Stories from the road: Whitefish Lake

This weekend Melanie and I visited the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek pow wow on Whitefish Lake. It was easily one of the most beautiful pow wow grounds we have seen this summer; the grounds were right next to the beautiful lake, and the road to the grounds was long and winding.

We stayed in Sudbury at the Holiday Inn this weekend, and Melanie and I had quite the adventure getting there. By this, I mean I forgot which hotel we were staying at in Sudbury (it’s gotten to be very confusing to keep track of the hotels each weekend if you don’t have the spreadsheet right in front of you). We showed up at the Best Western downtown, which was where I was ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE we were staying. My name wasn’t in the system, and of course when I checked my notes again we realized it was the Holiday Inn, which ended up being a great hotel.

Anyway, on the Saturday, we had great weather at the pow wow. Tons of people showed up right at grand entry, so there was a huge rush of kids all at once playing our engineering games together and taking lots of comic books.

On Saturday afternoon, Melanie and I booked it out to ‘Dynamic Earth’, which is the mining exhibit in Sudbury. We made it for the last tour, and man was it cool. You go down into a mine that has been set up to show the progression of mining technology over the past 100 years in Sudbury. After learning about mining engineering through this job, it was really cool to the see the actual techniques employed in the industry today, and also learn some of the statistics about nickel mining in Sudbury.

Fun fact: back in the day the best job to have in the mine was the person who cleaned the toilets, because they were the ones who were the least in danger in the mine.

Melanie and I really enjoyed the exhibit.

On Sunday, we expected it to rain all day but the sky seemed like it couldn’t quite make up its mind what to do. We also didn’t have our tent pegs (woops), so the windy weather was quite disagreeable. We ended up keeping everything down with our core samples from the mining engineers back at school, and stuck the tent in the ground with some sticks we found around the area. Nothing flipped so we got lucky.

Then we headed out for the road once the skies really looked black. I think we made it out just before it started spitting. Excellent timing!

See you next weekend!