Camping the Bruce Peninsula
By the time you read this, my daughters and I will have departed for our second annual trip to Cyprus Lake campground on the Bruce Peninsula. This narrow promontory, which seperates the western part of Lake Huron from its eastern backpack, Georgian Bay, is an easy candidate for Ontario's best scenery. More importantly, it is home to a startling number of unusual plant species, and one of our planet's rarest habitats: the alvar.
Despite their love of the outdoors, I long procrastinated taking my daughters on their first camping trip. With the amount of work involved in living out of a tent and car trunk, and the constant attention required by two small girls, parenting alone in semi-wilderness didn't seem like my idea of a vacation.
Resigning to adventure
But I didn't have the heart to deny them this experience any longer. Last August, when they were ages five and seven, I packed the car and headed North with them for a three-hour drive toward the village of Tobermory, planning to stay only a couple of days. Our adventure turned out far more joyful and rewarding than any of us anticipated.The Bruce Peninsula constitutes the northward mainland stretch of the Niagara Escarpment, which was designated a World Biosphere Reserve in 1990 by UNESCO. The escarpment arches like a backbone across Southern Ontario, its most famous feature being Niagara Falls, and into adjoining New York State.
Natural history of the Bruce
The Bruce Trail extends 800 km from end to end, Tobermory to Niagara Falls. It is the oldest marked hiking trail in Canada. This remarkable feat of co-operation between hikers, field naturalists, ecologists and land owners is a testament to the beauty of this landscape feature, and how much it is cherished by the community. The association's outstanding Web site is a tribute to the work of its members.The bedrock of the Niagara Escarpment formed 400 million years ago by sediments on the bottom of warm Silurian seas. Unlike most cliff structures, it was not formed by a geological fault but by erosion of the softer underlying shale. Glaciation between 25,000 and 13,000 years ago further eroded and shape it. It became an important microclimate. Scientific study of these habitats has revealed fascinating features such as 1,000-year-old white cedars (the oldest trees in North America east of the Rockies) and cryptoendolithic organisms: tiny algae, fungi and bacteria that live inside rock.
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