September 12 - Museum in Sudbury, Ontario

We had a quick breakfast of pancakes and drove in to the Travelodge to walk the year round event with members of the local club. I had to bandage four blisters on my toes from the previous day's walk, but after that I felt OK for doing another 10 kilometers or so. Henrietta was the de facto leader of our group, and she not only shepherded us along but also adapted the route a bit so that we would see as many of the sights of Sudbury as possible.

We set off walking to the central business district thru a section of very nice old homes and then used an underpass to cross the railroad tracks that bisect Sudbury. The commercial downtown section was on the other side of the tunnel and had an interesting mix of traditional small-scale businesses in historical storefronts and renovated or newly built buildings. One new initiative was a farmer's market near the tracks where we paused for a bathroom break, and there we saw several different places to eat plus a lot of cheap fruit and vegetables. Clearly the basic economic activity of the city had shifted to the peripheral areas where the big box stores like Costco, Home Depot, and Wal Mart were located along with the automobile dealerships and associated businesses. Still, the downtown appeared economically viable if not vibrant, and we enjoyed our walk thru it.

We curled back toward the lake past a pair of Catholic churches right beside each other, an old fashioned for the English and a modern looking one for the French. Henrietta told us that originally both churches were similar, but the French one had burned and been replaced with the more modern version. The French congregation still kept the old bell in a separate little bell tower, however. We also walked for a while along a streamside path that was just behind a Ukrainian Catholic church with a rather unique set of domes on the nave. Sudbury seems to have quite a few of these picturesque streams with paths, which are very useful for routing the walks. At the end of the stream we exited thru a small park with a monument where we read that the Ukrainian community in Sudbury dated from 1891; presumably they came over originally for work in the mines, which was Sudbury's economic base for many decades Near the halfway point we paused at a Tim Horton's where most of us had coffee and a donut, muffin (me), or fritter (Monika), before starting off again

On the return loop we worked our way uphill to a grotto with shrine to the Virgin Mary plus the stations of the cross set at various points. My blisters were starting to complain by this point, but fortunately it was the last hill of the walk. We took a back way down the hill and crossed the bridge to the promenade along the western edge of Ramsey Lake where we had walked the previous day, but this time in the lakeside park Henrietta diverted us to see some magnificent flower gardens. Everything was in full bloom and the beautiful displays covered large expanses on the side of a hill. Yet another large floral display was in the shape of a huge star.

Henrietta also diverted us to see a monument to the miners set on the top of a small knoll in the park. The large bronze sculpture was beautifully detailed and a rather poignant reminder of the lives lost in the mining industry over the decades. From the monument we returned to the lakeside promenade and curled around a small marina to the Science North center and then a couple blocks further down the street to the Travelodge. There we shook hands all around and said farewell to a very hospitable group of walkers.

We headed back to the farmer's market to have a lunch of Polish cuisine, and then pick up tomatoes, potatoes, blueberries, and cucumbers, all of which were quite inexpensive ($6 per pint of blueberries rather than the $10 we spent at the roadside stand, for instance). Based on some of our conversations with the club members, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the "Dynamic Earth" museum just out of town near the nickel smelter. The huge nickel and the towering smokestack of the smelter greeted us already in the parking lot, and we walked (rather slowly by this point!) up to the entrance at the top of the hill.

We ended up buying tickets for that museum plus two attractions back at the main Science North building, "Deep Sea Dive" adventure ride and an Imax movie on climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. The "Dynamic Earth" museum consisted of two large demonstration rooms plus a movie theatre and a mine tour. The demonstrations all involved geology in general and the Sudbury area in particular. I learned that the reason for the high concentration of nickel and copper in the area rocks was a meteorite collision a few billion years back. The impact had melted a huge area of crustal rock and the gradual cooling process allowed the heavier elements to concentrate at the bottom of the pool of molten rock. After it finally solidified and a few billion years of weathering had brought that bottom layer up to the surface, voila the surface rock had heavy mineral concentrations just waiting to be discovered.

The historical movie in the downstairs theater filled in the more recent parts of Sudbury's history. No one suspected the ore concentrations when Sudbury was founded in the early 1880s as a railroad junction on the Canadian Pacific railway and Sault St. Marie branch lines. The first resource to be exploited in the area was lumber, but once they located the mineral concentrations and found a way to refine the complex mix of minerals in Sudbury's ore, the area quickly became a mining center. Boom times ensued in the first half of the 20th century as warfare required nickel and Sudbury had a monopoly on the supply of it, but there was a bit of a bust and retrenchment of the industry in the late 50s when demand stabilized and other supplies of nickel ore were found around the world. Sudbury also pioneered the reclamation process starting in the 1970s with the taller stack to diminish acid pollution, adding lime to the soil, and planting a new generation of hardy tree species. The "before" and "after" pictures of that reclamation process were particularly dramatic, and I was glad we were visiting the newly reforested Sudbury rather than the city as it would have been before 1970.

Right after the movie we took the mining tour. The museum had three demonstration mine areas hollowed out of the mountain rock, one showing mining techniques circa 1900, one for mining techniques around 1950, and one for current mining techniques. One of the major themes was the introduction of mechanization in the mines that certainly reduced the grueling physical labor of the job but also dramatically reduced the number of miners employed.

When we went back upstairs I had chance to remotely control a rock breaking device that helped unclog the ore dumping chutes in the mines (think Real World Nintendo!). That involved the combined use of two joysticks plus buttons and since there was no explanation of how the controls worked, I had to resort to empirical experimentation. It took a bit, but in the end I was able to bang it on the big rock in the center of the chute that I had set as my goal. I also had the chance to remotely control a small electric locomotive that was used to haul ore cars up out of the mine. That was far simpler since it could only go forward and back a bit on a small segment of track down in the mine demonstration area, but it was the first and probably only time in my life that I will operate an electric train weighing over a ton!

My feet were really complaining when we left the museum shortly before it closed at 4:00 p.m., so after we drove to Costco on the other side of town I let Monika run in and get the supplies while I just vegetated in the truck. We headed back to the campsite for dinner and a brief rest, but then drove back to Science North for the Deep Sea Dive adventure and the Kilimanjaro film. The adventure dive was a lot of fun and had good computer graphics of a sperm whale fighting a giant squid, but it was also really quite short, only about 15 minutes, so we had an hour to kill before the movie. We wandered outside to sit and watch the lights reflecting in Lake Ramsey as dusk fell, and that was quite pretty. Of course, I had left the camera back in the trailer and thus couldn't get any pictures of it, but it was still a very relaxing and pleasant way to spend the time.

The Imax Kilimanjaro movie was quite good. It tracked the experiences of a group of 6 climbers plus a guide as they made their way from the tropical rainforest at the base of the mountain to the rim and crater inside at 19,000 feet. The change in biological zones and plants as the group worked their way up the mountain was simply astonishing, and I've never seen anything like some of those plants at all. At the top the group encountered snow fields and even glaciers, which is bizarre when you consider that Kilimanjaro lies essentially on the Equator. We thought the movie was quite well done, and it offered us a really good if brief glimpse into an exotic corner of the world that we will probably never directly experience ourselves unless we get a lot of unsolicited donations from our readers!. Even if we did try the trek up the mountain, the movie quoted statistics that only about half the people who attempt to climb to the summit actually make it and I'm not sure whether we would be in that 50% or not. I was glad to see the movie but it did result in us returning to camp and finally getting to bed some time after 10, which was a bit late for us.