One of my favourite paddling locations close to Buckhorn and Burleigh Falls is Lovesick Lake, and I managed to get out for a kayak trip on October 19th that felt almost like August — it was about 24 degrees Celsius and I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. At Lovesick, the put in/boat launch is right by the highway near the dam in Burleigh Falls, and it is a gentle and wide slope with parking close by.
The lake used to be farmer’s fields before the Trent/Severn canal system was created, so it is pretty weedy in parts, but the main channel is deep and wide, and even the edges of the lake are pretty clear wherever there are rocks. There are a bunch of small and large islands, including one of my favourites, which is barely big enough for a tiny little log cabin and a dock with a couple of chairs. Luckily the height of the lake is managed by dams at both ends, or it would be underwater 🙂
There’s another small island near the dam that has a somewhat larger cottage on it, and it too is barely above the water line. It has a wooden causeway that leads out from the mainland to an even tinier bit of land and then another that continues from there to the island with the cottage.
At the upper end of Lovesick is a dam where it joins Lower Buckhorn Lake, and it is one of the few dams and lift-locks on the Trent-Severn where the office and dam operation building is on an island, so the operator has to go there by boat. On the other side of the dam there’s an old canoe ladder, which I haven’t tried but looks very handy for getting from Lovesick to Lower Buckhorn.
As I paddled around, I could see a lot of evidence of wind damage from a big storm that went through a couple of years ago — one of the disadvantages of having a landscape that is made up primarily of rocks is that large trees can’t really get their roots down deep enough to hang on, so when there’s a big wind they just topple over and pull up their entire root structure. There were hundreds of trees that looked like this one.
Anyway, it was another beautiful day on the water. As I was tying my kayak on my car, an older gentleman in the car next to me asked about how I strapped it on (I have J-racks) and then he told me about tying a canoe onto a float plane’s skis and flying into tiny lakes with all of his supplies for weeks at a time when he worked for the Geological Survey of Canada.
