Ontario

Visiting ‘The Big Dipper’

You can’t get everywhere by airplane. Sometimes you need to paddle.

In Killarney, Ontario, on the North shore of the Georgian Bay, they get that.

That’s why they built ‘The Big Dipper,’ – a canoe paddle that is 107 feet long, with a blade width of 17 feet, weighing in at 22,000 pounds.

The paddle sits beside Canada House, which claims to be the world’s largest log conference center, located at the Killarney Mountain Lodge.

Why a big paddle?

According to the local tourism folks, it is meant to celebrate the history of the area.

The Great Lakes and Georgian Bay offered the voyagers access to miles of boating to transport all their products. They paddled their canoes through all kinds of conditions to establish the fur-trading economy, which was the origin of one of the oldest companies in the world: the still operating Hudson Bay Company.