I left Pancake Bay about 1 p.m. intending to drive 200 miles to Pukaskwa National Park on the north-central shore of Lake Superior. Unlike provincial parks in Ontario, Pukaskwa still has first come, first served spots, but by the time I got there at 6 p.m. everything was booked. Fortunately, there are lots of options for camping around Lake Superior. If you can’t find something on the water, drive 10 to 20 miles away from the lake and there will be another campground.
When I stopped at Pancake Bay it was because Lake Superior Provincial Park was booked, and by most accounts LSPP is the “better” park (though it depends on what you’re looking for). If you want a day on the beach, Pancake Bay is your spot. If you want to do some hiking in more rugged terrain, Lake Superior PP is the place.
After missing out on Pukaskwa, I kept going up Hwy 17 past valleys and forested hills claiming to be mountains, where I imagine the same kind of terrain continues right on into the lake; underwater the landscape no doubt looks roughly the same, hidden to us air-breathers, buried by 10,000 year old glacial water. But clues are offered as forested hilltops come up for air as whimsical little islands, like giant turtles poking their curious heads above water.
Just 40 miles beyond Pukaskwa I found Neys Provincial Park, arriving in time to set up camp, go on a hike, and watch the sunset in another bay—smaller than Pancake Bay but still nearly a mile of U shaped beach.
There’s a very different vibe at campgrounds in the summertime as compared with any other time of year. The school year creates this, of course, but if you’ve only camped in summer, like most people who have jobs and families do, you might not notice. I first noticed how different the vibe is after first starting to work from the road in the winter of 2022 in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. For the most part, it was just me and lots of retirees at every campground I went to, except on weekends when a few local families might roll in. But since it is summer, the campground at Neys is abuzz with the sounds of families. A toddler throwing a tantrum. A bubbly baby babbling to its mother. A dog barking into the darkness and getting shushed. And, like at most state parks near population centers in the U.S., you can hear beer cans cracking well into the night as the locals take their hard-earned vacations. It’s not unpleasant.
One thing I’ve always liked about camping is how dirty you can be and no one cares, including yourself. I’ll optimistically bring 6 pairs of boxers on a 10 day trip and end up with 4 of them clean. In my camper, to get hot water I need to turn on my water heater and wait about 15 minutes for it to warm up (otherwise, you’re using a finite amount of propane to keep it constantly heated, which would burn through your tanks quickly). So, you might end up washing dishes in cold water. And if they don’t get totally clean, so what? Even hand sanitizer only kills 99% of germs. So the big germ—the 1% that you can’t get—hot water or cold, that big germ is gonna get you. So what is even the point of getting the other 99 germs?
That’s also why I’ve really come to love this cast iron pan I have. You’re supposed to “season” these pans, brushing them with oil. And as you cook with them, they become more and more seasoned, evidently. When you clean them, you don’t use soap, because that will take away your hard fought seasoning. So instead, I just rinse them with water and scrub them with an abrasive sponge, then oil them up again. Can you believe it? For someone who hates doing dishes, a cast iron pan is ideal. Besides, fire and heat are nature’s original disinfectant. It’s this kind of thinking that has led me to develop a gastronomical interior of cast-iron constitution.
After leaving Neys the next morning, I drove past Rainbow Falls Provincial Park where I plan to stay the next time I take this trip. The Rossport campground there is perfectly set just meters (to mix my measures of distance) from the water, but predictably, it was full. So I continued on all the way to Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, perched on a peninsula just east of Thunder Bay. The park is named after a mountain in the distance, and it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how it got its name, as though a 10,000 foot man laid down for a nap on his back and let the forest grow through him in his slumber.
The campground at Sleeping Giant is set not directly on Lake Superior, but on an interior lake, Marie Louise Lake, and I found a spot directly on the water, probably the best spot of my trip. With the lake on the interior of the slim peninsula, you have the best of both worlds, as a short hike will take you to the shores of Superior, where the terrain is ancient and abounds with signs of geologic upheaval, like the incredible Sea Lion rock formation, complete with its own picture window to the sea. After some hiking, that night I walked 10 feet down some wooden timber stairs to the shore of Marie Louise Lake, set up my chair, and caught nearly a dozen small bass (I threw them all back) over the course of a couple hours—my first fish of the trip and a perfect send—off, as the next day I headed past Thunder Bay and across the border into Minnesota, where the customs agent asked me how many stowaways I had in the back of my camper.
And that’s it for this trip, minus a brief stop overnight at Divide Lake in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest—a 3-spot, $8-a-night (with the America the Beautiful pass) campground where I caught a beautiful rainbow trout. Not many people know it, but there are actually more than a dozen free “rustic” campgrounds in northern Minnesota, with most or all of them on a lake or stream with easy access to canoeing/kayaking, swimming, and fishing. There’s no electricity, but they have pit toilets and solitude and you can stay for up to two weeks at no charge, which is where I’ll be in late Sept/early Oct. when the salmon start to run on the North Shore. And speaking of salmon, that’s my last tip to offer. If you’re ever on the north shore, take the scenic route and stop at mile 17 where you’ll find Russ Kendall’s Smokehouse and the best smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted (try the brown sugar brushed).
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