CHIPPEWA FALLS

N 46°55.69194’ W 84°25.5123’

46.9281 -84.4252

About half an hour out of the Soo and a short hop to Batchawana Bay. At the picnic, rest area for Chippewa falls there’s a plaque that informs you that you are about halfway down the Trans-Canada between either end. There’s also one about J.E.H. MacDonald’s “Batchewana Rapids”…a painting of this same river, memorialized forever, by the group of seven. It’s a great set of cascading falls with nice hiking trails to visit for the day between your camping sites. Right at the parking lot area you can take the short down ward path right to the bottom. I usually stop and put up my temporary art inuksuks before heading up. In a way, my own Kilroy was here. Coming through in the autumn, there were quite a few salmon fishermen out on the river. I stopped to smoke a joint with a few of them and they were saying the pickings were slim that season because the water was low. I saw one fish resting in a side pool halfway up, but didn’t see anyone catch anything while I was there. You hike up a little way, and you can walk out on the rocks, hopping over the cracks and pools. Its beautiful, with a view up and down the falls. Most people stop there…don’t. Follow the trail right to the top, and the whole vista is beautiful. You can see the river curving back before the falls. No lie, I’ve wasted entire days there laying on the rocks. Like everywhere in Algoma, during the fall there are crazy amounts of mushrooms and other fungi growing White thick veins of calcite or quartz crystal run through the darker basalt rocks in some parts, in others it’s a beautiful pink archean granite. I don’t know if that’s geographically significant but it is quite cool to look at. As an aside, every time I’m there, people have been smoking and thrown their butts into the pools between the rocks. Don’t be one of those self-absorbed idiots if you do smoke. I shared a link elsewhere about the toxicity of cigarettes to fish never mind it’s disgusting to see.

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Chippewa Falls Webpage