Kejimkujik National Park: landscape and origins
Kejimkujik is a park made of water: shallow, bog-brown lakes linked by slow rivers and portages, exactly the network the Mi’kmaq have travelled for thousands of years.
The shape of the landscape dates from the last Ice Age, which began 100,000 to 80,000 years ago. The ice scraped away the soils and scooped the lake basins out of soft slate; it left behind drumlins, eskers, boulders and shallow lakes. The drumlins all point south-east, the direction the ice came from. The bedrock is poor: Precambrian to Ordovician quartzite and slate, plus Devonian granite.
About 12 to 15 per cent of the park is water: 46 lakes and ponds and over 30 streams and rivers, almost all in the watershed of the Mersey River.
The forest is Acadian mixed forest, a transition zone between south and north. Two hundred years of forestry changed it; only the establishment of the park in 1974 ended logging. What remains are islands of old growth: hemlock stands with 350-year-old trees and broadleaf forests on the drumlins, which you can see at Peter Point and at Portage E. Under the hemlocks, because of the dense canopy, almost nothing grows except mosses, and rare orchids.
In 1995 the park was also declared a national historic site, the first national park in Canada with this dual role. Two plaques, one in English and French and one in Mi’kmaw, were unveiled on 1 October 2000, Treaty Day. The monument was designed by Jean Augustine-McIsaac; its shape follows the pointed hat of Mi’kmaw women, which appears again and again in the park’s petroglyphs.
The park in numbers
- National park
- since 1974
- Coastal part
- since 1988
- Historic site
- since 1995, the first national park
- Plaques
- 1 October 2000, Treaty Day
- Lakes and ponds
- 46, plus over 30 rivers and streams
- Share of water
- 12 to 15 per cent
- Only by canoe or on foot
- over 80 per cent of the area
- Backcountry sites
- 46 on 17 lakes
- Frontcountry trails
- 13, from 1 to 6.3 km
- Petroglyphs
- over 500
- Archaeological sites
- over 60
- Red chairs
- 7 pairs
