Image: Looking across Jingwakoki Campground at storm damage.
Photo credit: Josie Dismore
Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park is located along the beautiful shores of the Mattawa River, a Canadian Heritage River with a rich history of trade, travel, and exploration. Since the 1960s, Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park has continued to add to this rich history of exploration and recreation by offering an access to campers, paddlers, and anglers to enjoy everything the Mattawa River has to offer. In June 2025, everything changed for the park.
On the evening of June 21, 2025, Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park experienced one of the most destructive weather events in its history.
What began as a typical summer thunderstorm quickly escalated into a violent downburst that flattened forests, crushed vehicles and trailers, and forced the park to close for the remainder of the season.
For those who know the park as a sanctuary of towering pines and serene trails, the transformation was unimaginable.
Image: A photo taken looking across Moore Lake in spring 2023. The point of land in the bottom-left is Bagwa day-use area. Jingwakoki Campground is across the lake in the upper left of the photo and Babawasse Campground boat launch and beach areas are on the right.
Photo credit: Ontario Parks
Image: A photo taken looking across Moore Lake in fall 2025. What were once dense forested areas are now clear, open spaces. The roads of Jingwakoki Campground are clearly visible on the left and some of Babawasse Campground on the right.
Photo credit: Ontario Parks
What happened?
Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a severe storm swept across the area, bringing intense lightning, torrential rain, and powerful winds.
The storm unleashed a downburst, a forceful column of air that plunges down from the clouds and spreads outward upon hitting the ground. Unlike a tornado, which rotates, a downburst drives straight down and then fans out, creating widespread destruction in a matter of minutes.
Winds exceeded 100 km/h, snapping century-old pines like toothpicks and toppling tens of thousands of trees across the park’s campgrounds and trails.
Roads were blocked, power lines downed, and campers trapped in tents and trailers.
Image: Photo of Jingwakoki Campground post storm damage, taken July 23, 2025
Photo credit: Western University’s Northern Tornado Project Team
The hardest-hit areas included the Jingwakoki Campground and the area of the Canadian Ecology Centre, which suffered significant infrastructure damage. Once a majestic pine forest, where generations of visitors had explored and made memories, now resembled a clear-cut logging operation.
The dense, entangled mess of fallen trees and branches made evacuation an overwhelming challenge for everyone who came together to help. Thankfully, there were no fatalities.
The storm’s impact was so severe that we had no choice but to close the park for the remainder of the 2025 season.
The aftermath: surreal and heartbreaking
For employees of the park, the aftermath was surreal.
Safety was the top priority as staff worked to clear roads, assess damages, and allow campers to retrieve belongings. But the emotional toll was heavy. Trees continued to fall for days after the storm, their root systems destabilized by the initial blast.
Areas where employees worked daily and knew like they were their own backyards were suddenly unrecognizable. Familiar landmarks vanished under tangled masses of fallen timber. Navigating the land with no remaining recognizable landmarks was incredibly disorienting.
Image: The beginning of the Kag Trail, 2021
Photo credit: Josie Dinsmore
Image: The trailhead to the Kag Trail (2025). This trail was a park favourite, weaving through towering red pines.
Photo credit: Josie Dinsmore
There was, and still is, grief for the loss of the parks’ majestic old-growth trees, some which were centuries old. And for many, there is still a shattered sense of safety for a place where people came to rest and recharge.
Looking at the campground, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the immense silence, broken only by the occasional crash of another tree, when typically in the summer there would be sounds of people laughing and yelling, and birds singing.
Image: The Jingwakoki Campground pictured after storm damages (date)
Photo credit: Josie Dinsmore
Recovery efforts: a monumental task
After clearing the web of debris to provide safe access for campers returning to collect belongings, clean-up began in earnest.
Ontario Parks partnered with logging companies to salvage downed timber. Some trees were salvaged for lumber, and many were ground into chips to support electricity generation.
Image: Rows of cut trees lined the roadways of the park for months, waiting to be loaded onto trucks to become future hydro poles, or to be chipped to support electricity generation (date).
Photo credit: Josie Dinsmore
Comfort stations, vault toilets, water taps, electrical pedestals, and the cabins at the Canadian Ecology Centre all required extensive work. Ontario Parks staff worked hard with contractors over the winter months to have all these facilities safe and available for visitors as of our opening on May 8, 2026.
But, no matter how much time, effort, or money is spent, Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park will be forever changed.
Moving forward with hope into a new landscape
Ontario Parks continues the rebuilding process, using this cleared slate to improve infrastructure and meet visitors’ needs into the future. The revitalized park will feature a new visitor hub with educational exhibits, a park store, equipment rentals for all-season activities, plus an extended operating season with winter activities such as skiing and snowshoeing.
The forest, too, will recover; but not overnight.
As part of the restoration work, Ontario Parks partnered with Forests Canada through the Species Conservation Program to plant 500 native trees in the fall of 2025. This spring, the park and Forests Canada, have added an additional 7,500 trees with the help of Algonquin College students. These trees are still young and will take time to grow into a full forest to support biodiversity.
Image: As of May 2026, newly planted trees line the back of some campsites in Babawasse Campground.
Photo credit: Ontario Parks
Until then, what was once a dense pine forest will be a meadow, providing habitat for different species and fostering biodiversity. These open spaces will create new opportunities for exploration and memory-making, even as there is mourning for what was lost.
This storm was a stark reminder of how quickly the familiar can become foreign. For staff, volunteers, and visitors, the experience was humbling and heartbreaking.
Yet amid the devastation, there is hope: in the tireless work of recovery, in the adaptability of ecosystems, and in the promise that future generations will still find beauty and peace here, even if the landscape looks different.