As noted in a recent post, there is an area along Highway 7, in Eastern Ontario, with a very unique topography, made up of long bands of granite and close packed, narrow, and parallel valleys and ponds. Unlike regions like the Adirondacks, with its beautiful rolling mountains, this is like a miniature, compressed version. From the highway, the ridges don’t seem to be for than a few meters high and are populated with thin trees.

I imagine the reason for the thin trees is that they seem to be growing on a very shallow layer of soil. I don’t see very many large, mature trees, and I wonder if they were harvested aggressively at some recent point in history, or if this is a natural phenomenon.

The long, narrow valleys are also perfect for beavers to build their dams and make long chains of connected ponds, that follow the highway along, sometimes fading to a grassy meadow, before transforming into a pond again. The challenge to photographing this area from the road is that the highway winds along these ponds quite closely and there are very few places where you can pull over safely to make a photo.

The photo above was made at one of these few pull-outs but represents the scenery fairly well. I’d like to come back here some time and spend a few days hiking the ridges or canoeing the ponds to get a better sense of this strange place that is so unlike anything I have experienced before.

Nikon D300
Tamron 70-200 mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm
1/80 sec, f/4.5, ISO 250

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