Login | January 15, 2025
Gravel cycling to beach chilling
PETE GLADDEN
Pete’s World
Published: August 26, 2024
Very rare are places up here along the northcoast that offer up some great backcountry gravel road cycling and at the same time are situated right next to beautiful sand beaches surrounded by Caribbean-like turquoise waters.
That’s seemingly too much to ask for but by gosh on a recent trip to Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula I was provided with just such a place.
If you’re not familiar with “The Bruce,” it’s a 100-mile long peninsula in the province of Ontario that’s lies between the westerns shores of Lake Huron and the eastern shores of the Georgian Bay.
It’s a thin curving finger of terra firma who’s southern terminus begins at about the same latitude as Traverse City, Michigan and who’s northern terminus ends at about the same latitude as Cheboygan.
The Bruce is composed of the very same cliff forming rock strata (Niagara escarpment) as Niagara Falls, which makes for some very captivating landscapes.
There’s everything from towering limestone and dolomite cliffs to thick woodland forests, rolling hills, lofty bluffs and flat farmlands.
And then there’s those many miles of beaches, some of them rugged cliffs that drop down into the turquoise waters of Huron and the Georgian Bay, while others are composed of basketball to baseball sized cobblestones and flat and endless wave polished slabs of limestone.
Yet tucked amidst all that there’s also these glorious white, sandy beaches that appear out of nowhere, so utterly odd and out of place.
And surprisingly enough, for a less than enthusiastic beach-goer like me, those stellar beaches are such a game changer that I wouldn’t think twice now about making subsequent 6.5-hour drives back up to the Bruce Peninsula to ride.
So that drive to the Bruce entails taking I-80 west, followed by a turn to the northeast through Detroit and up to the border town of Port Huron.
From there it’s across the border into Sarnia, Ontario and north on Rt 21 for about a 100 miles north up to the coastal town of Port Elgin, which is where the Bruce Peninsula unofficially begins and where we decided to make our home base.
Our choice of Port Elgin as a home base for gravel cycling was predicated on the town’s several key attributes: Access to the extremely long and multi-directional Bruce County Rail Trail, a rather rough and primitive swath of double track gravel trail; the large array of gravel county roads that the Bruce County Trail crosses; the plethora of camping and lodging options within the town; and finally, what I had read was an absolutely stellar stretch of sandy beach.
Now before I drone on about gravel riding, let me add this addendum, if you’re not a gravel head like me there are several much tamer trails available in and around Port Elgin.
There’s the five-mile Saugeen Inland Rail Trail which connects Port Elgin to its northern neighbor, Southampton. And there’s also a beautifully paved stretch of bike trail which hugs the coastline of Lake Huron running for five miles into Southampton.
Together, those two out-and-back trails provide 20 miles of very casual, very scenic off-the-roads cycling.
Okay, so rather than giving a recitation of our four day’s worth of the gravel routes, let me offer this instead.
Just in Bruce County alone the gravel riding choices seemed limitless.
In those four rides we experienced a good selection of riding terrains: Challenging stretches of roller coaster hills west of Southampton, steep and intimidating bluff climbs south of Port Elgin, and endless expanses of “Kansas” flat, arrow-straight gravel roads inland of Lake Huron.
And when consulting the Bruce County roadmap (https://explorethebruce.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023-Visitor-Map-for-download.pdf) I found that those four long days of riding constituted a mere drop in the bucket given all the gravel riding possibilities available.
Finally, as I indicated earlier, for a guy like me who’s not so much into chilling on a beach, WOW, coming back from a long gravel ride, fatigued, dusty and salt-encrusted and then jumping into Lake Huron’s cool, inviting waters, that most definitely became the cherry on top of each and every one of our back country rides.
So as the saying goes: ”I’ll be back.”