Craigleith Provincial Park: A Picture Perfect Getaway

BY ANDREW HIND PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF ONTARIO PARKS

// SOUTHERN GEORGIAN BAY // GREY // BRUCE LIVING //

The shoreline of shelf-like rock, lapped by azure waters and looking out on vistas that stretch as far as the eye can see, is straight out of a postcard. This is Craigleith Provincial Park, opened in 1967 to preserve a geologically significant shoreline on Southern Georgian Bay.

At Craigleith Provincial Park, the exposed bedrock consists of layers of limestone and of shale. These rock formations were formed 450 million years ago when southern Ontario lay at the bottom of a shallow tropical sea called the Michigan Basin. Fine sediments washed down from the Taconic Mountains (today’s Appalachians), settled in the basin, and were compressed into shale. Coral reefs also grew in the saltwater basin, gradually accumulating and consolidating into limestone.

The weathered surface of these rocks reveals countless fossils - skeletons or impressions of animals that once lived in the warm shallow sea that covered the Georgian Bay region so long ago. These fossils give us a glimpse of the rich and diverse marine life that existed in the prehistoric Michigan Basin.

Craigleith’s fossils are mostly that of hard-shelled marine creatures. Trilobites, ancient relatives of the modern lobster, are by far the most abundant and common of these fossils. Also present are cephalopods (cone-shaped ancestors of the squid) and brachiopods (prehistoric clams). Visitors to Craigleith Provincial Park are free to search for and photograph these fossils, but keep in mind they are protected and must be left on the beach for others to enjoy.

In 1859, Collingwood businessman William Darley Pollard decided he could make a fortune by meeting Ontario’s growing demand for oil, and was confident he knew just how to do it. Pollard patented a process of extracting crude oil from shale by distilling the fragmented rock in cast-iron vats heated to high temperatures over a fire. The crude was then refined to produce oil. >

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