Our fourth stop on our 2015 tour had us visiting Bruce Peninsula National Park in Central Ontario. The park is located just outside the small tourist community of Tobermory, Ontario along the Georgian Bay shoreline. It boasts some great and unique areas such as the famous ‘Grotto’, as well as the beautiful Flowerpot Islands that are world-renowned. Bruce Park also boasts a rough and rugged portion of the Bruce Trail, Canada’s oldest and longest footpath, which extends all the way from Tobermory to Niagara Falls.

Bruce Park also boasts a robust network of hiking trails of varying difficulty, most of which are located around the visitor areas and campsites. As with all of our Parks Canada visits, we had the great pleasure of working with the staff and management team of the park from all departments. It is a very special experience for us as many times those staff are not able to come together in a large group to look at a common theme, such as trails and trail development. Along with the park staff we were also lucky enough to be joined from representatives from Nature Ontario, a local Hiking club as well as a local professional trail builder and tour operator to name a few.

Our Trail Building School workshop was well attended by all of the above representatives, who were eager to learn the techniques that go in to designing and building sustainable trails. As there was no actual build site we came together to work on a trail design workshop, which had our participants taking a step back and getting into the minds of the users before heading into the field to look at an area of concern.

We were also fortunate enough to walk and assess a new trail that will hopefully be built before the end of the summer season. This will be the first new trail built in roughly 40 years in the Bruce so it was very rewarding to be a part of it. Given the fact that it will allow users to have a much safer and enjoyable experience as they navigate the park it will be great to see it come to reality. We would like to thank Bruce Peninsula National Park for their fantastic hospitality and amazing new Yurts that we got to enjoy for our time at the park.

For a link to photos from our visit at Bruce Peninsula National Park, click here.