Sleeping Giant Provincial Park
Ontario Provincial Park On The Sibley Peninsula; The Mesa Profile Of Nanabijou, The Ojibwe Spirit Of The Deep Sea Water, And The Highest Cliffs In Ontario At Roughly 250 Metres · Pass Lake, Ontario
From Thunder Bay the peninsula across the harbour reads as a man lying on his back with his arms folded, and the Ojibwe name for him is Nanabijou, the spirit of the deep sea water, turned to stone when the location of a silver mine was betrayed to Europeans. The silver was real: Silver Islet, at the tip of the same peninsula, was for a few years in the 1870s the richest silver mine in the world, worked from a shaft sunk into a rock barely larger than a house and drowned by Lake Superior in 1884. The park that now covers the peninsula holds the highest cliffs in Ontario, about two hundred and fifty metres of diabase dropping straight into Superior, and roughly a hundred kilometres of trail. The walk everybody comes for is the Top of the Giant, which is around twenty-two kilometres return from the nearest trailhead and ends on the chest of the Giant with the whole lake below. It is the single best day on foot in northern Ontario, and it is a full day.
Highway 587, Sibley Peninsula, Thunder Bay District, Pass Lake, Ontario, Canada
The park gate and the campgrounds are open roughly mid-May to mid-October, and the TRAILS THEMSELVES STAY OPEN ALL YEAR - winter brings groomed cross-country skiing and snowshoeing with a much smaller footprint of services. A DAILY VEHICLE PERMIT IS REQUIRED and is bought at the gate or online; the Ontario Parks day-use rate has been in the range of CAD 12-21 per vehicle. THE TOP OF THE GIANT IS A FULL DAY, not an afternoon: allow eight to ten hours for the return trip and start early enough that you are not finishing the descent in the dark. Visitor centre and store hours are seasonal and shorter at each end of the season. Highway 587 is paved to the park and maintained in winter.
Sleeping Giant Provincial Park on Spottos · Explore more places on Spottos