Trip Log - Prologue: Wendigo to Cedar Lake, Canada Day 2014

Prologue       go to Day 1      go to Day 2     go to Day 3    go to Day 4

We’d had our first trip of the season on Grand Lake then we’d done an easy one night at Sec Lake – not a single portage there.  It was time to spread our wings and try a bigger trip.  Three nights!  We had pored over Jeff’s maps after LT had ordered a full set online.  With each full set map order you select a free map you can give to someone else.  LT picked the Central map which covers the area we were going to explore for the very first time.  (And this is a good thing, as you’ll soon see.)

We would put in on Wendigo Lake, portage into Allen Lake then take a hard right onto our first attempt at black (unmaintained) portages.  We would wind up North River into North River Lake and camp there.  The next day would be challenging, making our way to Cedar Lake – again all black portages, longer ones than we had ever done before.  The 3^rd day would find us going down the Petawawa River to Radiant Lake.  The final day we would do 8 portages back up to Wendigo Lake, returning to our car.  That was “THE PLAN”.

In order to help with the extensive portaging of this trip, I reserved a canoe from Trailhead in Ottawa, a really nice canoe that weighed 35 pounds.  We picked it up on Friday night, it was a thing of great beauty.  Red, so thin you could practically see through it, it fit on the roof of the car differently than the other rentals.  There was no tying the furthest ends of the canoe to under the bumpers, it was held on with straps that wrapped around its middle and went through both doors, clamped on one side.  The gentleman helping us tie the canoe on, said “and a twist for good luck”, where he had twisted the straps of the canoe before tying them.  We didn’t really pay attention to the remark, it was a spacey remark and he was behaving in a particularly spacey way. 

The canoe looked like it had hardly been used.  Maybe someone had rented it for a couple of hours of paddling at Britannia Bay or some other non-rocky, non-loggy, non-muddy shoreline.  Pristine, with no scratches.  I made a joke with the clerk when filling in the paperwork about maybe not bringing it back.  She joked back about the value.  So I asked.  It was worth about $4,000.  Oh dear!  Here I was in possession of an expensive canoe that was pretty and unused looking.  Oh dear!

I had brought along a couple of my bike cable locks and I made LT lock it to the wooden fence in his backyard overnight.  I wasn’t leaving it on my car in full view in the parking lot of his condo.  I think we gave it the first scratch laying it down on the cement patio stones in the back yard.  

The pretty red canoe

Here's a link to the food plan for the trip.

Evening Paddle

We decided to take the canoe out for an easy evening paddle this week.  I swung by LT's place, we loaded the canoe on my car and I drove to Shirley's Bay.  I had been here once before, just for a picnic on the beach.  Hint, it's easier to lauch the canoe in the area designated for boat launching (I know, sounds pretty obvious!).  The Ottawa River is pretty shallow here and it's mostly shale rock.

I can't belive how calm the water was.  The only waves were wakes from the various other non-self-propelled watercraft we were surrounded by.

We paddled towards Aylmer Island, did a loop around it and returned.  (Sorry for the slight angle, sometimes it's hard to get the horizon straight in the canoe, LOL)  These pictures were taken with my small Canon PowerShot.  It went for a swim on our last camping trip last year and has come back to life. Although it did prevent me from taking any more pictures on that particular trip.

Throwback Thursday

As I am fairly new to the canoe camping adventure, I don't have any older pictures of trips taken in the 1970's or 1980's.  However I did come across the picture below.  It's my 1985 Chevy Cavalier with my brother's canoe on top. It's probably taken at Lac Philippe when I was there car camping.  I used to have a very basic old tent trailer I camped with in those days.  I'll have to see if I can dig up a picture of that beast.  

I had a cottage for a few years and during that time his canoe stayed at the cottage.  I'll have to find a picture of my log cottage too.

In the meantime....memories!

I never portaged with this canoe!

Bag Makeover

LT has had his eye on a particular bag at MEC.  He almost bought it before his solo trip.  When he got back from that trip, his talk was all around how to tweak the bag combination we are carrying.  Here's what he's considering:

Mountainsmith Tour TLS

It's basically an oversized fanny pack that costs $70!  Every time we're in MEC he asks my opinion and I hem and haw.  Seems crazy expensive to me, for a fanny pack!

I've been doing a bit of a clean-up in my spare bedroom and I found a backpack I bought at Value Village for a whole $6.99 (not including tax, of course).  My intent was to cut it up and use it to design a pet carrier.  The inside of the backpack had three full compartments and I wasn't able to wrap my head around what to do with the two extra sections, so it was just sitting there.

Original purchase

Yesterday I decided to make my very own oversized fanny pack with it.  Out came the scissors and the stitch ripper and I went to work.

All torn up

I used the sidepockets on the outside of the bag as a guide for the smallest size I could cut the bag down to.  I made sure to cut the section with the handle on top of the bag to put it on the smaller version instead of cutting it off completely.

I only did one seam where I forgot to add one of the 3 sections of fabric being sewn back in place so I had to tear that out and re-do it.

Now the final version is not pretty and I would never submit it as an example of my finer sewing skills.  Some of the seams were mashed and stitched for strength, not beauty.  Here are a couple of pictures of the final product - side and front.  Notice that I kept the VV price tag on!  Probably to emphasize that $70 is too much for a glorified fanny pack!

Front view

Side view

I used the backpack straps to create a belt, now I just need to add a clip buckle.  Do you think LT will carry it instead of the pricey one?  

Epilogue:

LT had a couple of suggestions which I implemented.  I had taken the shoulder straps and sewn them onto the bottom tabs and needed to get a buckle.  I left the bottom straps in place.  

He suggested I use velcro for the closure instead of a buckle.  That worked well! 

Then he suggested I somehow put something in place to allow him to shrink the bag or tighten it front to back.  The bottom straps worked perfectly for that.  I took the buckles they had gone into from the top shoulder straps and sewed them onto the upper front section.  Pics below.

Side buckle to cinch the bag tighter

Ditto above

Velcro waist closure

20 Minutes of Sheer Hell

This post is about an event that took place a long time ago, but it was a very scary thing and it has certainly determined how I approach being in a canoe on the water all the time.  Respectfully, very, very respectfully.

It was probably the early spring of 1990.  I was dating a chef that lived in Wakefield, Quebec.  I had my own small apartment in Ottawa. Chefs work weird hours, we often didn't have much time together on the weekends.  But this particular spring Sunday afternoon he was off and I was in Wakefield with him.

He owned an aluminum Grumman canoe, the exact same one that was auctioned off by Bill Mason's family this year (2015).  It was on display at the Outdoor Show in early spring here.  As I touched Bill Mason's canoe, many memories flooded back to me.

It was one of the first warmish days of the year, probably very early April. The first day you could go out without a heavy jacket. The first day we all run out of our houses and revel in the hope that spring is really going to come after all. The first day that the sun feels warm on your face.  I was wearing a thick cotton hoodie with jeans that day.

The chef decided we would go for a paddle on the swollen Gatineau River.  At that time there were still logs to be found in the river, it hadn't been cleaned up yet.  There weren't a lot, but they were there.  And there were big chunks of ice flowing in the spring run off.

He had spent many, many hours in the narrow section of the river just below the covered bridge with his windsurfing board during hot summer days and claimed he knew the water well.  I'm all for trusting when someone else has complete confidence in what they are doing.  I'll definitely defer to someone who acts like they know what they're talking about.  After all, it was his canoe, his turf.

We were able to walk over to put the canoe in near the General Store, a quiet bay, not far from the main road running through the town.  The chef explained that we would hug the shore as we followed the bay out to the main section of the river rushing by the covered bridge.  

He said "There's a big stone, we'll paddle up to just behind it.  We'll turn the canoe perpendicular to the flow and push out to the middle and get a great ride!"

"Um, won't that be dangerous?  Being perpendicular to the current?" I suggested.

"No.  The canoe will rock once, then twice, then it will right itself and it'll be just shoot out into the river."

"Okay, if you're sure."

We did exactly as he instructed.  We made it to the big stone.  We turned the canoe perpendicular to the flow, and as we started to push out from behind the stone the canoe rocked.  It rocked once, it rocked twice, then it rocked a third time and flipped.

Uh-oh.

In the first few seconds, the chef was a hero.  Going into the freezing water the first thing that happened was that all my breath left my body and I could not breath.  He calmly coached me to breath, just breath.  So I did. It was a shock, but that part was handled, now we had to figure out how to get out of this predicament.

The chef was a smart man.  But that day he was very stupid.  He was not wearing a PFD.  Nor did he even bring one into the canoe.  Here we were in totally freezing water, ice floating alongside of us, and we could not abandon the heavy, metal canoe.  I had on an old PFD that I had both zippered and tied. It's a good thing I had tied it, by the time we got out (no spoiler alert needed, I'm writing this blog, so I obviously survived, LOL) the life jacket had unzipped itself in the roiling water.  The flimsy tie was the only thing holding it on.  

Gatineau River

According to the map above the six-point star is where we launched and the four point star is where we capsized.

We were in the middle of the river and the chef suggested we flip the canoe over so he could climb into it and sit, possibly being able steer it better.  That didn't work.  He climbed back out again. We were not flowing closer to the shore we wanted to go to, we were being dragged along the main flow, which was closer to the east bank.  

We seriously thought we would hit the west shore near the five point star in the picture and we missed it.  I was getting discouraged.  Strangely enough the parts of my body in the water felt warmer than the parts out of the water. When I would raise an arm outside of the water, it was very, very cold.  We did not kick off shoes or take off any clothes to lighten our load, we pushed on.  

He was starting to flag a bit, discouraged we did not hit the shore where we expected.  I was able to talk him back, I said it wasn't that bad, we were making progress.  I could not abandon him with the canoe to make his own way, which is probably what I should have done in the first place if I had been thinking only of saving myself. 

Unbeknownst to us, there was an elderly gentleman that had seen us go into the water from his home at the end of the road where we had launched from. He left his home and walked along the shore watching our progress.

And thank god he did.  We pushed on and finally made it to shore right back where we started.  Now that I look at the map, I realize we should have just walked home from there.  But this gentleman, Mr. Eaton, was at the shore to meet us and he offered to help us.

As we got to the shore and I stepped on land I nearly passed out.  I guess it was blood flow.  I'm not a fainter.  I've only come close once or twice before. But I felt excruciating pain in both feet as I stood on the packed sand beach and my stomach threatened to come up my throat.  The chef was valiantly pulling the canoe onto the shore to ensure that the current did not pick it up and take it out again.

We walked back with Mr. Eaton to his home, it was about a quarter of a mile. I'm sure we were both in a daze. He said to us that he hoped it wasn't a problem but that the chef and I would have to share the tub to warm up.  As soon as the bathroom door was closed and it was only the two of us in the room, the chef lost all ability to function.  He started shaking and I had to undress him and help him into the tub of warm water I was running for us.

We made a few mistakes that day and they kept happening.  We had hot water in the tub, it should have been cooler to ease our bodies back to their normal temperature. I would be reminded of this for many, many months to come.

Mr. Eaton provided us with some of his dry clothing to wear as he drove us home shortly after our warm bath. We had on well worn corduroy pants with comfy wool sweaters. The chef had stopped shaking by then.

The following Tuesday a canoeist had disappeared in the Ottawa River near the Champlain Bridge.  Search and Rescue had looked and looked for him with no luck.  On the news SAR said "a canoeist would not last longer than 5 minutes in that water, it is so cold."

Five minutes?  We had been over twenty minutes in that cold water and we were okay.  Although I was suffering the strangest sensation.  Actually it was the lack of sensation.  Everywhere under my skin where there was fat or muscle, I had no nerve sensation.  It was like there were slabs of foreign material under my skin.  It took almost a year for the nerve endings to grow back.  I'm guessing they were nerve endings.  We never went to the doctor after our frozen dunking.

We did not think the whole time that we were in the water that we were going to die, but there were times when one of us was despondent that we were in a situation that we knew we weren't in control of and the other one talked us through it.  It was very frightening to think about how much danger we were in.

As a result of this experience I know I can't go white water rafting.  My body will take over and have some horrible reaction to prevent me from doing it. Fear can certainly cause a physical reaction to a situation.

However, I did get back in that aluminum canoe with the chef, although in warmer weather.  I did go canoeing in that same river, although when the river was not as full nor running as quickly.

I have had to work on my fear by doing some things that can be frightening for me.  The first trip in May, 2014 was scary for me.  Climbing into a canoe, going up Grand Lake into waves that were lifting the front of the canoe and dropping it, not a great deal, but enough to make my heart beat faster.  The water was cold, it had been the official ice-out date just a week and a half before.

LT is familiar with my story, I've told it to him a few times.  He, himself, has been dumped into the Ottawa River in March in full military gear for training, so he knows how it feels. I tell him that he has to wear a life jacket not for himself, but for me.  As obviously I will not abandon him if we capsize and if he's going to die because he's not wearing one, I will probably die with him.   Okay, I'm being a bit dramatic here.  But I'm very aware I could have died in that canoe incident. i don't ever, ever, ever want to be that close again. Neither do I want anyone else to be hurt either.  So wear your life jackets, please!

The spot we went in on the right by the stone

The picture above is a current one of the Gatineau River from the covered bridge facing the spot where we capsized.  However this was taken in late May and does not truly reflect the spring runoff.

Trip Log - Day 2: Grand Lake to Barron Canyon

go to Prologue                              go to Day 1                         Day 2

We had eggs and bacon for breakfast with two types of homemade bread, white and cinnamon raisin.  We didn’t rush, but we didn’t dawdle either.  We were up and ready to paddle the few feet to our first portage, 750 M, the longest we would have this weekend.  When we got to the other end, there was a family camping on a site right next to the muddy put-in.  They were on the move too and were monopolizing the shoreline.  We left our canoe and pack off to the side, out of the way, and walked back, thinking they would be gone by the time we finished our second trip.  Nope.

The family consisted of a hip guy with his two kids and his parents.  They were overloaded, I saw one of them carrying a Roots full-fledged rubber blow-up air mattress.   The daughter looked to be about 13 and not happy to be there.  The son was younger, maybe 11 and was the only one really carrying his weight on the trip.  The grandfather was insistent he was doing single portages only and he had what my father always called “a lazy man’s load”, which he struggled with, constantly stopping to rearrange his stuff or resting because he was carrying too much.  The only cheerful one was the chatty hip guy.  We got to know them as we leap-frogged over each other for most of the portages of the day.  At one point the daughter was actually in tears over something.

We managed to set out ahead of them on small Brigham Lake by about 5 minutes.  The next portage was 100 M and fairly quick to do.  We were in the habit of tying all the packs to the canoe crossbars each time we went into the water, in case we flipped the canoe.  I was being super careful, I wore my life jacket every moment I was on the water.  I have had a canoe mishap once before, a spur of the moment paddle in the Gatineau River with the spring run-off and ice floating in the water.   We were 20 minutes before being able to land, my partner did not have a lifejacket on, or even with him in the boat.  Anyways, this tying and untying was time consuming.

Brigham Chute

One more 440 M portage around the Brigham Chute, very pretty by the way, then we were in the Barron River with nothing but spectacular cliff faces to enjoy on our lazy meander down the river.  We let the happy family crew get ahead of us so that we could feel the river was ours and ours alone.  I took a lot of pictures and must have stated 5 dozen times how beautiful this was.  I’m going to have to expand my vocabulary.  Being able to see the Barron Canyon both from above and below, it gives you real perspective on its true beauty.  

I'll let a few of the pictures I took tell the rest of the story.

We stopped for lunch at an empty campsite once the cliffs had shrunk to regular shoreline.  I was disappointed at how little the leaves had changed.  I didn’t realize that this part of the park has predominantly coniferous trees.  I found a few red maple trees along this stretch and photographed them. 

My one picture of the fall colours

Before we knew it, we had our last portage, 345 M, and were at the Squirrel Rapids parking lot.  It had been another gorgeous day without a cloud in the sky, no breeze, warm, we could not have asked for a nicer day.  I said that we could go away this same weekend for the next 10 years and not get weather as nice as we had.  It probably only went down to 8 degrees at night, it wasn’t cold by any means.

We just made it to the outfitters before 4 p.m. to drop off the canoe.  We had such a good time, it was a disappointment to realize that the camping season was pretty much over for us and we’d have to wait what seemed like a long, long time before putting a paddle in an Algonquin Park lake again.

Potty Talk

Warning!  If you are easily grossed out, you might not want to read this post!

There's no way around it, if you're going to leave an access point in Algonquin Park to canoe or hike, at some time you will need to go to the bathroom. That mind over matter super strength you think you have will not last for your entire trip.  And you're gonna hafta go.

I will be giving the female point of view on this subject.  Us girls have it a little tougher in the back country.  My number one recommendation is to go at the permit office and again at the access point.  Enjoy those flush toilets while you can!

Supreme Deluxe Back Country Potty

The back country campsites should all be equipped with a thunderbox.  Disclaimer: I haven't visited all the campsites, so I'm not positive, and I don't want to be held accountable if you end up at a site without one.

The picture on the left is not the traditional thunderbox, this is just like a regular outhouse, except it has no door.  That's okay, it's facing away from the campsite and probably helps with odor control.  And there's something icky about being in a dark wooden shed with the door closed with spiders and mosquitoes and multiple other breeds of bugs.

A regular thunderbox is basically a wooden box (much like the inside of the seat of the outhouse) with a lid.  The thunderboxes at each campsite are placed facing away from the site and when you open the lid it provides some privacy.  

One thing you should NEVER do is to use the thunderbox to dispose of food that you weren't able to eat at dinner.  Bears can smell this food and their food handling standards are quite low.  They will go into the thunderbox to get the food.  We stayed at 2 campsites early in the season last year where both boxes had been completely flipped over by a bear searching for food.  I know, ICK! But more than ick is BEAR!!!!!

Usually when we have selected a campsite to stay at, one of the first things I scout out is the location of the thunderbox.  Some of the more established campsites have a directional sign to give you a hint where to look.  Some of the thunderbox locations are quite far from the site.  This is all dependent on the lay of the land for your campsite.  The rangers do relocate boxes every once in a while.  If you're walking over a strange rectangular depression in the ground on the path to the current thunderbox, you probably just walked over the previous location of it.   

Most often the thunderbox is placed in the woods with trees all around you, lots of bushes and growth, and lots of bugs. If it makes you feel better, bring your bug spray and just mist the air before dropping your drawers. 

After having used more than half a dozen different thunderboxes I have certainly learned to appreciate the finer things that set one box above all the others. So far, my favourite spot is on an island on Catfish Lake. You sit high above the lake and you can see passing canoes. You might not want to shout or wave though when you seen them. The outhouse in the first picture actually has a toilet seat. That pushes it into "Super Deluxe" in the thunderbox classification system.  

Clean-up:  I have to confess I do bring baby wipes along on my trips.  This year I did some research and found a bamboo-based baby wipe that claims to completely disintegrate in 21 days.  I have not yet purchased special toilet paper that is environmentally friendlier than the regular grocery store stuff.

One trick I use, which does not work on a windy day, is to place toilet paper around the rim of the hole of the thunderbox before I sit down.  Okay, it wouldn't pass the sanitary standards your mom tried to instill in you when using public washrooms, but it helps me delude myself that I'm not sitting directly on the wood (like my butt is that small).  However, during very warm days, be forewarned that some of that protective toilet paper may stick to your butt and you may not notice until some time later, making you wonder...."what the heck???"

Another trick I have is to take a half-used roll of TP from home, remove the cardboard roll in the middle, and pull out the end from the middle.  I put the whole thing into a Ziploc bag with the tuft of toilet tissue from the middle near the top of the bag.  

I do carry a shovel (and I have had to use it when one of the previously mentioned thunderboxes was turned over into a swamp and thereby left as is). On an earlier trip this year when I checked out the thunderbox it was quite used and recently used.  Ick.  I went to the fire pit, took my shovel and an empty large Ziploc bag and transferred some of the ashes to the thunderbox. It worked really well.  

And last, but not least, don't forget the hand sanitizer!

Bought this at Mags and Fags on Elgin Street

And that's all the poop that's fit to print!