Vacation Day 6: Mazinaw Lake

We left the house at 7:30am today for the 1.5 hour drive to Bon Echo. I’ve been wanting to go to this Provincial park for a while now. A friend keeps inviting me year after year to her cottage near there but the timing never works out. Today I finally made it over there.

We arrived by 9am but the canoe rental shop didn’t open until 10am. To kill time and burn some energy, we did a 3 km hike called High Pines. Nothing too exciting but a good way to breath in some pine scent and warm up as it was a bit chilly this morning.

When we were done the hike we rented a canoe to paddle around Mazinaw lake. Getting up close to the rock really gives you a sense of how spectacular it is. The pictographs were kind of hard to find and much more faded than I had imagined. After checking out everything around the lake, we got to the the Mazinaw rock hike start point. We left the canoe and went up to the 3rd view point. I was confused as to where it ended so we went further, got a little lost, bushwhacked a bit and then came back down to the 3rd view point only to be told that that was the highest point! If we hadn’t of gone off course, the total hike (which was suppose to take half an hour each way) only took 15 minutes up and 10 minutes down! It was nice to have lunch with the view of the lake. Once were down, we got back in the canoe and swam at North beach, the quieter and colder beach (because it’s deeper and is shaded after the morning). We chose that beach because it was quieter than the main beach. Plus how often do you get to swim with a view of 100 metre rock in front of you! It was a cold lake, but again, my body was hot from the hike and canoeing made it less of a shock getting in. After the swim we returned the canoe, walked to the other beach to check it out and had a long chat with an older woman who’s been coming since the 60’s.

We got back to the cottage at a reasonable hour today so we took the paddleboat out on Cole Lake. It was a beautiful evening and a beautiful day.