Quetico Park: Twelve Thousand Years in the Making – A Century of Protection

by Jon Nelson

Quetico is celebrating its 100^th Anniversary. Quetico was originally set aside in 1909 as the Quetico Forest Reserve, became a Provincial Park in 1913, logging was banned in 1972 and it was declared a wilderness park in 1978. Quetico is characterized by towering cliffs, rocky islands and sandy beaches in a watery landscape of clear water lakes, rivers, creeks and bogs. These compelling attributes that attract canoeists to Quetico are primarily the results of the actions of glacial ice and glacial meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age.

Twelve thousand years ago, the land that is now Quetico Park was being released from beneath a retreating glacier. This seemingly inhospitable mixture of rock and water did not remain barren for long. Tundra vegetation quickly became established and barren ground caribou and other grazing animals soon populated the land. These animals were prey for Palaeo-Indians who followed them across the landscape. Quetico may have also been briefly populated by Ice Age megafauna - woolly mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves (wolves almost twice as large as today’s timber wolves) and beaver that weighed 500 pounds (over 200 kilograms). British zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace was referring to the extinction of these Ice Age megafauna when he noted: “We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the largest, the fiercest, and strongest forms have disappeared.” It’s obvious that much was lost in the millennia since the glacier retreated but much has also been gained. 

Quetico continues to evolve and change. Today’s Quetico is a captivating blend of deciduous and boreal forests with a sprinkling of species from the prairies. As a result, organisms as diverse as Calypso orchids and caribou lichen, silver maple and stunted black spruce, prairie goldenrod and wild ginger, all grow in a land where whisky jacks overlap with blue jays, moose co-exist with white-tailed deer and bog lemmings live near woodland jumping mice.

The protection given Quetico in 1909 and the resolve of people to make it a wilderness park allows us to paddle today in a Quetico that is very similar to what it was one hundred years ago. Native peoples have been an integral part of Quetico since the first Palaeo-Indians arrived over eleven thousand years. To a large extent, their stewardship was responsible for the relatively intact state of the ecosystem when the area was protected in 1909. One of the primary reasons for the strong appeal of Quetico Park is that the heavier and more destructive hand of modern man has had relatively little negative impact. The activities of fur traders, trappers and prospectors left relatively few scars.

When logging was halted in 1972 almost half of Quetico had never been logged. The clear cuts that were created in the late 60s and early 70s are now about forty years old and are becoming young forests. These areas were used by moose researchers studying the behaviour of bull moose during the rut and by forest ecologist comparing re-growth after logging and forest fires.

For a wilderness park, it is ironic that some locations are of particular interest because of — not in spite of — the long record of human use and habitation. In addition to the campsites used by early explorers and voyageurs, some sites were used by Palaeo-Indians not long after the glacier’s retreat and are still used by canoeists.

Over the last one hundred years, Quetico - considered by many to be the finest canoeing park in the world - has changed from a forest reserve visited by a few hundred people to a wilderness area that attracts thousands of canoeists from around the globe. Quetico’s landscape remains a magnificent merger of sculpted bedrock with water and northern pine forests. It also has the added attractions of timber wolves, moose, bald eagles, loons, northern lights, old-growth white pine and excellent fishing in a landscape having the greatest concentration of aboriginal rock paintings in eastern North America.

If we use it with care and vigilantly work to maintain its wilderness integrity, Quetico Park’s appeal should escalate for hundreds of years to come.