in the summer months, often in large numbers.  Families put aside differences, often to fish the deep black lakes that were full of trout and eel.  The people would discuss the movements of the Moose and the feeling they felt in the cool winds, and they would also keep track of the people who dwelled to their south, on the far shores of a vast lake, people they considered enemies.  More often, they gathered simply for companionship.  In the winter, they would set apart from one another into smaller groups of families that stuck together in the harsher months, floating down the rivers out of the mountains and into the valleys of two great rivers, one of which flowed to the ocean.  The land would be wild again, as it had been at the time of creation, until the people would return when the snows melted and the lakes were free once more.

Courtesy of Bob and Diana McElory:  http://www.mcelroy.ca/view/v20071117.shtml.  The valley of the first great river, the Ottawa, near Deep River, Ontario.

Now and then, the people to the south of the Algonkin, various nations who spoke one language and would come to be called the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), would venture north of their mountains and the blue waters of their great lakes.  They found the land of the Algonkin desirable, if a little different and not the best place to grow corn.  They were aggressive people, and they might have easily taken the land for themselves had the Algonkin not been as ferocious in defending their land as the attackers were in trying to seize it.  At times, control of the valleys leading into the mountains seemed to be quite contested.  The Algonkin prevailed time and again, however, and even found an ally in one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee, a people known as the Wendat (Hurons).  For that matter, the people not only loved their land enough to be willing to die to the last warrior for it, but the land of the mountains was a great bulwark protecting something just as valuable, a great meeting of waters that connected various nations far beyond their lands.  Even if the Algonkins would lose their land, they would most likely get it back quickly, for the nations of the western lakes and northern forests would not tolerate the passage being controlled by a hostile people.

The great power and determination of the defenders and their allies aside, the Haudenosaunee found the land  of black water, granite outcrops, and powerfully brutal winters was lacking what they loved about their own blue waters, towering deciduous forests, and limestone cliffs.  They would fight the Algonkins for centuries, even forming a great council of six of their nations, but would never come close to seizing the meeting of waters or the majestic mountains that protected them.  The Algonkin would continue returning to their blessed land every spring, and leave it to the spirits and ancient forests every winter.

Things would go on like this for some time.  The nations would move about, some heading into the vast lands of the west, some retreating from the advance of another, but for the most part, nothing grand or catastrophic happened to change the ancient ways of life.  500 years ago, however, news started traveling up from the distant south beyond the mountains of the Haudenosaunee, news of men very different from the nations of the people.  Along with news ventured trade which slowly passed between the nations and the newcomers.  Finally, some newcomers of a different nation made a small settlement for themselves at the fringe of the lands of the relatives of the Algonkin, the Montagnais at a place they called Tadoussac.  Though this was a mysterious new nation that had landed on the eastern shores, little changed other than the fate of the beaver.  One summer though, in 1608, as the people were in the blessed lands, a man sailed further inland along the great river that lead to the ocean, a man who would change their lives and their land forever.

Courtesy of Library and Archives of Canada, C-011016, Artist: George Reid, 1908.

Algonquin

My apologies for the lack of posts in the last week; things have been busy these days.  Don't worry, I am back on track, and the two weeks ahead are going to be full of passionate writing, as we head here:

Cedar Lake, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario.  I am pretty sure I have taken quite a few photos of this same vantage point and weather conditions, but credit here goes to Lady Junop.  Why yes, those are 130 foot Eastern White Pines sticking up from the slope across the lake!

In 16 days I am going to be heading to what is without a doubt, in my opinion anyway, the most beautiful and serene land on the entire planet.  I say this having been to amazing places like the Grand Canyon, the Scottish Highlands, the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and the giant forests of the Sierras.  Nothing compares to the rugged, "scaled back" atmospheric wonders of northern Ontario and western Quebec, and then nothing compares to the Ottawa and Petawawa valleys.  I am a bit biased, as those are the best thing I can call anything resembling a true homeland.

Now, why is this?  In these last 16 days, I intend to post every day about my reasons, and why everyone who is able to make the journey in a lifetime should head to the lakes, rivers, mountains, and bogs of L'Algonquin.  I will be making extensive use of some photographs from Bob and Diana McElroy, and as usual, will be citing their photos as I use them.  Their main website can be found here:

http://www.mcelroy.ca/

I highly recommend browsing through their stuff, as they really capture the essence of the land in their pictures.

I do have a lot of my own pictures that I am in the process of scanning into digital format, so have no fear, you still get original content in the weeks to come.

So where are we going to be exploring?

The green box!  80 miles inland from Lake Huron, 350 miles south of James Bay, 380 miles from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 400 miles from the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, and worlds apart from even the surrounding areas.  For an area so close to the historical cores of both Canadian and American European settlement, Algonquin still remains rather pristine and wild.  Things could have turned out very differently though, at least without the birth of the Canadian conservation movement which got underway in the 1880's, coinciding with the foundation of the American conservation movement.  Algonquin, along with Banff in the Canadian Rockies, was the first sacred ground fought for and saved by the movement.  Ken Burns meant to say that the National Park is North America's best idea, but I digress.  Tomorrow we will start by looking at the human history of Algonquin, a battle to save the natural history of the region.

Mes amis français, je vais vous traduire chaque page si je reçois suffisamment de demandes pour.

The Arizona Snowbelt and Volcanoes of Flagstaff

Like much of the rest of the continent, Arizona is a land of extremes.  While most people figure the land to be a sun-baked desert favored by golfing retirees, 27% of the state is still forested, which is actually on par with many countries in western Europe.  One such area makes up a good portion of the middle of the state, in a lovely mass of pines that stretch from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the New Mexican border, surrounded on the north and east sides by high sagebrush desert and grasslands, and on the south and west sides by the desert of imagination, the Sonoran, complete with the branching saguaros and seemingly bare mountains.  The lands on the north and east sides looking into the mountains and forests can be seen in an earlier post here.  Of course, the crowning point of the coniferous oasis would be the volcanic peaks around Flagstaff, renowned for their quality of skiing and picturesque proportions.

The San Francisco Peaks from I-40 eastbound, about 7 miles west of the peaks and Flagstaff, and 7200 feet above sea level.

When a child draws a picture of a mountain, usually a triangle with a jagged snowline and cap on top, these peaks are just about what they look like, owing to the neat (if volatile) formation of volcanic mountains such as these.  The scene is enough to make one think they are in some part of California or Colorado rather than dusty hot Arizona, but this is where that picture was taken, not 20 miles from the northern edge of the Sonoran desert.  Elevation means a lot out here, so much so that traveling from Phoenix to Flagstaff (150 miles) is the climactic equivalent of traveling from Phoenix to Montana or Alberta.  The area around the base of the peaks can often reach into the mild 40's during the day, but the freezing nights in the teens and persistent snowfall of 100 inches a year usually means a nice powder of several feet blesses the landscape for some time.  These were the exact conditions when I was last there, in the third week of December back in 2008.  "Powder" certainly described the snow, which gets its light consistency from being depleted of saturation after Pacific rains hit the California coastal mountains, their leftover moisture is spread thin in the desert skies, and then are forced against these higher elevations once more, this time very much, well, powdery.  This is surely one of the more difficult places in the world to make a wet and powerful snowball.

About 10 more miles back from the vantage point in the photograph above.  The peaks are visible from as far away as Williams.  

This sort of landscape survives in pockets even further south into the Sonoran desert in the form of "sky islands", mountains that catch leftover Pacific moisture before it makes a powerful stop in the Rockies to the east.  The great central Arizonan forests do reach a southern end generally north of I-10 and the Mexican border, where they are separated, by a bridge between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts consisting of lovely grasslands and oak woodlands, from ranges to the south that carry the alpine forests and winter snows well south into central Mexico.  Like much of the rest of the arid west, the snows and forests are quickly passed through on our present modes of transportation, which no doubt leads to an even greater impression on passersby.

Other Blogs: Wildflowers of Indiana

The next few days will feature sporadic or absent posting on American Voyages.  In the meantime, feast your eyes on some lovely wildflowers over at Get Your Botany On! :

http://getyourbotanyon.blogspot.com/2012/08/post-number-500_7.html

The blog is celebrating their 500th post, which they decided to do by showing a "best of" collection of flower pictures.  Many of these species are some of the loveliest you can find in the Midwest and Nearwest, and the selections posted are a nice sampling of flora you can find everywhere from woods to fens to prairies and the ecosystems in between.

Sunday Afternoon Post: John Smith

Here we have the John Smith statue in front of the excavated ruins of Jamestowne.  He faces the James River, which he probably stared at a lot while his colony was going through the pains of growth and alternating decay.  The people he brought with him were settlers, while he and many who would follow him were not content to merely stay by the river, but explore it further upstream and into the wilds beyond.  Behind him is a lovely tidewater pine and baldcypress forest, probably looking not that different from when he first set ashore here.

Parks in the News: Hetch Hetchy possibly unleashed!

Hetch Hetchy Valley was one of the first great casualties of the war waged by the conservation movement.  These days we tend to think of National Parks as nature preserves with recreational opportunities in them.  Back in the early days of the park system, protected lands were involved in a battle over utility vs. preservation.  San Francisco needed a reliable source of water delivered to it, and a reservoir capturing runoff from the Sierras seemed like a good idea at the time.  Unfortunately, instead of damming an expanse at slightly lower elevations, plans were drawn up to damn the valley, despite protests to the contrary by John Muir and many, many other people.  The valley, you see, was already a part of Yosemite National Park, and could easily go toe to toe with Yosemite Valley in terms of sheer beauty.  This is what it looked like before the damming:

Public Domain,  Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. VI. No. 4, January, 1908, pg. 211.

These days it pretty much looks like a third to a half of the bottom of the valley is missing.  This might very well change soon, however...

 http://www.wdam.com/story/19195501/yosemites-lost-valley-will-be-subject-of-vote

In a change of pace from the usual entrenchment of the conservation movement well into liberal front lines, environmentalists are siding with the Republican party against the San Francisco Democrats, with both the green and the elephant hoping to unleash the waters of Hetch Hetchy so that they may flow freely once more.  This comes in the midst of an age when the Sierras and much of the rest of California are experiencing some heavy drought, which is the last time one would figure a vote would be put forth to remove a source of water from a major city.  The battle of the damn is turning into a very peculiar and unpredictable conflict, and the outcome might have ramifications for water use agendas elsewhere on the continent.

A Different Detroit

If you follow the media and pop-culture produced anywhere outside of the Detroit area, you probably have a rather bleak view of a city that conjures up images of war torn streets, abandoned buildings and fields taking up the space of where healthy neighborhoods should be, and blight in general.  You know, something that pretty much every city in the world has at least a few bad places of!  '

You probably would not imagine a scene of skyscrapers rising above a very tree dense urban landscape, something almost akin to a morning scene in one of the more quiet corners of Central Park.

This sort of scene is not a carefully orchestrated illusion, but just a casual shot taken from the forth floor of Sacred Heart Major Seminary, looking out to downtown while lies four miles distant, as the crow flies.  What you see is a lovely sunrise obscured in fog and mist, not pollution.  Los Angeles and New York cannot say the same for their mornings a good deal of the time, and yet more people can relate good times and great stories about such places.  Perspective is everything, and the important part to remember about taking a fresh look at our continent's "different" places is that the negatives always seem to outweigh the positives.  Next time, instead of looking at a news report on the "worst cities", try asking someone from Detroit what they love about the area.  The same goes for any place out there you might have thought was undesirable.

Coastal Californian Sage Scrub

While the coastal basins and valleys of southern California are a welcome respite from the intense heat and aridity of the interior deserts, the succulent and drought-hardy brush even right on the misty and moderate climate of the immediate coast is a reminder that this is a dry land.

Taken at Leo Carillo State Beach, just inside the western border of Los Angeles county, California.

Indeed, were it not for the importation of water, the large cities of Los Angeles and San Diego would not be possible, to say nothing about their questionable sustainability.  Still, it seems that the pleasant climate of the coastal counties keeps people around there, and imported water is joined by all sorts of introduced vegetation to make the area seem like it is either an imitation of Florida or northern California than the dry region that it is in reality.  This is not to say that the place is a true desert; the montane chaparral is actually vibrant and quite lush.  Still, the plants here can more than tolerate the dry summer conditions that the area is prone to.

Wednesday Filler: Where Warm California Meets Winter California

At around 6,000 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevadas, the thickening oak forests and chaparral give way to coniferous forests, which in some places include Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron Giganteum).

General's Highway, Sequoia National Park.

The transition is sudden, and even though each forest merges into the other rather gracefully, in some places one just needs to turn a corner and see a completely different world around it.  Some elements of each ecosystem do continue on into the neighboring one, but the dominant life in both transforms the surroundings in an almost magical way.