Agawa Rock Pictographs
Ojibwe Rock Paintings On A Lakeside Cliff Face In Lake Superior Provincial Park; A Sacred Site, And One Of The Few Pictograph Sites In Canada That Visitors May Walk Right Up To · Wawa, Ontario
A vertical sheet of granite drops into Lake Superior, and at the waterline there is a ledge barely wider than a person. On the rock above the ledge, in red ochre, are some thirty-five paintings: canoes, human figures, and Mishipeshu, the horned underwater lynx whose tail stirs the storms that sink boats on this lake. They were made by Ojibwe people, most likely within the last few hundred years, and Henry Schoolcraft recorded an account of them in the 1850s in which the paintings commemorate a crossing of the lake made by a war party under a leader named Myeengun. WHAT MAKES THIS SITE UNUSUAL IS THAT YOU CAN WALK UP TO IT. Most rock art in Canada is either unreachable or fenced. Here a short, steep half-kilometre trail through a cleft in the rock puts you on the ledge itself, a metre from the paintings, with nothing between you and the lake. It is still a sacred site, it is still visited for that reason, and the ledge is genuinely dangerous when Superior is up.
Lake Superior Provincial Park, Highway 17, Algoma District, Wawa, Ontario, Canada
THE SITE IS SEASONAL AND WEATHER-DEPENDENT, and this is not a formality. The Agawa Rock access road and parking are open roughly mid-May to mid-October, and THE LEDGE IS CLOSED WHENEVER THE LAKE IS HIGH OR ROUGH - staff post the closure at the trailhead and people have been swept off this ledge and killed. A DAILY VEHICLE PERMIT FOR LAKE SUPERIOR PROVINCIAL PARK IS REQUIRED, recently in the CAD 12-21 range. The trail from the car park is about 500m each way, steep, and takes twenty to thirty minutes return before you spend any time at the rock. Outside the season the road is gated and there is no winter access. The paintings are on an open cliff face with no gate of their own - the closure is of the trail and the parking.
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