Aerial view of small forested islands scattered across the St. Lawrence River at sunset
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Thousand Islands

"Somewhere between a lake and a river, someone scattered a thousand tiny kingdoms and forgot to tell anyone."

A scattered archipelago where the St. Lawrence River splits into more than a thousand granite islets, straddling the Canada-US border in improbable, castle-dotted beauty.

Pierre Words & photographs

The boat pulled away from the Gananoque dock and within minutes the open lake dissolved into something stranger — islands everywhere, some no bigger than a single pine tree rooted in a slab of granite, others large enough to carry a full estate with boathouse and dock. Our guide told us the actual count is 1,864 islands, not a neat thousand at all, defined officially as any landmass that stays above water year-round and supports at least one living tree. It’s a wonderfully bureaucratic definition for a landscape this whimsical, and it means the border between Canada and the United States actually zigzags through the archipelago, some islands American, some Canadian, occasionally splitting a single island down the middle.

The whole region sits at the point where Lake Ontario funnels into the St. Lawrence River, and the geology is the kind of thing that only makes sense once you’ve seen it — this is the exposed edge of the Frontenac Arch, a granite ridge connecting the Canadian Shield to the Adirondacks, worn down by glaciers into these thousand scattered humps of rock.

Boldt Castle and the Gilded Age

Boldt Castle, on the American side but visible from most of the Canadian tour boats, is the story everyone tells first. George Boldt, the hotelier who ran New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, began building a six-story stone castle here in 1900 as a gift for his wife Louise, only to abandon construction mid-build the moment she died suddenly in 1904 — the workers reportedly downed tools that same day and never returned. It sat as a crumbling, roofless shell for nearly seventy years before restoration began, and cruising past it now, half-finished towers still visible in places, it remains one of the most genuinely romantic and slightly heartbreaking sights on the river.

Grand stone turrets of Boldt Castle rising from a small island on the St. Lawrence River

The Dressing, of All Things

The other thing this region is famous for, somewhat absurdly, is salad dressing. Thousand Island dressing is claimed by several local sources as having originated here in the early 1900s, most persistently through a fishing guide’s wife named Sophie LaLonde who served it to her husband’s clients, with the recipe later passed to actress May Irwin and popularized from her Thousand Islands summer home. I ordered a burger at a dockside diner in Gananoque just to see it done properly, and the local version — heavier on the relish, less sweet than the bottled stuff — was better than I expected to admit.

Small stone summer cottage with a red boathouse on a granite island in the Thousand Islands

When to go: June through September for boat tours and warm-water swimming off the smaller islands; September and early October bring dramatic foliage along the shoreline and noticeably fewer crowds on the tour boats.