September 9 - Train Ride on the Algoma Railroad, Ontario

This was the first day on our trip thus far that we had to resort to an alarm clock to awaken on time, which for this day meant 6:30 a.m. We dressed and had a quick breakfast of cold cereal, our fastest breakfast, and made PBJ sandwiches for our lunch before driving off to downtown Sault St. Marie, arriving there shortly after boarding began at 7:30. Monika bought the tickets while I gathered all our belongings and schlepped them in the general direction of the Algoma train. We ensconced ourselves in 2 seats on the left side of carriage #7, but later shifted over to the right side where we could occupy a set of seats with a clearer window. That turned out to be a great move, photographically speaking, and I if you ever ride the Algoma train I would heartily recommend that you carefully select a seat on the right hand side of the train that has an unfogged window or you may have ghosts in your picture.

The train departed right on time at 8:00 a.m. and trundled slowly out of the city, after which we slowly gathered speed until we were rolling along at 30-40 miles per hour, but never more than that. The trip up to Agawa Canyon took 3.5 hours at those relatively slow speeds, but you really wouldn't want to take it any faster because the scenery, once we left the city, was consistently pretty if not beautiful.

For much of the trip the scenery was an ever-changing medley of woods, streams, lakes, and mountains in various combinations. Since we were on the right hand side of the carriage, we saw quite a few ponds and small to medium sized lakes. The sky was a deep azure blue with some puffy white clouds, and it reflected perfectly off the still, unruffled surface of the water. Some of the lakes, particularly the ones closer to Sault St. Marie, had the occasional lakeside cottage, but none of them were developed to any great extent.

The streams that intersected the tracks seemed quite pristine. Most of them had the noticeably brownish cast caused by tannin leached from the forest debris, but it was a clear brown and not a muddy brown. We also saw the occasional rapids, but nothing that looked dangerous, just picturesque. The train announcer told us that the lakes and streams were stocked with trout each year, and sure enough we saw a few anglers trying their luck along the way.

The landscape became more mountainous as we penetrated into the interior, and it culminated in the spectacular Agawa Canyon that was the turn around point for our trip. Here the tracks at first led along the upper edge of ridge above the canyon, where we were high enough to see Lake Superior in the distance to the west. In fact, the Agawa River running through the canyon enters Agawa Bay where we had seen the pictographs the previous day, and it was interesting to get a bird's eye view of that area after seeing it up close and personal.

The tracks wound around to the end of the canyon as they descended to the floor and then followed the Agawa River into the middle of the canyon. The canyon itself was magnificent; in fact, it was so big and so steep that I could not back up enough to get a proper picture of it, so I had to settle for partial view photographs. Take my word for it that it was really magnificent and reminded me a bit of the valley in Yosemite National Park. Having everyone and everything arrive by train apparently helped preserve the pristine condition of the valley because the trails were perfectly groomed and had no trash or debris whatsoever.

Another point of resemblance to Yosemite were the waterfalls cascading down into the valley on both sides. On one side of the valley was Bridal Veil Falls, which, although not as high as the falls in Yosemite by the same name, was still a very high and spectacular waterfall.

On the other side of the valley we managed to visit North and South sections of Black Beaver Falls and the Otter Creek Falls, all of which were very pretty. The South part of Black Beaver Falls had a big "X" shaped flow of water in the middle of the falls, and that is something that I've just never seen before anywhere; usually water falls straight down rather than zigzagging back and forth across the face of the rock wall!

I could really understand why this region in general and the Agawa Valley in particular had inspired the Canadian "Group of Seven" artists to paint these landscapes. The Group of Seven was like the Seven Samurai except they used brushes instead of swords. They painted, from the few examples I saw, in an Impressionist or Neo-Impressionist style and also apparently used the Impressionist method of painting "en plein air". In fact, they actually had painting safaris that might have been a lot like 1960's Surfing Safaris except probably a lot quieter! There continues to be a artist lodge or colony of some sort on Spruce Lake about 20 miles south of Agawa Canyon to this day, so that artistic tradition clearly has persisted.

We were trying to climb 300 steps to a lookout tower at the other end of the valley for an overview of the valley when our time ran out. If you ever take the Algoma Railway trip, you might consider eating your lunch just before the train arrives so that you have the maximum time from 11:30 to 1:30 for walking all the trails in the valley. If you don't take time to eat like we did, and if the train isn't late like it was for us, and if you are in decent walking shape, you should be able to walk to all of the sights in the valley in the allotted time span. We climbed aboard when the train hooted impatiently and then set off for the trip back to Sault St. Marie, filling in photographs of things we had missed on the way up as best we could. Monika in particular wanted to get a picture of the locomotive on the trestle, which she finally did.

A lot of folks zonked out for the trip back, but I enjoyed looking at the landscape and seeing the occasional fall colors peeking through the green canopy. I felt that in some way seeing the occasional red, orange, or yellow tree among all the greenery was more pleasant than an unrelieved spread of fall colors would be, which is what I imagine this line would look like in a couple of weeks. For me, the occasional colorful maple was like the spicing in a forest stew, and you really don't want to have a stew that is all spices (to mix an arboreal metaphor). All in all, we thoroughly enjoyed the Algoma scenic train tour. Although he scenery was not as ruggedly spectacular as the Durango and Silverton steam train (see Wanderung 3), it was thoroughly enjoyable and pretty in a woodland way rather than a Grand Canyon way.

All too soon we were back at Sault St. Marie and disembarking from the train. At the gift shop Monika bought a bear dressed as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which she had been looking for to keep our English Bobbie Bear company, so we picked up that and a set of train postcards. We also walked around the downtown area of the city for a half an hour or so, and our impression was that the downtown was in decline. I counted at least 5 empty storefronts and some of the others just didn't seem to be open for business. I didn't even find the advertised bar where 25 women were supposed to dance with tables, a feat that I thought might be even better than Fred Astaire's dancing with a hat rack, although why you would want 25 women to do it simultaneously baffled me. Maybe they do it all together like the synchronized swimming I had just seen in the Olympics. Gee, maybe they will even include table dancing in the next Olympics. If they do, it certainly can't be much weirder than some of the events they have now and the, ahem, uniforms wouldn't be a whole lot skimpier than the women's beach volleyball teams had in the Olympics just past.

Where was I? Oh yes, well in contrast to the moribund downtown, the commercial strip on route 17 as we drove north out of town had the Wal Mart, Canadian Tire and many other businesses, so I think that area has de facto taken over as the commercial hub of the city. We filled the truck with gas in preparation for the next day's drive and bought 4 liters of milk for $4 Canadian. The milk was in 3 plastic bags, and a less convenient arrangement for pouring I cannot imagine. The first thing I did when we returned to the trailer was freeze two of those bags and carefully snip off a corner of the remaining one and pour it into our old milk jug. Why do the Canadians do it this way? What is the rationale for a bag of milk that is exactly one and one-third liters in capacity? The milk was still too expensive in my book, and I was completely puzzled about its packaging.

Monika made dinner while I started on the journal, and after dinner she downloaded and processed the 250 plus pictures we had taken during the day. At least we had some energy left over at the end of the evening so that we could read a bit more of the Asaro book and that was pleasant. I don't know if it was the book or something I ate, but I woke up around 3:00 a.m. with a weird idea. Suppose the Superego, Ego, and Id were flying an jet airplane (No Freudian implications here, of course!) as Captain, First Officer, and Flight Attendant. What could happen? I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I gave up, got up, and fired up Baby to write down a skit of how it could work out ("Airplane Skit.rtf"). I wasn't sure if it was good, bad, or indifferent, but at least writing it all down let me turn the idea loose and get back to sleep!