Perhaps the most well known and heavily visited natural feature in Western Ontario is Kakabeka Falls on the Kaministiquia River, 24 miles west of Thunder Bay. Dropping 130 feet in several powerful torrents, it is often referred to as the Niagara Falls of the North.
Kakabeka Falls is protected within a Provincial Park and can be viewed from boardwalks and stairways on both sides of the river. During our brief visit this morning, my wife and I agreed that it is one of the most impressive cascades that we have had the pleasure to visit.
The geology of Kakabeka Falls is also of interest. A resistant capstone of chert overlies soft shale of the Gunflint Formation, 1.8 billion years old; within this shale, fossils of ancient stromatolites have been discovered. As the shale erodes beneath the chert caprock, the latter plunges into the gorge and the waterfall slowly retreats upstream.
