I used to blather on about how cool it would be to do an all-women wilderness trip, and more than once I've tried to make it happen - but somehow, it had never worked out. And I was blathering on about this to a friend in June, and she said, let's do it. So we made loose plans, and - as these things go - they never worked out. But along the way we'd recruited another friend, Siobhan, and she wouldn't drop the idea... and so, thought it wasn't the plan to begin with and the original instigator never did come along, the last weekend of September three of us - Siobhan, Carol and I - went up to Algonquin for a quickie fall colour trip. You'd have to have been in this general area this fall to appreciate how lucky we were - we hit the warmest weekend of the entire fall, and the only one that it didn't rain. The fall colours were at their absolute peak, the bugs were gone, and the holiday-weekend-type idiots you sometimes encounter in Algonquin had moved on to other pursuits for the season. Since there were only the three of us and we ended up with a lot of gear (who said anything about roughing it? and besides, winter bags are big! and we needed mittens and toques and long underwear and a tent each! yes, that's right, we each wanted a tent!), we decided to rent a canoe and a kayak. We went with a Swift Kipawa (a boat that I've paddled a few times now and consistently love) and a big-ass tank of a recreational kayak. Given the weight and unwieldiness of the kayak, we wanted to not portage it too much, so we figured we could put in at Rain Lake, and put the two portages required to get into Jubilee behind us and set up a base camp for the weekend. The picture above is on our first day, paddling Rain Lake (and if you called it Rain River, nobody would be the wiser). As anticipated, the kayak was a beast to portage. But even sweating and grunting and hunched over, you couldn't help but see how cool the leaves on the portage trails looked. And since we really didn't have a lot of distance to carry... I think I only cursed the kayak three or four times. The site we ended up settling on was lovely - it faced east north-east, though I was convinced it was due east when we got there. It had a good sitting rock, a nice view from the privy, and three flat spots for tents. And we couldn't see anybody else, which was good for my ego when I ended up going for a swim fully-clothed trying to rescue the food bag that I had opened but not had a good grip on in the morning... (all those extra clothes came in handy). Carol voluntarily went swimming (though maybe if I was honest, I'd admit that I exaggerated the warmth of the lake hoping to sucker somebody else into getting as wet as I was). The mornings out there were funny - there was so much mist rising over the lake that you'd swear it was overcast and dreary, but within an hour you'd go from needing mittens while starting the stove to shorts weather. Not kidding - I thought my hands would freeze to the stove as I started making coffee, and by the time I finished my cup, I'd shed almost all my layers. Maybe I had several cups of coffee, though... The great thing about the basecamp/daytripper approach to wilderness camping is how little stuff you have to carry along. And when three of you share a canoe, you only have to carry it about one third of the time! This meant that we could do an otherwise overly ambitious loop - on Saturday we did a big circle through Moccasin Lake (the pictures on the right) into the Petawawa River to Misty Lake, and then back again. That's coming into Misty on the left. We had lunch in Misty, and then took a chain of little lakes back to Moccasin and eventually Jubilee. That's Wenonah Lake, which is a little jewel of a lake with one site, on the right. Our last morning we napped (Siobhan), fixed gear (Carol) and explored (me). The mushrooms and the picture on the right are from my morning exploration (I bushwhacked to another site to see if it would have been better than ours - I'm like that). So.... the relaxing weekend ended all too quickly, and we paddled out the way we came in (with lighter foodpacks but probably heavier bodies, there were many treats!). Did you know there is NO Dairy Queen in Gravehurst? Me neither. But there isn't. Oh - and the women's only thing - it rocks! This trip was one of those rare times where everything worked smoothly and everybody contributed equally, and I'm glad I got to do it with two such cool chicks as Siobhan and Carol. Yeah. Back to Johanna's homepage