Canada is 150 years old this year, and loves having visitors come to the party. So much that it’s made a pass for its National Parks free for the year. It’s part of why the country is having a tourism boom this year.
Now, the Guardian (UK) has scoped out the scene and come up with a list of 10 of the less-known but fantastic parks. Spread across the continent from the far eastern islands to the Pacific, they offer a variety of hiking, cycling, camping and other activities.
For more details and photos from The Guardian, click HERE. For more information about Canada’s free park pass, click HERE.
Photo: Cape Breton Highlands National Park (Tony Webster/Wikimedia)
Yes, there is some evidence of early man in Canada and the northern USA, mostly a few bones found accidentally here and there, some dating back thousands of years. No large human findings, at least not that I’m aware of, but in places with large collections of bison bones at the base of jumps (places they chased a herd over a cliff to harvest meat). Canadian natives were mostly nomadic people living in tents and temporary shelters they constructed, not so much in caves.
And of course there is evidence the Vikings landed in Newfoundland about a thousand years ago, some 500 years before Colombus did.
There are ruins of a Viking settlement in the northwest corner of Newfoundland. Admittedly a remote hard to get to place, but I’d like to see them someday.
Indian tribes tended just to bunker down in the winter in a place they knew would be safe for them. Sheltered somewhat from the wind, wood and fresh water supply nearby, etc. Food was generally harvested in the summer and consumed during the cold winter months. Their tents were constructed of hides (as were their clothes) and are surprisingly warm, and their shelters were designed such that a fire was at the center of each tee-pee. Other tribes had semi-permanent communal homes (eg. Pacific Northwest and some of the East coast tribes). The distances involved to move a tribe far enough south to appreciate better climates would have likely been too far for many of them to achieve.
I knew the Vikings travelled a thousand years ago. They settled in Greenland too. They wrote that Greenland was a land of cows and meadows and obviously green too. I just wondered if history had further proof of a time when Global Warming was just a natural cycle. The Indian tribes have been nomadic for centuries and I wondered if they could survive a long winter without retreating to a warmer south.
Always wondered about the natural history of Canada. Do they ever find evidence of mankind when searching the caves, fields and mountains ?