AGAWA CANYON PARK, Ontario — The Agawa River is the color of iced tea, clear and just as cold. When the breeze picks up, the ripples give the water a tiger-eye effect, shimmering ribbons in gold and brown of uncertain depth, just like the stone.
People come to the park here for the waterfalls or the forest hike or for the kid-again fun of riding the vintage train that rolls north out of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on 114 winding miles of track. People don't come for the river. But I'm drawn to it anyway. Frederick Varley would have said that's because of the "color vibrations," something he experienced as he painted Canadian landscapes, and other things Canadian, until his death in 1969.
This 68-mile breach of granite bedrock, this ancient geologic fracture scarred by receding ice sheets and healed by forests, this canyon: It is better suited to brush and canvas than lens and film. I'll blame it on the time of day, the angle of the sun, that my photographs of the river record only a muddy bank and the reflection of blue sky. But the truth is, cameras don't catch vibes.
The round trip on the Agawa Canyon Tour Train is an all-day job. Board at 7 a.m., depart at 8, arrive at park 11:30 or so, leave by 2, get back after 5 p.m. It's a jostling, swaying jaunt in '50s-era coach cars. They weigh 136,000 pounds apiece. Diesel locomotives -- three on this trip; up to six on others -- pull them with the power of 1,750 horses each. They're also from the '50s, and from London, Ontario.
The tour train follows the first 114 miles of Algoma Central Railway's track, but the rails go on another 182 miles north to Hearst and the end of the line. Mile markers track-side match up with ones on a route map that ticks off local landmarks of rivers, lakes, bridges and highways.
Before we're even out of Sault Ste. Marie, steel and paper mills mark the city as the footman of mining and logging. The railroad was built in 1899 to help those industries take from the land. But in the years either side of 1920, it also gave back, bringing artists -- some of Canada's famed "Group of Seven" -- into what quickly becomes wilderness as we leave "The Sault" (pronounced SOO) behind.
We cross Bellevue Valley on an 810-foot-long, 100-foot-high trestle; we pass Little Achigan Lake to the left and Achigan Lake (the "big" one, I guess) to the right. We climb through tree-covered mountains cut by rivers -- the Goulais, the Chippewa, the Batchewana -- and dotted with lakes -- the Ogidaki, the Trout, the Spruce, the Mongoose. There's a glimpse of Lake Superior.
And still we climb, till we reach a 1,550-foot-long curving trestle where the tracks are 130 feet in the air. People at window seats on the inside of the curve watch the rest of the train chug around the crescent.
This trestle spans the Montreal River. Its valley was celebrated by Group of Seven artist J.E.H. MacDonald in paint -- and in ink. In his notations for "Algoma Sketches and Paintings," MacDonald described the region's fall colors as if each were a lover.
"Every day advanced the passing of the leaf," he wrote in 1919, "and soon our painters had to go in quest of the desirable spot of red....But the wild cherry leaves still hung as though the high fifes and violins were to finish the great concert of color. They were another of the notable little graces of the bush, daintily hung in every shade from palest yellow to deep crimson against the big blue-gold hills of the Montreal Valley."
I know MacDonald's late-autumn frustration; I feel similar stirrings, though I'm making the trip at summer's end as the leaves, just a few, are only beginning to turn.
The train crosses the Montreal River and dashes the next 12 miles in a 500-foot descent to the floor of Agawa Canyon. The place is just wide enough for a half-dozen buildings, the train, a picnic lawn and the tea-colored river.
For an hour and a half -- or with some luck a few minutes more -- the train idles in Agawa Canyon, diesel engines grumbling throughout the stay.
Passengers scatter. Some head for wooden tables where they spread lunches carried up in coolers and paper sacks or paid for on the train. Others make for one of the waterfalls: 225-foot Bridal Veil Falls; 175-foot Black Beaver Falls, with its north and south branches; or 45-foot Otter Creek Falls. A few attempt the 250-foot climb up Lookout Trail to view the narrow valley as a bird might.
What's to be seen depends on the season. The waterfalls, fed by rain and melting snow, are strongest in late spring and early summer. By autumn, they'll have gone from torrent to trickle, and fall foliage takes precedent. In winter -- and the railroad, though not the tour train, operates year-round -- an average annual snowfall of 15 feet dominates.