A Guide to Sudbury's Natural Escapes 🌿

Sudbury sits inside a crater. Roughly 1.85 billion years ago something struck here hard enough to leave the Sudbury Basin — among the largest and oldest known impact structures on the planet — and the nickel it exposed built the city. What the visitor notices now is water and rock: more than three hundred lakes within the municipal boundary, Shield ridges running through the suburbs, and one of the largest lakes inside any Canadian city lapping at the edge of downtown.

🌲 Lake Laurentian Conservation Area – Wilderness on the City Edge

A short drive from downtown, Lake Laurentian protects several hundred hectares of Shield country — rock ridges, beaver ponds, marsh and mixed forest — with a network of trails that feels considerably more remote than it is. Boardwalks cross the wetlands, lookouts open over the lake, and the geology on display is the point: this is the rim of the Sudbury Basin, one of the largest known impact structures on Earth. Groomed for skiing and snowshoeing through the winter.

• Shield Country
• Boardwalks & Lookouts
• Impact Basin Geology
• Winter Trails

Source: Conservation Sudbury

💧 Onaping Falls & the A.Y. Jackson Lookout

North-west of the city, the Onaping River drops through a rock gorge that Group of Seven painter A.Y. Jackson put on canvas in 1953 — the lookout named for him stands where he worked. A trail runs down from the viewing platform towards the base, steep in places and worth it. The falls run hardest in the spring melt, and the surrounding rock is part of the Sudbury Basin's shattered bedrock, some of it carrying shatter cones from the impact itself.

• Group of Seven Site
• River Gorge
• Spring Melt
• Impact Bedrock

Source: City of Greater Sudbury

🚶 Bell Park & the Ramsey Lake Boardwalk

Ramsey Lake sits right against downtown — one of the largest lakes contained within a Canadian city — and Bell Park runs along its western shore with a boardwalk out over the water. It is the city's front porch: a flat, easy walk of a couple of kilometres past beaches, an amphitheatre and Science North's snowflake buildings, with loons on the lake and the whole thing lit at dusk. The wider Ramsey Lake trail system continues from here.

• Lakeside Boardwalk
• Downtown Access
• Beaches
• Science North

Source: City of Greater Sudbury

🏔️ Killarney & the La Cloche Quartzite

An hour and a half south-west, Killarney Provincial Park holds the white quartzite ridges of the La Cloche Mountains against water so clear it is startling — landscape that the Group of Seven painted hard enough to help get the park protected in 1964. The Crack, The Pig and the long La Cloche Silhouette Trail are the best-known routes, and they are rock scrambles rather than strolls. For Sudbury, it is the weekend trip everyone eventually makes.

• White Quartzite Ridges
• Group of Seven
• The Crack
• Backcountry Routes

Source: Ontario Parks