Cottages For Sale on Mazinaw Lake

Owning a cottage on Mazinaw Lake

Mazinaw is the lake with the cliff. Mazinaw Rock rises about 100 metres straight out of the water near the narrows, and the lake below it drops to around 145 metres, among the deepest inland water in southern Ontario. Owning here means living with that scale: cold, clear, very deep water, steep shorelines and a view that people drive hours to see.

The lake is really two basins joined at a tight narrows. Bon Echo Provincial Park takes in the middle, including the narrows and the rock, so private cottages sit to the north and south of it. Plenty are reached only by boat. Mazinaw is the one lake in the park where power boats are allowed, so summer brings a mix of cottage runabouts, campers' fishing boats and a steady line of canoes paddling to the pictographs.

Highway 41 runs along the lake, with Cloyne to the north and Kaladar to the south. This is Addington Highlands, quiet and wooded, with a short summer season and a long, still fall.

• Mazinaw Rock
• Bon Echo Provincial Park
• Pictographs
• Very deep water

History of Mazinaw Lake

The name comes from the Algonquian Mazinaabikinigan-zaaga'igan, meaning painted-image lake. It refers to the more than 260 Indigenous pictographs painted along the base of Mazinaw Rock, among them images of Nanabush, the Ojibwe trickster figure. The pictograph site was named a National Historic Site of Canada in 1982.

In 1889 Weston A. Price and his wife bought land here and built the Bon Echo Inn at the narrows. Flora MacDonald Denison and her husband later bought the property, and she ran the inn through the 1910s. With Horace Traubel she had a tribute to the poet Walt Whitman carved into the rock, and the inscription is still visible from the water.

After Flora died in 1921, the property passed to her son, the writer Merrill Denison. Lightning started a fire that destroyed the inn in 1936, and it was never rebuilt. Merrill donated the land to the province in 1959, and Bon Echo Provincial Park opened in 1965.

North Mazinaw, South Mazinaw and the narrows

A narrow channel splits the lake into two basins. North Mazinaw is the larger and deeper one, and Mazinaw Rock rises along its eastern shore. Because the park wraps around the narrows, every boat moving between the two halves passes the rock and the park's beaches and docks, which makes the narrows the busiest stretch of water in summer.

Ontario Parks allows power boats on Mazinaw but no other lake in the park. Canoes and kayaks launch from the park's lagoon, and paddlers often stay close to the cliff, so slow down and give them room.

Deep water, lake trout and pickerel

With an average depth of about 41 metres, Mazinaw holds a lot of cold water. Ontario Parks lists lake trout, walleye (yellow pickerel), smallmouth and largemouth bass, lake whitefish and northern pike. Trout anglers fish deep in summer, while bass and pike hold in the shallower bays at either end. Check Fisheries Management Zone regulations before you go.

The dam and the fall drawdown

The Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority owns and operates the Mazinaw Lake Dam at the outlet, which holds the summer level and controls flow into the Mississippi River during spring runoff. Each fall the conservation authority lowers the lake. On Mazinaw the drawdown is held back until after hunting season, roughly mid-November to mid-December, so boats can still get through the narrows to hunt camps and water-access cottages. Plan your boat haul-out and dock work around that timing.

Water-access cottages and emergencies

If your cottage is boat-in only, emergency crews will meet you at the shore, not at your door. The Mazinaw Property Owners Association lists set meeting points for boat-access owners, including Brown's Camp, the Tapping's Landing public boat launch, Smart's Marina and a landing on Highway 41. Make sure your property has its blue civic address sign and that everyone at the cottage knows which landing to use.

Cloyne, Highway 41 and the shoreline

Cloyne, just north of the lake, is the closest settlement for basics. Kaladar sits to the south where Highway 41 meets Highway 7. Larger shopping and hospital care mean a longer drive, so stock up on the way in.

The property owners association runs lake health programs, including Blue Lakes certification, shoreline health advice and invasive species education. It urges boaters to clean, drain and dry their boats, and it points members to the conservation authority's invasive species list and highlights Eurasian watermilfoil as an aquatic invader to watch for.