Fushimi Provincial Park – Summer 2021

So here we are at Fushimi Provincial Park on a cloudy, windy, rainy day and only about 14 Celsius.

Fushimi is about a two hour drive from Nagagamisis Provincial park. This park had only about 50 sites total, quite a few were seasonals. We had site 29, a nice site on the corner and it was pretty private and not too many neighbours. To get to this park, take Highway 11, when you spot the Parks sign, turn North and drive on a dirt road about 12 kms on a side road before turning down another dirt road, driving about 4 kms, before hitting the main gate. Phew! got there finally.   It was really raining the day we arrived so we just drove around the Park which is situated on a really big Lake called Fushimi Lake! Big surprise lol  The name Fushimi intrigued me so I researched it and found out that Prince Fushimi (Hiroyasu), cousin of Emperor Meiji, was the second Japanese royalty to visit Canada & Vancouver in 1907. In honor of the Prince’s visit, Fushimi Lake Provincial park in northern Ontario was named after him. I think that’s very cool. You can paddle on Fushimi Lake or parts of the Valentine River and there are only two trails to hike; Achilles Lake trail, 1 km and Fire tower Trail, 7 kms.

The day after we arrived it was still super windy but the temperature did get up to 24 Celsius. The town of Hearst is located about 25 kms down Highway 11. I want to mention that Highway 11 is a main highway and when you are driving on it, there are tons of wildflowers on the sides of the road, white, yellow, purple and pink, just beautiful. And of course there are the ever popular Sandhill Cranes all along the sides of the road too.

Hearst is a really nice and clean town and they have a big War Memorial in the middle of town, which I did not get a photo of and I’m not sure why. They have a really cool Visitor Centre with 2 big moose statues and wolf statues. We had a ton of fun photographing Trum on these statues. In case you are wondering, do we get weird looks when I walk around carrying a stuffed monkey? Yes we do. Do we care? No we don’t. We’re old but we can still have fun!

Just outside of Hearst is Rheault Distillery which is known for it’s Loon Vodka but they also had all sorts of different flavoured liqueurs; rum and rye and also Vodka liqueurs: apple, pomegranate, cherry, blueberry, cranberry and more. The cranberry flavour was really good and their vodka is one of the finest I have had. I brought home a bottle of Pomegranate for my son as he loves that flavour.

One of the places we stopped at was Lake Stoddart which is on the dirt road between the Park road and Highway 11. It’s a nice long skinny lake.  The very first photo in this Blog post, way up there at the top, is of Lake Stoddart.

The last day we were here it rained again and still cloudy and windy and also went back down to 15 Celsius. Blah weather, fall is on it’s way! If you haven’t been to Northern Ontario you can pretty well depend that summer is just about over when mid August, or earlier, comes. Not always but usually. We decided to walk the Achilles Lake Trail to Achilles Lake, about 1.1 km total.  It was a really nice little lake but we only saw a couple of loons. 

Another trail we did, well we did some of it but not all, was the Fire Tower Trail.

After that we decided to leave the Park and when we got to the dirt road we drove north to see what was there. We ended up on a logging road driving about 25 kms before we turned around. We spotted a small lane that we drove down and that ended up at a beautiful little lake and what looked like a quarry to the right of it and maybe a camp. Back to the main dirt road and we drove further down and parked on the road to walk to another lake. At another spot, we took another dirt lane and it also led to a camp, not used, probably used for hunting in the fall.  We were very adventurous today and we spotted not one other person. I guess they were all at the beach.

Back at the Park, we actually saw Parks staff filling up potholes on the campground roads with gravel, we could not believe that! They really take care of this park and you can tell because the campground roads are in really good shape. There was no fire ban but boil your water was in effect.  We almost always buy our drinking water, I don’t even drink tap water at home, our water is quite chlorinated. We did have one fire one evening when we were here, in between rain storms.

A nice Park with nice beaches, boat launches and more.

All in all this is an okay Park but not in my top Ten. Now we are off to Rene Brunelle Provincial Park!