Bug Season Adventure, June 1998

I really wanted to a trip with Perry Rath. Perry, however, was leaving Guelph in early July, and until then he was committed to working at Switch Farm. Fortunately, my grad student existence lets me pick up and go most times, so we worked around it and decided on four days (over a weekend) in June. Given the relatively short time frame, we decided on Algonquin Provincial Park. We then opened up the invitation to others, and it was accepted by Sue McDonald and Simon Jocques as well as two others who ended up bailing the night before the trip. By this time, I had already packed all the food, and I figured it wasn’t worth unpacking it all again to take out a third of it – and besides, Simon had told me just how hungry he had been on his Thelon trip, so I figured we’d just work our way through as much as we could and pack the rest out again.

I picked up Simon and Perry at the farm – though we had to go back there 20 minutes after leaving because Simon forgot his boots. His huge, heavy hiking boots. Which joined a tripod and a bunch of other heavy and cumbersome articles. My two small drybags which contained all of my personal gear seemed so tiny in comparison… We met Sue and Bailey, her golden retriever, at the outfitters at Oxtongue Lake, where we picked up a Swift Kipawa and a Swift Winisk.

June, as everybody knows, is not a great time to go interior camping in Ontario. The bugs are nothing less than murderous. We figured we were tough enough, and besides, why did they invent bug shirts in the first place? What are a few blackflies in the nostrils when you get to be outside? So, undeterred, we set out from the put-in on Canoe Lake in the early afternoon. The bugs were no problem, we figured – and they weren’t, out on the water. And since we were heading for a site on Teepee Lake, we only had one tiny 295m portage into Joe Lake, and there were enough tastier people in the vicinity.

  The weather was great, the bugs got less and less great as the day wore on and we had landed, but all in all things were just fine. Simon valiantly gathered firewood from less frequented areas, I made dinner (which involved heating up the pasta sauce I’d frozen at home and cooking spaghetti), and we were happy campers. As the evening wore on, I even figured out how to drink tea while wearing my bug shirt.

  Day 2 we headed to Tom Thomson Lake. There’s a definite advantage to being in the park when everybody else you know is too busy telling other people you know that you’re nuts to go in during bug season – the super popular lakes that I wouldn’t go near in the summer are almost empty. Not even the kids camps had started hosting campers yet. I started the day with a skinny dip while the rest of the group snoozed, and once I had “camp” coffee on they started moving around. Camp coffee can be great – or it can be horrible, particularly if you follow Simon’s suggestion and make “cowboy” camp coffee by simply pouring boiling water on top of the grounds in a Nalgene bottle and then using centrifugal force to get the grounds to the bottom. It doesn’t work, and the coffee on this trip became a chief contributor to my percolator coffee obsession.

 The day was a really short paddle without a single portage (I guess we’re wimps – but the dog had tried swimming with her special dog pack the day before, and Sue’s hiking pack just didn’t hold what a canoe pack does, and Simon’s tripod alone required an extra trip, so that at least two of us had to do two trips over the portage no matter what. Besides, we had all that extra food).  So, given all these wimp factors, we were looking for a king site where we could stay for two nights. It had to have everything – a good swimming spot, an exposed point so that the wind would blow bugs away, a great view… We even found it at the northern end of the lake, very near to a marshy bay (if the bugs are already bad, being close to a marsh wouldn’t matter much, would it?) that was chock-full of moose.

 Given that the morning’s paddle had been so short, Simon, Perry and I worked up the energy to go on a daytrip (Sue, on the other hand, wasn’t feeling well, and spent the time in her with a roll of toilet paper to tend to her sinuses). The three of us took the Kipawa and a day pack (full of water, snacks and a bug shirt) for a tour. We were perhaps ambitious with the portages we planned, but we figured, without a pack and having to carry a canoe only every third trip (and we took the lighter canoe), how bad can it be?

 The blackflies and mosquitos were bad. Really bad. We made a deal: the person carrying the canoe got to wear the bugshirt, the others were free to sprint. Purely by accident due to my valiant efforts towing the canoe ashore at the beginning of a portage, I discovered that the disgusting black muck in the shallows makes mosquito bites stop itching (or maybe it just distracts you enough from that worry because you’re covered in black slime), but as soon as I announced this discovery at the end of the 1220 m portage from Tom Thomson into Pathfinder Lake, Simon was as dirty as I was.

 From Pathfinder Lake we portaged into Potter Lake (a friendly 235 m) and after that another 725 m to Potter Lake. This route was popular with Simon since we walked along an old railbed and explored a former townsite on Brule Lake. After a snack break, we headed for Rosswood Lake. Due to low water levels, this would better have been called Rosswood Marsh, and the two portages (175m and 975m) we had anticipated turned into a single 1600m portage, followed by about 2 minutes paddling on Straight Shore Lake before a 655m portage into Mackintosh. Mackintosh Lake is beautiful (though the first time I saw it I was cold and wet and only about a third of the way through a faster-paced trip and I thought it was rather bleak), and at its southern end you can enter a winding passage to Ink Lake. Ink Lake does look rather inky because there is so much tannin in the water. It’s tiny, but it gives way to a beautiful 2320 m portage back to Tom Thomson. By now it was late afternoon, and the bugs were as nasty as they were going to get. Perry and Simon traded off the canoe (maybe I carried about 100m worth before my whining rivalled the mosquitoes and blackflies for annoying) and jogged the whole length of the trail. At the other end we hit the marsh near our site, and came across Sue who had taken the other boat out to snap some pictures of the ubiquitous moose.

Day 3 dawned hot, hazy and lazy. We spent much of the morning eating pancakes and swimming, at least until a snapping turtle decided to swim there too and I feared for my toes. Eventually, we climbed into the boats and headed for Bartlett Lake. We were aiming for Sunbeam Lake, but partway there, the sky started looking ominous. Good campers that we were, we of course had all the tents open and various dry things that probably should stay dry out at the site, so Perry and I volunteered to go back and rainproof while Simon and Sue pressed on. Before we made it back, a nasty rain and hailstorm hit – fortunately it lasted only about 20 minutes, and then the hot sun came out again and we were able to dry everything in the hour it lasted. Simon and Sue still weren’t back when the second rainstorm hit (Perry and I had already moved Sue’s tent into a better spot – the cushy spot we spent the first night on turned out to be a bit damper than we were willing to put up with) and we discovered how dry it stays under thick coniferous branches. As soon as the rain petered out to only moderate strength, we got a fire going and had hot chocolate for Simon and Sue when they – drenched to the skin – pulled in. The evening turned out okay, though – nice weather, a good breeze to keep the bugs manageable, and a yummy burrito dinner. With enough food that not even Simon, despite his best efforts, could prevent leftovers.

Day 4 was like so many “last” days in a park – the weather was perfect, clear and sunny with a mild breeze to keep the bugs at bay. We paddled by about a dozen moose on the way out (I think we probably averaged 5 moose/day on this trip!) and took out in time for lunch (ice cream!). We returned the boats and headed back to (sigh…) Guelph.

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