During our summer holiday this year, our family went camping for several days at Bon Echo Provincial Park in Ontario. We had a canoe-in site on Joe Perry Lake, one of several lakes in the park. And so we canoed in to our site and set up camp there for four days – we had our tent and our tarp and our camp stove and our food including, of course, a massive bag of marshmallows. But on one of our days at Bon Echo we canoed out and went over to the main area of the park, which is situated on Mazinaw Lake.

Mazinaw Lake is not a huge lake – average to small, I’d say. But the lake has a few remarkable, defining features. Its first remarkable feature is that it is the second-deepest lake in Southern Ontario, aside from the Great Lakes. It is an astonishingly deep lake for its relatively small size – 145 meters at its deepest point. It goes pretty much straight down on each side. A second defining feature of the lake is that along one kilometer of its shoreline there is a massive 100-meter cliff or escarpment – that part of the shoreline is known as Mazinaw Rock. Here’s a picture that gives a sense of the Rock – with Becky and the girls in the canoe.Now it’s true that if you have spent any time living in or near the Rocky Mountains of western Canada, this cliff may not strike you as impressive. But in the context of Ontario’s geography, it is a remarkable lake and Mazinaw Rock is a pretty amazing formation. Continue reading →