NATURAL HISTORY - TROUT LAKE

(By Peter Bullock - amateur archeologist)

Trout Lake and its surrounding landscape has not always looked as we know it today. On a geologic time scale of hundreds of millions of years Trout Lake has seen it all! It has been scrunched by continental collisions, fractured by continental faulting, inundated by oceans, baked by dessert heat and frozen under continental glaciers. Evidence of its earlier past have largely been obliterated by the most recent period of glaciation which ended, in the Trout Lake watershed, between eleven and twelve thousand years ago. Evidence of this melt down and of the events that have followed it are found throughout the Trout Lake watershed and reading the evidence is a fascinating "Sherlock Holmes" style mystery of reading the hieroglyphics of the landscape. The evidence adds up to an almost unbelievable story!

Trout Lake and its environs have changed very little in the past three to four thousand years, but look much deeper into its past and its look quickly changes to the point of being unrecognizable. At the time of the retreat of the Laurentian Continental Ice sheet 11,000 years ago Trout Lake was part of an ocean of fresh water that encompassed the great lake basin and beyond. Land elevations were significantly depressed, by hundreds of meters, due to the immense weight of the ice that had covered it. The shores of this ancient sea are found in the head waters of Trout Lake northern tributaries at the top of the highest hills. This fresh water ocean drained down the Ottawa River corridor and reached the Champlain Sea near Petawawa.

The look of the landscape changed rapidly after glaciation due to the rise and tilting of the land, the warming climate and the rapidly shifting hydrologic patterns. More recent shorelines of ancient lakes are found at lower elevations in the Trout Lake watershed with each successive lake stage more resembling the shape of Trout Lake that we see today. The steep north shore emerged first with much of the southern part of the watershed remaining inundated until about 6,000 years ago. Drainage for this entire period and up till about 4,000 years ago was through the Great Lakes, and Nipissing-Trout Lake low lands and down the Ottawa River corridor. The Trout Lake system was integrated with that of the entire system and its ecology and physical properties were part of the Great Lakes system. This hydrologic system was also a main corridor for native travel and trade.

The rising land choked off drainage through the Trout Lake system approximately 4,000 years ago as the Great Lakes found a new lower outlet through the St. Clair River system into Lake Erie. Just think, Niagara Falls has only had sufficient water to make it its spectacular self for only a few thousand years. Ancient waterfalls east of Trout Lake may have at one time been as equally as magnificent. If only we could see what the landscape has witnessed and what stories it would tell if it could speak.