Tea Time on Lake Superior

Over the years, I’ve seen many videos on YouTube of people undertaking an outdoor winter adventure. They hike somewhere breathtaking beautiful and enjoy a fire with a hot beverage.

Well, I live in Northern Ontario, and I figured, Hell, I can do that!. So I did, last Sunday.

You can watch our adventure in the video at the end of this blog post!

With the enlisted help and company of my friend Jake Cormier and his trusty furry companion Hudson, we embarked on a winter adventure.

We drove up to Lake Superior Provincial Park on a chilly Sunday morning. The air temperature was hovering around the -9 C (16 F) mark, with very little wind. We parked at the Orphan Lake trailhead and set out with two backpacks, with sandwiches, snacks, an ultra-light camper stove, some mugs and tea.

Overlooking Orphan Lake | Lake Superior Provincial Park | (C)2021 Thomas Detert

Once we reached the Orphan Lake Overlook, it was time to break out the sandwiches. Lunch sure does taste a whole lot better when you worked up and appetite and earned it! As we ate our lunch, the cloud cover broke up and left us with a spectacular view, with some of the weirdest lighting and cloud formation I had ever seen!

Weird light and clouds over Lake Superior. (C) 2021 Thomas Detert

The Orphan Lake Trail meanders its way down to the shoreline of Lake Superior. When we got there, it was time for tea. Jake scooped up a pot of ice cold Lake Superior water, and set it up to boil on his very small, ultra-light isobutane camp stove. Several minutes later, we were enjoying peppermint tea on the beach, on a cold winter’s day, on the shore of the largest freshwater lake in the world!

I was also most pleased with the snap I captured below. It is definitely one of my most favourite black and white photos I have ever taken!

Icy Patterns on a Sunny Day (C) 2021 Thomas Detert

As Jake put it, this day and adventure were one for the books.

If you’d like to share in our adventure, watch the video blog below!

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Thomas Detert is a landscape photographer based out of St. Joseph Island, Ontario, Canada. You can view more of his work, or reach out to him at https://www.tomsview.ca.

Icy Reflections

The Story Behind Icy Reflections

Icy Reflections by Thomas Detert

It was a beautiful, sunny and relatively mild winter day in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. My friend Jake Cormier and I decided to take a drive north of the city, along Highway 17 to explore the Lake Superior Shoreline.

As we headed north, we lost the sunshine, and the vast majority of the wind.

We drove all the way up to Agawa Bay, located in the southern end of Lake Superior Provincial Park. The experience was surreal. The lake was completely open and with the exception of some snow in spots along the shoreline, it looked and felt like a cool summer day.

You could see the sand, the sand bars, and even some remnants of the grass blades growing out of the sand.

We worked our way down south, back towards Sault Ste. Marie.. We stopped at a popular photo spot known as SawPit Bay. It was at this location I photographed “Icy Reflections”. We were losing the light. However, the darkening light and sky made for a nice somber mood to photograph little microcosms in the bay.

Icy Reflections is the ultimate photo from the day’s shoot. I really love the mood it captures.