Category: Personal

Posted on

Backwoods camping in Killarney Provincial Park

Every year we go backwoods camping (i.e. not car camping) on a different lake in southeastern Ontario with our friends Marc and Kris, who have been doing this for a few decades or so now. Most of the time it’s in the Kawarthas, like Copper Lake or Crab Lake — which I wrote about last year — because there are just so many little lakes there’s no end of choice. We have also done Algonquin once (Andrew Lake) and have camped in Massasauga Park, which is the second largest provincial park next to Algonquin. And this year we decided to pick a spot in Killarney Provincial Park, which is up near Parry Sound.

After some investigation we wound up booking a campsite on Balsam Lake. It looked like it was on an island — which it sort of was — and it faced southeast. That meant entering on Bell Lake, at the put in that is right beside Killarney Kanoes (at the end of a very long and bumpy dirt road that probably claims to be two lanes but is more like one and a half). We got there and were unloading the two canoes and my kayak — since we had five people — and I saw a guy walking towards me with his canoe who looked familiar. Turns out it was a paramedic who is good friend of my son-in-law, an emergency department nurse in Hamilton. That’s what it’s like to go canoe camping in Canada I guess LOL.

We put in on Bell Lake and probably paddled for an hour and a half or so — it’s a long, thin lake — but it was a beautiful day and we stopped for lunch on the shore somewhere. After a while we were in Three Mile Lake, which is also long and thin and is attached to Bell (I’m not sure why they have two different names because it felt like just one big lake — there isn’t a portage or anything between them). I think in total it’s about six kilometres from the put in on Bell to the portage into Balsam Lake. Anyway, as we got closer to the portage, we met a man in a canoe who warned us that there was a beaver dam between us and the portage and we would probably have to lift over it.

Continue reading “Backwoods camping in Killarney Provincial Park”
Posted on

Kayaking on Lake Rousseau

We happened to be up in Muskoka recently, visiting a friend who lives near Lake Rousseau, so I brought my kayaks and went out for a paddle with a friend who is getting back into kayaking. It was a perfect day for it — warm (around 19 Celsius) and sunny, with hardly any waves at all. So we set out from the public boat launch on the east side of the lake near the highway and spent a great couple of hours paddling around and chatting. Like a lot of Muskoka, Lake Rousseau is a combination of multimillion-dollar “cottages” — the kind with three fireplaces and a boathouse with four bays — and tiny old shacks like the kind that used to populate the lake before the rich people came 🙂 unfortunately we couldn’t wave to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn because they apparently sold their place recently. 

A hilarious coda to this story: I was so busy chatting with my friend as we were packing up at the end of the paddle that I forgot to tie the kayaks onto the car, and we drove away and made it about half a mile before one of the kayaks flew off the top of the car. Luckily it didn’t hit anyone driving behind us, and it didn’t wind up in the road — in fact, at first we couldn’t find it! We walked up and down the highway looking in the bushes and finally someone who owns a house right on the highway noticed us wandering around her property and found it lying in some underbrush!

It was a little banged up, but I bought plastic ones for a reason — not because I thought one would fly off the car, but because they get dropped on rocks and pulled across roots etc. and I didn’t want to have to worry about damaging it. There’s a dent in the kayak where I assume it hit the road and it is scraped up, and there appears to be a small pea-sized hole where it hit a rock or something, but I figure I can epoxy that pretty easily. And my friend got a cheap lesson in paying attention when you are supposed to be tying your kayaks onto your car! So it was a win-win IMO.