Biking Presq'Ile Provincial Park

About five miles from our campground is Presq'Ile Provincial Park, a beautiful preserve of beach, bay and marshland along the northern coast of Lake Ontario.  We decided to spend the day exploring it.  In 1922, a private commission was given authority to develop a park at Presqu'ile. In the 20th century, Presqu'ile became popular for recreation, with two kilometres of sandy beaches, a summer hotel and dance pavilion, an annual regatta race, a nine hole golf course and opportunities for boating. As the decades passed, the type of recreation enjoyed at the park changed, which caused the dismantling of the golf course and the closure of the hotel and dance pavilion. Presqu'ile was incorporated into the Ontario Parks system in 1954 and has become a popular destination for campers, naturalists, and other users.

We brought our bicycles and started our journey bicycling along the shore of Lake Ontario:

After looking at the beach, we moved on to a 1.2 km marsh boardwalk.  Here, cattails dominated the landscape, but there were occasional patches of that invasive grass phragmites:

The marsh is an undulating landscape originally formed as tombolo - fingers of sand connecting the shore with nearby sandbars.  These tombolos, or fingers of sand, developed vegetation - first marsh grasses, then small bushes (here, red-leaved dogwood), and then trees - originally cottonwood trees, which still dominate the dunes near the shore of Lake Ontario, and later, great stands of cedar, which grow on the ridges formed by the tombolos:

Between the ridges are damp areas, including isolated ponds or pannes, where a rich variety of vegetation grows, supporting a wide variety of animal life.  We saw dragoflies, hummingbirds, frogs, mute swans, egrets, geese, gulls, and the scat of some unnamed ursine or canine visitor.  Here is one of the pannes we saw as we walked the boardwalk trail:

Kathy loves fir forests, and here, on this ridge, the cedar trees formed a huge grove, which blocked sunlight out from all but the towering fir trees.  Their needles shed over the years formed a soft, rusty colored carpet on the ground:

One oddity in the cedar forest was the "horse trees," which, as best the naturalists can guess, were small fir trees when some force - perhaps a late spring frost - stopped the growth of the main stem and forced the tree to focus its growth through one of its side branches, thus forming a saddle.  Here, David tries a horse tree saddle out to see how the bum fits:

Out on the lake, we left our bicycles to walk along the wild shore:

We found a picturesque spit of sand and rocks at Owen Point sweeping out toward Gulf Island and High Bluff Island:

Along the southern margin of the peninsula stretches a beautiful, wooded campground.  Many of the sites offered lakeside vistas.  Here, a camper nestles cozily into its site, reminding us of years of family camping:

We poked around on the beach and found a huge tree-sized piece of driftwood, which Kathy examined:

Further along the shore, we came upon an ad hoc piece of public art.  Some unknown camper had moved a picnic table down into the lapping waves of the lake, and then built a stone nunsuk on top of it.  It made a whimsical statement:

David gave closer inspection and realized that, perhaps, the nunsuk was not an entirely innocent statement:

Leaving whimsy behind, we cycled on to the Lighthouse on Presqu'ile Point:

The park area had been selected in 1797 as the site of a town called Newcastle which was to become the county seat. However, on October 8, 1804, the schooner HMS Speedy, which was bringing officials to a trial at the new courthouse, sank offshore with all on board lost. The ship was never found, nor the bodies of the passengers and crew. As a result, plans to develop the new town were shelved. In 1840, the lighthouse was completed at Presqu'ile Point. The designer of the 69-foot, octagonal structure was Nichol Hugh Baird, who also designed the Murray Canal, parts of the Trent-Severn Waterway and the Rideau Canal. Today, this lighthouse stands as the second oldest operating lighthouse on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

As we circled around onto the north shore of the peninsula, bordering the bay and opposite to the marsh we explored at the beginning of our visit, we spotted a family of mute swans feeding in the shallow water.  There were two parents and three fledglings - one that had begun to turn white and two that were still mottled brown:

Finishing our bicycle trip around the park, we returned to the beach where we had originally parked and enjoyed a scrumptious lunch of cold, pan-fried Atlantic salmon and salad, with lemonade and tea:

After lunch, we lolled in our camp chairs on the beach and enjoyed watching kite boarders testing their mettle against the strong winds blowing ashore from Lake Ontario:

By late afternoon, it was time to head home.  We enjoyed a long happy hour chat with our neighbors, who hail from an area near Ottawa, and then walked out to watch another beautiful Ontario sunset:

While it wasn't quite as special as a day with Sir William, nevertheless, it was a very enjoyable day, and we got a chance to get some exercise in this beautiful, warm early fall Canadian air.  These are days we'll remember for a long time.