Stratton Lake Camping

For the Labour Day weekend, we headed up to Algonquin for a last-hurrah canoeing trip of the year.

It was a pretty laid-back trip by our standards, and I greatly enjoyed it. Filled with sunshine, swimming, and great company, it was a perfect end to the canoeing season.

For the first time ever, we even had a canine friend join us. He insisted on standing guard almost every time I went off to use the bathroom, which was charming in a weird kind of way.

We enjoyed the natural waterslides at High Falls – but headed back to our site when the number of visitors ballooned from a dozen to upwards of 70. We’re picky like that.

On the last morning, we had pancakes – hubby tried to finish a frying-pan-sized one, but only got halfway before calling it quits.

We even stopped by Barron Canyon on the way back, for a quick hike out to the edge. This park has some great views!

The full set of photos from the trip is here.

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Brent Run 2012

On the August long weekend, the hubby and I decided to do a canoe route called the Brent Run. It’s a there-and-back trip, from Canoe lake to Cedar lake, and back, in Algonquin Park. We were attempting to do it in 4 days, but unfortunately due to a combination of rain and ridiculously strong wind on the crucial day had to abort. We made it as far as Catfish lake, where the plan was to drop off the packs and continue to Cedar lake and back in an afternoon, unencumbered by our gear, but it was not to be.

It was a trip to test our limits, and we definitely found them – on trips that I do for fun, I’m happy to never do a 13-hour paddling day again. If my life depended on it, I could keep going, but “for fun”, that’s enough.

It was still a very successful trip, if we’re judging by the number (and quality) of wildlife sightings. We passed within a few dozen feet of a very intimidating (but oh-so-awesome!) moose.

We also saw a loon pop up within 10 feet of our canoe, and an otter swimming right next to our canoe for a few seconds (we must have surprised it). No photos of either because it all happened too fast.

Due to the fire ban, there was an airplane patrolling the park every night, checking for campfires. On our last day, we saw it dropping off some rangers and their canoe. Now that’s an interesting way to get to work!

The full set of photos is here.

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Cedar to Cauchon

Another successful canoeing weekend. We made the run up from Cedar to Cauchon and back. The original plan was to do a more complicated one-way trip that involved another couple, two cars, and two bikes – but the other couple ended up  not being able to go, so we thought quickly to come up with this route. Actually, we were surprised we hadn’t considered something along this route sooner, since it involved all of 1000 m in portages (500 m each way) for the whole weekend. That’s peanuts compared to most of the other trips hubby has had us doing!

This may well go down as the best weekend (weather-wise) in our canoeing history, and it was not too shabby both on wildlife sightings (we saw a beaver and probably 7 or 8 loons) as well as the scenery.

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Camping

We saw this guy when we were canoeing in Algonquin last weekend.

Hubby has much better eyes for spotting wildlife than I do, and he’s gotten quite good at paddling in a quiet and non-threatening manner, allowing us to get close enough for shots like this. This is definitely the closest we’ve gotten to a loon, and in this case the closest we came is when after another bout spent underwater, he actually popped up closer to us than he had been before. Love the curious wildlife.

Although maybe not so much when it tries to take a sip of my drink – the first afternoon, I found a chipmunk prostrating itself on top of the can with my drink, looking for all intents and purposes as if he wanted a drink. My best guess is that actually he smelled the peanuts from the trail mix I was munching on just before taking a sip… Still – that’s a gutsy chippy!

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Algonquin trip – Grand Lake loop

Because I’m obsessive like that, there’s still no post about the California trip. You know, because I still haven’t organized all those pictures. Oops. Laundry between that trip and our Algonquin sojourn took precedence, after all.

Which leads me to my post – I thought I would jot down some thoughts about the Algonquin trip before I forgot. And here’s fair warning to you – there will be no Algonquin trip pictures. As in, none. I don’t know if it was burn-out from the California trip or just plain combination of not-so-amazing weather, difficulty in accessing the waterproof camera bag, and same-ness of the sights, but I didn’t take a single picture on this trip. That’s right. A travesty, I know.

Friday

Our trip started early on Friday morning, fuelled by homemade english (mc)muffins. Delicious! After loading up the canoe, we raced across Grand lake ahead of a raucous-looking group of 8 guys in 4 canoes, not wanting to be stuck behind them on portages (we needn’t have worried, as it looked like they didn’t even make it past the first portage).

A few portages later we were at our campsite on Little Carcajou Lake, tarp and tent set up just in time for threatening clouds to roll in. [Is it bad that I can't exactly picture our first campsite, 4 days later??] Going to make dinner we discovered that we hadn’t brought utensils… huh. Husband to the rescue with his whittling skills.

Saturday

Saturday went off gorgeously, with some reasonable portaging and a few minor glitches in searching for portages. Upon leaving our site, we were also met with a trio of beavers chittering and growling at us – so cute! I know they were meant to scare us off, but the little growls were just too adorable. We also happened on another well-established beaver dam and had to portage across it.

Our Green Leaf Lake site had a lovely rock to swim off, and after a quick dip we yet again set to setting up the tarp and tent. The tarp turned out to be a good idea as we got a nice downpour around dinnertime.

That’s also about the time that we discovered that our tent, set up in a gorgeously flat (so we thought) spot, was actually half-floating on a puddle. Oops. Off we went to move the tent, to a drier but much rockier (i.e. lumpier) spot.

Sunday

Sunday morning we were met with rain, and by mid-day we had the option of cutting the trip short and taking the shortcut back to the car (we didn’t).

This was the day of the monster 7k in portages (yes, as in 7 thousand meters), which went really well thanks to the fact that we were on an old forestry road for most of it. It really made me realize just how much of our energy is spent on finding footing and stepping up and down around obstacles on “regular” portages.

The wind picked up just as we had to cross Clemow Lake to our campsite, and we had fun setting up a flapping tarp in the gusty wind. No rain tonight, but better safe than sorry.

As we were sitting at the site, enjoying the last light of the sun, I pointed out to Dan something swimming across the water to a nearby island. “Pretty big for an otter”, I’m thinking. Nope, not an otter – turns out that we had a bear neighbour! A good-size (and thankfully well-fed-looking) bear clambered up onto an island 150m or so away from our site, and then continued splashing across the bog to our side of the lake. Huh. After making some appropriately discouraging noises (think those campsite neighbours you don’t want to have nearby), we went off to bed. No nighttime visitors, although Dan says he didn’t get much sleep. Ah, the nights when I’m ever-so-thankful for my earplugs…

Monday

By Monday morning the temperature had dropped a good 10 degrees, and we were glad to be on our way back. A good tail wind made our paddle the length of Grand Lake mostly pleasant, although toques and gloves were definitely in order. Some loons who were out on a fishing trip with their babies bid us farewell.

And that’s our Algonquin Labour Day trip in a nutshell.

Apologies for the lack of pictures. I promise I’ll make it up with the California ones. Soon. ish.

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Canoeing pictures!

Don’t know how, but between everything else that was going on this weekend, I also managed to go through and edit some of the pictures from our canoe trip (ahem, two weeks ago).

While I’m great at writing pages and pages of travel notes when I’m going somewhere far away, on canoeing trips – not so much. So I don’t really have many stories to share now – pictures will have to do. The full set of pictures is here.

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Alonguin trip: the pictures

Despite the bad weather preventing me from taking as many pictures as I’d like, due to

(a) not wanting to take the good camera out in the rain, or

(b) not being able to stop paddling long enough to take a picture, because otherwise we’d drift off course,

I was able to take some pictures after all. Below are a few teasers, see the gallery for full list of pictures.

The sun greeted us on Sunday morning… until we hit Opeongo, we actually thought we were in for a fairly decent day!The day of the scary thunderstorms. It’s hard to convey through pictures how dark it got… suffice it to say that some of the pictures from this time actually turned out blurry, there was that little light.The evening of the scary thunderstorm day we actually got a few hours of gorgeous sunshine in which to dry out our clothes.

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Algonquin trip 2010: the shorthand

I’m not nearly as motivated as my husband to write about our trip in detail just yet, what with all the housework that’s piled up and what not. But I figured I would at least make an appearance and let you know I did survive – if just barely at times. So here’s a quick rundown of the highlights, with more details to follow once I sort through my pictures, hopefully over the weekend.

The one constant this trip was the forces of nature. All week, we were hounded by wind, rain, clouds – or a defeating combination of all three. One stressful day in particular, we were surrounded by thunderstorms (or a single thunderstorm which kept circling back to us – we weren’t sure). I’ve mostly only canoed on calm water before, so it was a bit of a surprise to encounter close-to-3-foot waves on Opengo lake. Lots of fun by powerboat (thanks to Matt of the water taxi), not so much in a canoe. Even to escape the waves, we had to perform an epic turnaround. Glad that’s over.

Another force of nature was animals. And not even the ones you’d expect – on the second day, I accused Dan of having ripped my backpack (which was the designated food backpack) when taking it down from the tree. Imagine our surprise that evening when we noticed a couple of fat little mice waddling around our campfire area, completely unafraid. Putting two and two together, we realized that the little suckers must have climbed down the food pack rope, chewed through the pack, and through two ziplocks (on closer inspection, we noticed that they had taken a few bites out of our bread).

Despite the unpleasant conditions, one thing I was grateful for was that we had packed appropriately. We slept dry, were able to cook food when required by our menu, and didn’t stray too far off course. Another thing I was grateful for was that I still got to spend all that time with Dan, and both of us kept our spirits (mostly) high throughout the trip. Yay spousal bonding.

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Enjoy your long weekend!

You know what’s nicer than a Friday afternoon? – A friday afternoon before the long weekend!

And what’s nicer than that? – Knowing that you’re not coming back to work for a full week, since you’ll be on vacation. In our case, canoeing in Algonquin!

And what could possibly be even better than that? Getting off on such a Friday at 2 p.m., because you get an email from your CEO saying everyone should leave at 2 and enjoy the long weekend. For real. [Or, you know, some prankster hacked his email and sent out that message, but... meh. I take things at face value. ]

Enjoy your Labour Day weekend. Dan and I will be spending it somewhere around here.

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