Best Fall Colours in Canada | Autumn visit to Algonquin

Good morning everyone. We are in Ontario and apparently Algonquin National Park is the best place to watch the fall colors at this year. So let's go on an autumn hike and see if this park is worth visiting. Currently I'm for business in Toronto and decided for the weekend to go for a day trip to Algonquin Provincial Park. I didn't make any plans, but people told me it is the best place to see fall colors. From Toronto it is around a 3 hour drive to the park, so it looks like it will be a very long day. We just arrived and you might wonder, man I'm so dressed up, like, warm, thick winter jacket, hoodie on, because it's raining and I'm not sure if it will last for the whole day but it's also only 5 degrees now. But we are at the Track and Tower Trail, which is the first trail that I'm doing. I'm not sure how many trails I will be doing, but this should be a circular loop ending at a cliff, which should normally give beautiful views around the area, at least that's what it looks like on the pictures. But with the low hanging clouds I'm not sure how much we actually will see from this area. But the drive up here was already so beautiful with all the colors from the leaves, so nice orangey, red, yellow, the combination of that is really really pretty. But let's have to walk and see where nature brings us I guess. The current trail we are doing, the Track and the Tower Trail, is a good introduction to the area. Not only showcasing you the beauty, but also learning you about the history of the area. Unfortunately the weather wasn't really helping and so far it just kept raining. But does that matter for this hike? Even though I'm just into the hike, I really like it already so far. Like yes, we're getting a bit wet, but it's a good combination of like, there's still leaves on the trees, like I think like 60%-50% has fallen on the ground as well, which make that nice combination of the orange and red leaves on the ground where you walk, and then you still have the orange vibe around you as well on the trees as well. The only thing that I need to be careful of at the moment is, at some places now, it can get really... That's interesting. That's a great sound of a bird, I don't know if you heard that, but I've never heard that sound of a bird before so I don't know which type it is, but what I wanted to say is, it also gets really slippery and muddy and wet at the moment, so I just need to walk slowly. The total walk, the total circular walk, is 7.7 kilometers, so based on my speed with taking pictures, I guess it would take me around two hours. I wasn't aware of how much human impact there was in this area. When you walk around here, you can't really see anything of it, but if you look at the lake just at the far end, there are two poles standing, and that's from the railroad that was constructed here and started an operation somewhere in the end of the 1800s, and then the last time this was in service was around 1959 because they had to replace the poles of the bridge. Those two poles, to replace them, cost at that time half a million Canadian dollar to replace them. It was too expensive. Railroad went out of operation, but if you just look around, you can't even see anywhere that we had this impact on this area. Nature reclaimed it all, and that keeps me positive that maybe we, as humans, if we give more stuff back to nature, maybe the world wouldn't be in such a bad place. Wow, even though you can't see that far, and the clouds are hanging really low, and yeah, the fog and the rain in between, still, the view from this lookout point is absolutely stunning. You can see that it's a little bit the end of the season. It's now mid-October, and fall season starts like mid-September here till mid-October, so we're at the end of the season. So some of the leaves are already gone from the trees, but seriously, I'm used to fall colors in Europe. Like the forest in the Netherlands is colored as well, but for whatever reason, it's just different here. It's just bigger, nicer, and a more diversity of color as well. I haven't seen such a difference between orange, yellow, and red color. Like, it's all a bit of more the same color in the Netherlands. It's strange to think that where we're walking now above grounds, this hill is completely man-made, and exactly at this point, where we're walking now, along this line, in the past, the old railway track was built here until like the 1950s that this was running. This is where the bridge on the picture was standing, going up to the other side, and then in the early 1940s, they dismantled the bridge. Just for your information, the rail track was mainly used at that time to transport the logs, the wood, into the city, and of course, the luxury cabins also brought passengers over to enjoy the forest. But after the railroad was dismantled and the highway came into place, people here really moved more into camping rather than hotels, so most of the hotels at that time, they didn't survive that either. And you can see how the forest has healed. It's completely gone. You can't really see that this was man-made, and the forest has completely reclaimed this part again. It's unbelievable. So in the past, the bridges here were made from wood. They quickly changed that to concrete, not only because concrete was stronger and wood would carry a very heavy train with all the logs on it, no, not only that, because also the trains at that time, with the steam locomotives, there were sparks coming out of the train, and that would set part of the forest on fire as well, and therefore, at least concrete wouldn't catch fire and the bridge would always be in place. Because of that, they also erected watchtowers across the hills, like one on the lookout point where we were before. There was an old watchtower located as well. It's all dismantled now. You can't see it anymore. But by having those watchtowers, if then someone would see from a watchtower some smoke, they would call with the telephone back to the main office, and if then another watchtower would see that fire as well, the smoke, then they could triangulate with the lines, and where the lines would cross, that's where the fire would be. But they quickly realized, after planes came in, that planes could spot fires as well. This was way more convenient, faster, and more reliable as well, and therefore, that's why the watchtowers were dismantled as well. We just arrived at the visitor center, where I'll have a browse and look a bit more about the information about the area. But remember that I told you about those watchtowers that were looking out for the fires. Well, there aren't any of those original ones left, but there's a replica here, just right at the visitor center. Just to give you an idea how such a watchtower to watch out for the fires would have looked like in the past. The visitor center is free to visit, and was a good place to dry up a bit. Besides that it shows you the wildlife that is living in this area, and teaches you more of the history of the area, of course, it isn't as impressive as walking through nature itself, but it definitely gives you more context. All in all, Algonquin Provincial Park was an amazing surprise, and definitely worth a visit in autumn.