The Massasauga Provincial Park
provincial park in Ontario

The Massasauga Provincial Park is a provincial park in Parry Sound District, Ontario, Canada, stretching from the town of Parry Sound south to the Moon River. The park has an area of 131.05 km2 (50.60 sq mi).
The park encompasses hundreds of islands on the coast of Georgian Bay and many inland lakes including Clear Lake and Spider Lake. Classified as a "Natural Environment" park, it contains no roads, so camping is limited to interior sites. The sites on the bay can be reached by motor boat whereas those on the lakes are typically reached by non-motorized craft such as canoes or kayaks. The park also has mooring anchors for boats to overnight in some inlets on Georgian Bay.
An interpretive trail is located on Wreck Island. A multi-day backpacking trail in the northern part of the park, the Nipissing-North Arm Orienteering Trail, is used for orienteering. This wilderness trail is uncleared and only minimally marked.
The park contains a striking landscape of windswept pines clinging to smooth granite-striped rocks, towering cliffs, narrow bays and inlets.
“The Massasauga Provincial Park” enters the record as provincial park in Ontario. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Massasauga, Provincial and Park can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Massasauga Provincial Park” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Massasauga, Provincial and Park provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6784554. Authority coordinates are 45.226, -80.056. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Massasauga Provincial Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.