Three hundred and seventy years pass ...

On a clear Canadian winter’s night in 1992, the spacecraft Discovery silently orbits the Earth. One of the astronauts marvels at the Earth below, searching for familiar patterns. There is Lake Superior, its shoreline wending eastward until it tips into Lake Huron. This modern-day explorer, Dr. Roberta Bondar, has located those same rapids at Sault Ste. Marie, her home. For her, too, this is a very special place on Earth.

The Ecotour, skirting the Lake Huron shore from Sault Ste. Marie to Midland, describes the historic rapids of the St. Marys River and many other places whose histories are prominent chapters in the story of Canada. The land was formed and sculpted over three billion years — by fiery magma, tropical seas and crushing glaciers — and then, in a instant of only 9,500 ears, was inhabited and shaped by the Paleo-Indian, First Nations, Métis and European peoples. Before beginning the Ecotour, picture yourself looking down from the spacecraft Discovery and imagine the unfolding of those three billion years of change that is the legacy of the Lake Huron shoreline.

Imagine before you, in the ancient Archean eon, an alien planet covered by oceans. The first rocks are forming, with volcanoes and magma swarms spewing lava above and below water. Ontario—indeed North America—begins to take shape with the formation of rocks known as the “Superior Province,” the first part of the Precambrian Shield. Newly formed continental plates are thin and move faster over the Earth’s surface than the continents of today. When these continental plates butt together, large balls of magma rise from the earth’s core and then cool, forming the giant granite batholiths that become the trademark rocks of northern Ontario. There is no vegetation, the air is unbreathable and there is no ozone layer. Only tiny algae and bacteria exist in the seas.

Then, about 2.5 billion years ago, the second part of the Shield, the “Southern Province,” begins to form. This part of the Shield is crossed by the Trans-Canada Highway and the Ecotour, linking Sault Ste. Marie with Sudbury. The formation of the Southern Province begins with erosion of the Superior Province rocks, followed by a tectonic-plate collision that creates the Penokean Mountains north of Lake Huron. Remnants of the Penokean Mountains include the white La Cloche Mountains—a favoured subject area for Group of Seven artists. Finally, in the Southern Province, another Earth-shattering event occurs 1.1 billion years ago: North America tries to split into two parts, forming the Midcontinental Rift. The rift gradually fills with sediments and lava that reshape the land once again.

The third and youngest province of the Shield, the “Grenville Province,” is crossed by the Trans-Canada Highway, from just south of Sudbury to the Shield’s southern boundary near Port Severn. The Grenville Province is formed when several pieces of volcanic land are swept into collision with the two existing provinces. The Grenville rocks are baked, squeezed, stretched and twisted into metamorphic formations.

With the completion of the three provinces 1.75 to 1.0 billion years ago, the great Precambrian Shield takes shape. As time passes a new ring of rocks forms the Michigan Basin, just south of the Shield. These rocks are the youngest on the Ecotour route—570 to 360 million years old—deposited as sediments in seas much like the Caribbean of today. Oxygen is plentiful and numerous tiny creatures flourish, but only in the sea. Their limy remains make up much of the fossilized limestone of the Michigan Basin.

Now begins a period when glacial ice and snow accumulate and glaciers creep beyond the North and South Poles: the Great Ice Age. The most recent ice advance is the Wisconsinan of 115,000 years ago—and the last retreat a mere 10,000 years past. The Ecotour is filled with evidence of glacial advances and retreats, including the formation of these young Great Lakes.

The Ecotour is rich in its biodiversity with rare species and unique habitats. It spans the southern hardwoods to the boreal forests and also contains some of the oldest archeological sites in Canada, such as the Paleo-Indian site of Sheguiandah, on Manitoulin Island, dating back 9,500 years. Parts of the Ecotour became the cultural heartland of the Algonquian-speaking Ojibwa and Odawa peoples and, about 1400 A.D., the Iroquoian-speaking Wendat moved into Georgian Bay.

The first European to travel the Ecotour route was 18-year-old Etienne Brûlé, sent by Samuel de Champlain in 1610 to learn the Algonquian language under the guidance of an Algonquin headman, Iroquet. Brûlé, however, ended up living with the Wendat on Georgian Bay, and quickly learned their language. Champlain and Father Le Caron, a Récollet missionary, visited the Wendat in 1615, and the next year an alliance was formed. The fur trade was soon to become the economic pillar of the European colonies and, for the next 200 years, a major source of human conflict.

Dominated first by the French and later by the English, the fur trade led to English settlement beginning in the late 1700s, and to agriculture, lumbering, fishing and mining. This era led to the devastation of the white pine, severe pollution of the lower Great Lakes, a decline in fisheries, and the disappearance of natural habitats and species. This Ecotour, partly the story of past resource exploitation, is also about ecosystem recovery and the efforts made to improve, protect and live in harmony with the natural environment. Ecological consciousness has been growing since.