Qualla: Killarney Provincial Park

Killarney Provincial Park: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Indigo from Santa Clara, CA, CC BY 2.0. A.Y. Jackson picked up his pen instead of his brush and wrote the most important letter of his career. The Group of Seven painter had just learned that loggers were coming for Trout Lake, one of the jewels tucked among the white quartzite ridges north of Georgian Bay. His letter to Ontario's Minister of Lands and Forests in the 1930s did something no canvas could: it stopped the chainsaws. The lake was placed in the care of the Ontario Society of Artists and renamed O.S.A. Lake, and Jackson's act of artistic protest planted the seed for what would become Killarney Provincial Park -- a wilderness that owes its survival not to politicians or planners, but to painters.

Image: Alex Indigo from Santa Clara, CA | CC BY 2.0

Killarney Provincial Park: White Bones of the Earth

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mykola Swarnyk, CC BY-SA 4.0. The La Cloche Mountains are among the oldest on Earth, and they look it -- not in the towering, jagged way of younger ranges, but in the smooth, rounded, almost skeletal way of rock that has been worn down over billions of years. These are quartzite ridges, blazing white against ...

Image: Mykola Swarnyk | CC BY-SA 4.0

Killarney Provincial Park: Canvases and Conservation

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Indigo from Santa Clara, CA, CC BY 2.0. Jackson was not the only Group of Seven member drawn to these hills. Franklin Carmichael, Arthur Lismer, and A.J. Casson all painted here, captivated by the play of light on quartzite and water. Their canvases transformed Killarney from a remote stretch of Canadian Shield into on...

Image: Alex Indigo from Santa Clara, CA | CC BY 2.0

Killarney Provincial Park: Acid and Recovery

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Indigo from Santa Clara, CA, CC BY 2.0. The park's proximity to Sudbury, one of the world's largest mining centers, nearly undid everything the artists had fought to protect. From the 1940s through the 1970s, nickel smelters pumped sulphur into the atmosphere, and the acid rain that resulted fell hardest on Killarney's...

Image: Alex Indigo from Santa Clara, CA | CC BY 2.0

Killarney Provincial Park: Wild Solitude

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit elPadawan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Killarney is primarily a wilderness park, and it means it. There is a single campground at the George Lake entrance, six heated yurts, and precious little else in the way of built infrastructure. The park sits in the Eastern forest-boreal transition zone, which gives it an unusua...

Image: elPadawan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Killarney Provincial Park: Neighbors and Next Chapters

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit elPadawan, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2006, the province created the adjacent Killarney Lakelands and Headwaters Provincial Park, expanding protection beyond the original boundaries. In 2015, the Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island established Point Grondine Park on their own unoccupied heritage territo...

Image: elPadawan | CC BY-SA 2.0