Gaye I Clemson

John Rudolphus Booth (1827-1925) had a significant influence on Algonquin Provincial Park, the Ottawa Valley, and the City of Ottawa. He was a businessman of note, who built an empire based on timber, lumber, grain, pulp and paper, and much more. At one time, he owned the largest lumber mills in the world, and he employed thousands of men in his bush camps. Booth was behind the construction of a railway from Georgian Bay to Ottawa, with parts of the roadbed now converted to Algonquin Park’s Old...

In late September in 1903, Ernest Machado, a 35-year old Boston architect, his older brother José, brother-in-law Alfred Whitman and three park rangers headed out from Canoe Lake on a twelve-day canoe trip through the Algonquin wilderness. In the summer of 2013, over a century later, the author and four companions repeated this trip with a view to contrast and compare the experiences. Earlier that summer, two young women attempted a marathon paddling trek with a goal to trip from Canoe Lake to...