Mazinaw Lake is a lake in the Addington Highlands north of Kaladar in Eastern Ontario. The lake is situated on the upper Mississippi River. It has a perimeter of 49 km (30 mi) and averages 41 m (135 ft) in depth with a maximum depth of 145 m (476 ft), making it the second deepest lake in Southern Ontario besides the Great Lakes. There is a narrows dividing the lake into the North Mazinaw and South Mazinaw sections. North Mazinaw being the larger and deeper.
Bon Echo Provincial Park encompasses the central section of the lake, including the narrows between North and South Mazinaw and the Mazinaw Rock formation. The lake's name comes from Mazinaabikinigan-zaaga'igan, meaning "painted-image lake" in Algonkian, referring to the pictographs on Mazinaw Rock which overlooks the lake. The Mazinaw Rock, located on the eastern side of North Mazinaw, features over 260 native pictographs- often confused with petroglyphs – the largest visible collection in Canada - including the Ojibwa trickster figure and culture hero, Nanabush. The rock also contains a tribute to Walt Whitman, inscribed for Flora MacDonald Denison, who ran the Bon Echo Inn on the site of the provincial park during the 1910s.
A dam is located at the outflow of the lake to maintain the level of the lake and to control water flow into the Mississippi River during the spring runoff time.
Mink can be spotted along the northern shores of the lake.
Famous quotes containing the word lake:
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)