Epoxy

Lake of Bays

Muskoka, Ontario, Canada

Also known as Baysville, Dwight, Dorset

For 55 years a railway ran from Lake of Bays to the next lake over. It was a mile and an eighth long and billed itself the world's smallest.

Lake of Bays sits about 175 feet above Peninsula Lake, with a ridge between them and barely a mile of ground to cross. Steamboats could not make the trip, so from around 1905 the Huntsville and Lake of Bays Railway carried mail, tanbark and tourists over the top.

The grade reached seven per cent at its steepest, on a switchback. Two per cent is considered steep now. Crews called it the Corkscrew route, and the engines were known as the Hot Tamale because they threw fire out of their stacks.

The last steamship stopped in 1958 and the train followed a year later. The track came up, the equipment went south, and volunteers brought it back to Huntsville in the 1980s.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: White Pearl
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: February 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Lake of Bays map by Keyway

How this one was made

Lake of Bays earns its name on the workbench as much as on a map. All those arms and inlets come through as narrow channels in the engraving, and narrow channels are where air gets stuck with nowhere to go, so a good share of this board was slow work in small spaces. The white is its own problem. On walnut it will pick up anything left behind, so most of the prep here went into cleaning and sealing before any resin went down.