Chapter One: Time-Worn Hills

The newly-formed hill enjoyed relative peace and quiet for a few thousand years. No seismic events of the same magnitude occurred. Then came the glaciers. For tens of thousands of years they pushed and pulled at the landscape, advancing and retreating, scraping the bedrock and littering the ground. The last glacier to grip North Bay was the Wisconsin ice sheet – from 55,000 years ago to around 11,000 years ago, it held the city down under as much as two kilometres of ice (Theberge, 1989: 52-65; Bullock, 199?: “The North Bay Outlet...”; Leatherdale, 1978: 7). If you think the winters are bad here now, imagine being frozen under 6,000 feet of ice!

As the glacier began to melt and retreat, it left behind an enormous amount of water. Lake Nipissing, Trout Lake, and all of the Great Lakes formed a single waterbody that drained eastward through the Champlain Sea (now the St. Lawrence River) and out to the ocean from there (Bullock, 199?: “The North Bay Outlet...”; Harington, 1989: 161; Leatherdale, 1978: 7-9). (Kooistra, A History of the North Bay Ski Hill page 2)