In Part 3, I recounted the pleasant-to-unpleasant drenched stretch from Cottage Country to North Bay, the unofficial border town between Central Ontario and Northern Ontario. As I grumbled about, the difference tends to show in higher gas prices. It also shows in a more immediate way: the formerly four-lane Highway 11 shrinks to two-lane - mostly. Every now and then, it expands to a three-lane highway to allow for a passing lane in one direction; these directions alternate.
At this time, there's a lot of repair and construction work on Ontario's highways. On a four-or-more-lane highways, this work amounts to an inconvenience. But up in two-lane country, it's something more:
This pic, I snapped from the side of the road a little north of North Bay. It shows bridge work in progress, enough work so that the two-laner has to be compressed to a single lane. Hence the impromptu traffic lights.
Another roadside feature distinguishes Nothern Ontario's Highway 11 from the southernmore part. Frequently, the shoulder expands to the size of a small parking lot. The authorities know what they resemble, which is why each of these zones has a sign like this:
Yes, that's what they're there for: turn-arounds for the highway snowplows in winter. You may get a chuckle over seeing a sign like this in summer, but the flat 365-day no-parking rule makes things straightforward. There's no room to quibble over whether or not it's "really" winter. That said, I've found some litter off the shoulder in those areas ;)
The trees in that picture - the dominant ones - are conifers: pine trees. Some deciduous trees are there too, but they're small compared to the pines and kind-of wilted.
Tourists Welcome
Traditionally, the two main industries of Northern Ontario have been mining and forestry; in economists' jargon, primary producers. In more recent times, that source of cash has been partially supplanted by tourism. The region north of North Bay's Nipissing is called the Timiskaming District, and it has lots of lakes that are vaunted for the fishing.
I saw this from the billboards. In Ontario, some of the billboards are devoted to local business and aimed at locals. There's the inevitable billboards for McDonald's and the like. But the rest of them, on the way to Cottage Country and beyond, are aimed at cottagers. Not the ones in the North; those are aimed at tourists looking for a wilderness adventure and/or fishing. Here's a charming one that looks hand-made:
Except for the fishing, it's representative of what the others in its class advert.
There are also parks along the way that are also geared to tourists, though they function as rest stops too. They have a common design, which is pretty simple and minimalistic. A building for bathrooms, some park benches and chairs. All of them are contained in an area carved out of the wilderness that's essentially a driveway, parking lot and lawn:
That shot is representative of all of them...
...except this one borders a lake:
As lakes go, this one ain't small. Had I been more prepared and had more time, I could have taken up a nice chunk of the day boating. I did have a taste of its water, and it tasted like the water from Lake Muskoka.
Surprise In The Rocky Wilderness
After travelling more than two hundred miles of forests dominated by pines, rocky outcrops, etc. broken up by towns and such, I got used to seeing trees and rocks. Imagine my surprise, after being lulled into seeing Timiskaming as rough-hewn tourist country, I saw emerge...
an outright farming district. A long stretch of farms that encompass several small towns, all clearly ag towns. This in the middle of Northern Ontario, a part where it's cold enough to make life inhospitable for maple and other deciduous trees. Despite me thinking that the growing season up there was too short for profitable agriculture, the farms are there.
Most of them seem to be cow farms planted with pasture, like this one:
but I did see at least one potato farm.
I also saw another kind of "farm," whose fertilizer was government money. The current Government of Ontario is pushing northern communities to add solar panels, and the local governments are complying. A fellow I met in Kapuskasing (during an earlier roadtrip) complained about it because the town had stuck a whole bunch of those rotate-with-the-sun panels on abandoned land that was close to his backyard. They didn't do much for his view.
Driving along, I saw a a farm that had been fitted out with a whole farm's worth of solar panels. I didn't get a picture of it, but I did get a picture of this welcome sign with a solar panel for its night light:
It isn't just some notherners who are grumbling about the Ontario government pushing alt-en. The push towards alternative energy has jacked up Ontario's electricity bills from near North America's lowest to nearly its highest.
Race With The Sun, Lost
I admit that I could have started earlier and/or done less dawdling along the way. I had planned to reach my destination of Larder Lake with enough sunlight left for me to poke around the area and sample the water. And to take a shot of the building in nearby Kirkland Lake that house the Hockey Heritage North museum. (It offers a "virtual tour" of photogs through this link). The "face" of it, if you will, is Dick Duff, whom my dad knows personally. Dick Duff is the favorite son of Kirkland Lake in the same way that Shania Twain is the favorite daughter of Timmins.
But sadly, that poke-around was not to be; I ran out of sunlight. Instead of the taste-testing followed by a photo, I had to settle for getting six gallons of water out of Lake Larder in the dark. When I was finished, I took a snapshot of the public-beach sign:
It shows adequately enough that night had fallen.
The time had reached 8:30 PM; I had been on the road for ten hours. As this night-shot of my odometer shows,
I had put on 715 km - more than 445 miles - in those ten hours.
With night upon me, there was little else to do but head back to Toronto and home. Since the photography opportunities had become limited, the same long distance is covered in two parts.