Every year for the last decade or so my wife Becky and I have gone backwoods camping with our friends and neighbours Marc and Kris — “backwoods” meaning places that require a few hours of paddling and at least one portage, which is a French term meaning to put a canoe on your head. If I’m being honest, the length and number of portages we undertake has dwindled as we have aged (we are all over the age of 60 now but I’m not saying how much). We used to think nothing of doing three portages of up to 300 or 400 metres or even longer, up a steep incline in many cases, but now we look for routes that have one or two short ones. The last trip to Crab Lake had a single portage of about 160 metres, and it was dead flat, and I have to say it was a real pleasure 🙂
This trip also started near where we live for half the year (when we aren’t at the cottage) near Buckhorn, just north of Peterborough, so we only had to drive about 20 minutes up the road to the Anstruther Lake road. We borrowed a canoe from a friend for Becky and our friend Patrice, Marc and Kris had their canoe, and since we were an odd number I brought my kayak, a 14-foot Perception Carolina (as an aside, someday I wish someone would invent a yoke or something that made portaging a kayak easier, the way canoes are, but so far I haven’t found anything — and I have tried a couple of DIY gizmos that never really worked; if you know of anything please send me an email!).
We put in on Wolf Lake, which you can get to from the Anstruther Lake access road, and it was about an hour paddle (straight into the wind, unfortunately) and then the tiny portage into Crab Lake, a relatively small lake with only a half dozen campsites. It’s part of Kawartha Highlands provincial park, which was created back in **. Getting to our site didn’t take long, even though it was at the opposite end of the lake from the portage, and we stopped for lunch at a site that was out at the end of a large rock outcropping. It was fairly sunny and warm, although windy.
When we got to the site, we got a pleasant surprise: some kind soul had left us a massive amount of kindling and cut wood, as well as several pieces of wooden furniture that some enterprising craftsman had created out of split wood and branches. There was just one problem as far as the kindling and split wood was concerned: we had had virtually no rain for six weeks, and so huge swaths of the forest were dry and brown, and there was a fire ban. So all of that wood — literally the largest trove of the stuff I have ever seen in all the years we’ve been doing this — was completely useless to us!
Since we didn’t have to spend hours getting wood or starting a fire, we got the tents and water treatment system (a Life Straw) set up quickly, hung the bike lights along the path to the thunder box, and then sat around looking at nature and then got started on soup, using the tiny camp stove we call the Lunar Lander. Unfortunately, there was a very gusty wind, and the fairly large soup pot sitting on a tiny camp stove was a sitting duck, and a sudden gust sent the pot tumbling to the ground. I’m sure the chipmunks were happy with the fallout, but we got no soup that night! Luckily, soup was just the starter course — we still had ribeye steaks and potatoes (cooked sous vide beforehand as usual — none of that freeze-dried food for us!)
About a week before we left for the trip, we looked at the weather forecast and it looked the same as the rest of the summer had been: namely, hotter than usual. I was looking forward to warm nights and lots of swimming, but it was not to be. That first night was frosty (not literally) and we had only brought half a sleeping bag as a blanket, rather than the whole thing. When we got up in the morning it was a whooping six degrees Celsius! I put on almost every piece of clothing I brought with me and was still chilly 😜
It warmed up later that day, however, and so we paddled off to a hiking trail on the far side of the lake, and hiked up to an outcropping where we had lunch. It was an impressive view from what the locals call Blueberry Hill, but unfortunately there were no blueberries because the intense heat and lack of rain had turned most of the bushes into dust. We could see for hundreds of miles from the top of the rock, and everywhere we looked we could see vast swaths of brown trees — many of which may have gotten stressed by a huge ice storm that hit the area in March, and then whacked again by the heat and drought. It was kind of a sad sight.
We made our way back to camp and had another great dinner of double-smoked pork chops, and then later had a treat we’ve had a couple of years in a row now: Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with icing. Usually we cook them over the fire, but this time we obviously couldn’t do that, but they turned out fine over the camp stove and luckily they didn’t end up on the ground! The night was a little warmer, but it felt odd not standing or sitting around the campfire for both warmth and light. Sitting around a camp stove or a portable solar LED light just doesn’t have the same feel to it!
The next day was cloudy and sort of raining on and off, but I went for a paddle in the kayak anyway (I have a nylon skirt that covers the cockpit and keeps me dry) and got nice and close — maybe six feet away — from a beautiful Great Blue Heron. I was paddling quietly enough and kind of floated around a corner and there he was, standing on the shore, so I froze and didn’t move and we just hung out together for about 15 minutes. They are truly impressive birds. As I was paddling around, I couldn’t help noticing that virtually everyone else at the other campsites had left. As it turned out, that probably would have been a good idea — it started pouring at about 2 pm and didn’t let up until about 3 o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t that cold, but it wasn’t a huge amount of fun to huddle under a tiny tarp and cook over a tiny cook stove. Eventually we retreated to the tents.
The next day we packed up and left, and had to set up all the tents and gear in the garage to let them dry before respraying them with waterproofing. So all in all, not the best trip we’ve ever had, but one good day and one not-so-great day isn’t the worst trip we’ve ever done either.
