Sault Ste. Marie CanadaCruise Port Guide

Sault Ste. Marie — universally called 'the Soo' — is a border city straddling the St. Mary's River on the Ontario–Michigan frontier, connecting Lakes Superior and Huron at one of the Great Lakes' most strategically important waterways. For millennia, the powerful rapids of the St. Mary's River (the 'Bahwating,' or gathering place, in Ojibwe) were the only passage between the two great lakes, drawing Ojibwe people and, later, European fur traders, missionaries, and explorers to its shores. Today the city is defined by two engineering marvels that together account for its prominence on Great Lakes cruise itineraries: the Soo Locks, a parallel series of navigational locks that lift or lower oceangoing vessels 6.4 metres between Lake Superior (the highest Great Lake) and Lake Huron, and the Agawa Canyon Tour Train, an all-day wilderness railway journey through the boreal grandeur of the Algoma wilderness north of the city.

The Soo Locks are among the most heavily trafficked commercial waterways in the world: roughly 10,000 vessels transit the locks annually, carrying grain, iron ore, coal, and limestone between the upper and lower Great Lakes in quantities that make them critical arteries of the North American interior economy. The American-side locks (operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan) and the Canadian Sault Ste. Marie Canal (a National Historic Site) sit side by side; from the viewing platform and Soo Locks Visitor Center on the US side, visitors can watch 300-metre-long ocean freighters rise and fall in the lock chambers from elevated walkways at remarkably close range. The scale of the vessels relative to the lock walls — inches of clearance on each side — is breathtaking, and the narrated Soo Locks Boat Tour, which locks through alongside the freighters in a commercial passenger vessel, is one of the Great Lakes' most memorable experiences.

The Algoma Central Railway's Agawa Canyon Tour Train — departing from Sault Ste. Marie station each morning during its August–October operating season — travels north through 183 km of roadless boreal wilderness to the floor of Agawa Canyon, a dramatic gorge of waterfalls, cliffs, and mixed forest whose fall colours (mid-September through early October) are among the most spectacular in Canada. The train operates an all-day round-trip excursion (approximately 9 hours) through terrain accessible by no other means, stopping for two hours at the canyon floor for hiking to waterfalls and viewpoints. The Group of Seven painters, discovering Algoma from the same railway in the 1920s, produced some of the defining images of Canadian landscape art from what they saw on these journeys.