I love, love, love this park, we have been here a couple of times. Samuel du Champlain Provincial Park is about 4 1/2 hours drive from where we live. It’s close to the small town of Mattawa near the Quebec Provincial border. It’s also less than an hour drive to the city of North Bay. If you don’t know who Samuel du Champlain is…………..click here to find out!
As I mentioned, the park is only a few minutes drive to the small town of Mattawa and here’s a tidbit…..Mattawa means “Meeting of the Waters” in Ojibwa. In 1615 Etienne Brulé and Samuel de Champlain were the first Europeans to pass through this area. Mattawa was important because of its location along the voyageur’s canoe route from Montreal to the Great Lakes.
There are two campgrounds in this park but neither has had electricity for about 3 years now I think? We don’t really care if we have electricity or not, it’s nice to have for sure but sometimes it’s more like camping without it. As long as we have our coffee in the morning, which we do, all is good. The rest of the time we use our BBQ or Coleman propane stove. We had a ton of sites in different parks this summer without electricity.
I was looking at the photo above of our site and noticed we have six chairs on our site for two people lol. Different chairs for different needs I guess.
We had a great site and when we were setting up we heard this godawful noise from the empty site across from us. I walked over and it was a Black Backed Woodpecker and a nest in a tree! We both got our cameras and went back over for a bit to get photos. Then we got bored so we left to go canoeing and when we got back there was a man camping on the site. He said it was so awesome for the first day and after that, not so much. They started squawking (for lack of a better word) early in the morning, 430-5 am and didn’t stop until late evening. Anyways, here are a couple of my shots. The guy at the campsite said it was thrilling at first but day three it was enough lol. They were noisy.
One evening when we were out paddling we spotted this beaver so we sat and watched him for a long time and I got a lot of photos, too many to be honest! I included some of these photos in the presentation I did last month at the City library. I also said how I had read that beavers cut down over 200 trees a year. I thought that was amazing but what I thought was more amazing that someone followed a bunch of beavers around for a year and counted ! LOL
He was very relaxed 
I love their little hands, they have no thumbs just five fingers
In this park there are about 4 trails and lots of swimming areas. They also have a Pet Exercise area in the park. As for canoeing, there is the Mattawa River, Moore Lake, Long Lake and the upriver section of the Amable du Fond River. Long Lake is motor boat free and it’s a very long, narrow lake. We enjoyed paddling it in the evenings and rarely saw anyone else on the lake.
Moore Lake at sunset 
Moore Lake 
Long Lake 
Mattawa River 
You can rent a spot in the big Voyageur canoe for a paddle! We did this one other year we were here 
Along the river, a beautiful beach and a trail to a waterfalls
Mattawa River Provincial Park and Canoe Route extend from Trout Lake, near North Bay ending in Mattawa, passing through the centre of Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park. You can paddle a portion of river from Pimisi Bay to Samuel de Champlain which we did one year and we ended up at beautiful Parreseux Falls and the landscape was so pretty.
So this is Part One of Sam Champ Park (my nickname for it) but stayed tuned because the best part of this park is that you can float down the river on your floatie!
See you soon………
Trums Travels 