Lookout Sioux Lookout

We recently spent the weekend in the oh so exciting town of Sioux Lookout with the ever so large population of 5000. We arrived late Thursday night after traveling on roads that seemed to lead nowhere and seeing some interesting wildlife along the way such as foxes coyotes and even a moose. We were billeted with the amazing families of former Hero Holiday participants Jenna, Paige and Rylie, who were on our Dominican Republic trip this past summer. We performed a stellar show at the local high school Queen Elizabeth Secondary School and got a great response from the students of which a large percent were native given our northerly location in Ontario. Now you might think ok, what are you going to do in this super small town for fun, read a book or something, toss a stone or two? Well that was my initial thought as well. The father of one of our School of Leadership students; Carly, was gracious enough to give us a tour of the town. Along the way we crossed a bridge over a river and someone made a comment how it looked like it be fun to jump off of. The next thing you know we’re pulled over and leaning over the edge of the bridge ready to jump. Did I mention it was 8 degrees that day. So we jumped off that a few times and once we were too cold to continue, we loaded our wet selves back into the bus and cranked the heat. Another stop for us on our tour was to the local garbage dump where we watched and waited for the local bears to come by and feast on the trash. Apparently there can be up to seventy bears at a time there! But unfortunately, due to the time of year, most of them were hibernating and we only saw a momma and her cub.

The following day Jenna’s dad (billet) offered to take a few of us out walleye fishing on his boat. Four of us went, myself and Jamie were experienced, but Jenn and Nathaniel were new at this. It was beautiful out on the water and the leaves on the trees were just changing colour. Apparently it was a bad day for fishing for those parts but where I’m used to going I’d call that a pretty good day. I caught 2 walleye too small to keep, Jenna’s dad caught one that was too big to keep, Nate and Jamie got skunked, and of course due to beginners luck Jen caught the most bringing in 5 but only one sizable enough to keep. On our last day we went out to watch the local hockey team, the Sioux Lookout flyers play a team from Thunder Bay. It was a good game, only one fight though (is it bad that that’s my favorite part of the game?). All and all a pretty epic weekend especially for such a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Josh, Road Team Assistant