Our final stop on our 2026 Lake Superior explorations was at Pancake Bay Provincial Park, for a brief 2 night stay.
Just like at the other two provincial parks on this trip (see the two previous posts for information on them) we stayed on-site, in the park’s campground. This was a nice campground set back in the trees right along the Lake Superior shoreline. We could see the water through the trees right from our site, but they did serve to make the campground a little tight. It wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle in our rig, but they did cause us to opt to back out of our pull-through site rather than pull out because of the location of some of the trees and branches. We had 30amp electrical service at our site, but like the other provincial park campgrounds we stayed in, the power pedestal was quite a distance from where we were parked. At least this time, we were able to reach it with our two 30amp cords, so we had full functionality of the electric. This trip has taught us this…if you are camping in the Ontario provincial parks, you should take more electrical cords than you think you would possibly need. Otherwise, you may be paying for electric at your site that you can’t use. One other strange thing about this campground is that the dump station and water fill is located in the very back of the campground instead of near the entrance, like most. This means that everyone has to drive through the entire campground to get to it. It isn’t a huge deal, but we can see that – especially in high season when the campground is full – this would add a lot of additional traffic through the narrow campground roads. And our final observation of this campground is…HOLY MOSQUITOS! There were so many, and inside the campground, there was no escaping them. We had encountered a few here and there at Lake Superior Provincial Park, but nothing like this. We can only describe it as a cloud of mosquitos that rivaled anything we saw even when we were in Alaska, and they definitely made it difficult to enjoy the great outdoors! Think being-afraid-to-inhale-because-you-might-inhale-a-mosquito. It was that bad, and honestly made us glad our stay here was scheduled to be brief.
Pancake Bay is a very small park, and there are only two trails that would have been feasible for us to hike, and wouldn’t you know that the one we were most interested in, the nature trail, was closed during our visit. There is also the Edmund Fitzgerald Lookout Trail, which is about three and a half miles and rated difficult. At this point in the trip, we had already done a fair amount of hiking and our legs were somewhat tired, and while this lookout sounds neat (it looks into the “graveyard of the Great Lakes” where the Edmund Fitzgerald sank), we weren’t sure we were willing to take on a difficult out-and-back trail just to go to a lookout. And we won’t lie here, either…we were also concerned about the mosquitos on the hike since most of it travels through a lush forest. We decided to pass and just enjoy a low-key day of wandering around the beaches of the area.
We started with the beautiful sandy beach right at the campground in the park. This is definitely the most “ocean-like, beach vacation” beach we encountered on this trip, and a few people were taking full advantage of it. The air temperature was in the mid-60s, yet they were lying out on the beach in their bathing suits, and even swimming in the frigid lake waters like it was hot out! We were definitely the “odd” ones here, walking the beach in our long sleeves and long pants! We can only imagine what this place must look like during the height of summer! One of the locals told us it gets PACKED full of sun-bathers!
From there, we drove five minutes up the highway to Stone Beach. This was a highlight for us. We love stone beaches, where we can sift through rocks looking for those that catch our eyes. We could spend hours doing this! Not only, that, though, this beach also had large boulders that were fun for scrambling, and since it was not in the provincial park, Jeff was able to put up the drone and get a bird’s eye view of the area. It was a great stop and made us glad that we opted to not go for the hike this time, and have a more relaxing day on the shore.
Unfortunately, the end of our stay at Pancake Bay also marked the end of our time on Lake Superior. From here it was time to start heading south toward home. We did take time for one more stop to see a place that has been on our bucket list for years, but for that you will have to wait until our next post! Come back in a week or two to find out where we stopped along our route home, and what fun we found there!
Until next time!
