Amazing aerial images of the best fall colours in Algonquin Park. Autumn is a special time of the year to visit the forests of Algonquin Park. The Best Drone Video 4K UHD.
Algonquin Provincial Park is a provincial park located between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River in Ontario, Canada, mostly within the Unorganized South Part of Nipissing District. Established in 1893, it is the oldest provincial park in Canada. Additions since its creation have increased the park to its current size of about 7,653 square kilometres (2,955 sq mi). The park is contiguous with several smaller, administratively separate provincial parks that protect important rivers in the area, resulting in a larger total protected area.
Its size, combined with its proximity to the major urban centres of Toronto and Ottawa, makes Algonquin one of the most popular provincial parks in the province and the country. Highway 60 runs through the south end of the park, while the Trans-Canada Highway bypasses it to the north. Over 2,400 lakes and 1,200 kilometres of streams and rivers are located within the park. Some notable examples include Canoe Lake and the Petawawa, Nipissing, Amable du Fond, Madawaska, and Tim rivers. These were formed by the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age.
The park is considered part of the "border" between Northern Ontario and Southern Ontario. The park is in an area of transition between northern coniferous forest and southern deciduous forest. This unique mixture of forest types, and the wide variety of environments in the park, allows the park to support an uncommon diversity of plant and animal species. It is also an important site for wildlife research.
Algonquin Park was named a National Historic Site of Canada in 1992 in recognition of several heritage values including: its role in the development of park management; pioneering visitor interpretation programs later adopted by national and provincial parks across the country; its role in inspiring artists, which in turn gave Canadians a greater sense of their country; and historic structures such as lodges, hotels, cottages, camps, entrance gates (the West Gate was designed by George H. Williams, Chief Architect and Deputy Minister of Public Works for the Province of Ontario), a railway station, and administration and museum buildings.
Algonquin Park is the only designated park within the province of Ontario to allow industrial logging to take place within its borders.
Visitor activities:
Algonquin is popular for year-round outdoor activities. There are over 1,200 campsites in eight designated campgrounds along Highway 60 in the south end of the park, with almost 100 others in three other campgrounds across the northern and eastern edges. There is also the Whitefish Lake group campground with 18 sites of various sizes to accommodate groups of 20, 30, or 40 people. Interior Camping is possible further inside the park at sites accessible only by canoe or on foot.
Docked canoe on Pog Lake, Algonquin Park.
The Algonquin Visitor Centre features exhibits about the natural and cultural history of the park. A large and detailed relief map of southern Ontario is displayed to enable a visitor to be oriented to the size and geography of the park. In a flow-through style, exhibits continue with many taxidermied species set in their native surroundings, then progresses, in a chronological manner, through an extensive collection of artifacts relating to human intervention in the park. The centre also includes a video theatre, a gift shop, a panoramic outdoor viewing deck, and an art gallery-"The Algonquin Room"-with changing exhibits of art related to the park.
Lookout trail
Other activities include fishing, mountain biking, horseback riding, cross country skiing, and day hiking. The park has 19 interpretive trails, ranging in length from 1 to 11.7 kilometres (0.62 to 7.27 mi). Each trail comes with a trail guide and is meant to introduce visitors to a different aspect of the park's ecology or history.
Algonquin is home to a Natural Heritage Education program. The most popular aspect of the program are the weekly wolf howls. These are held (weather and wolves permitting) on Thursdays in the month of August, and sometimes in the first week of September if there is a Thursday before Labour Day. Park staff attempt to locate a wolf pack on Wednesday evening and, if successful, they announce a public wolf howl the next day.
The park also publishes a visitor's newsletter, The Raven, six times a year - two issues in spring, two in summer, one in the fall, and one in the winter.
Guests who drive through the park down Hwy 60 can listen to a driving tour of Algonquin Park, including a dozen audio stories of the early days of the park and musical performances including E. Pauline Johnson's poem, "The Song My Paddle Sings." The driving tour was professionally curated by Four Corners Algonquin.