Massassauga Provincial Park

Oh, I have to apologize!  The week just got away from me and I haven't posted since Monday.  Wednesday and Thursday are my busy days, sorry!

I do have pictures of two of the northern canoe trips we went on, after I'd switched to digital photography, so here's one of them, dating from 2011.  This trip was to the Massassauga Provincial Park, just south of Parry Sound on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay.  It's not a river, but an area of lakes, rocks and pine trees almost entirely wild.  There are a couple of old fishing lodges that we never saw.

Once you re close to Parry Sound, you find you're on the granitic rocks of the Canadian Shield.  It's that classic northern canoe country.

You register at Oastler Lake Provincial Park, where I was taken camping as a child, and then you follow a winding road through the bush to the docks on Three-legged Lake.  After paddling for half an hour or so, to the farthest corner of that lake, you arrive at the portage.

Packs slung onto our backs, and canoes overhead, we trundled down the path to the other side, at Spider Lake.  Usually canoe owners prefer to hoist their canoes themselves, and a portage usually takes two trips.  Spider Lake where we've arrived, is the heart of the park, large, ragged and with several deep bays, shaped sort of like a spider.

Guess what Massassauga Park is named after!  We found a campsite, beached the canoes, and got our tents put up.  In fact I think it was the next day when I was walking up the short path from the water that I noticed this pattern in the leaves and pine needles, a metre or so off the trail.  I stood very still!  This looked like a mature Massassauga Rattlesnake, but if you don't bother them, they won't usually bother you.  

Not far away, in the water between the beached canoes, was this enormous Snapping Turtle!  I expect previous campers had inadvertently trained it to visit for food scraps.  Not everyone is careful about their washing up.

Sunrise on Clear Lake - As our canoe group was aging, we picked some gentler trips.  This was one, with no whitewater at all, just flatwater paddling, but plenty of different places to explore over ten days.

This was sunrise on our final day, camped at a different spot on Spider Lake.  No-one wanted to leave!

It's February 1st!

Here's a winter interlude, interrupting our summer canoe trips for a moment.  Today is February1st, and here in the north, it's a brilliant sunny day.  If you take my word for it, you could actually feel the warmth of the sun outside, the first triumphal hint of spring to come (though we have to get rid of a lot of snow first)!  

So here's the view out our back window, though as with all these photos the editing doesn't remain true to colour in such bright sunlight.

The unhealthy Sugar Maple out in the golf course still looks good, with two small recently planted pines beside it.

And here's a view you don't often get, taken from the kitchen window.

It was sunny, but still cold, so I wasn't seeing any melting snow, though I tried to convince myself that the snow on the back of the chair was melting.

I'm intrigued by how these plants get buried.

The drift off the roof at my front window is hanging down a good two feet now.

And the snowstick is almost completely buried.

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, widely celebrated in the northeast and here in nearby Wiarton.  Will he see his shadow or won't he?  Will we have another six weeks of winter, or won't we?  Checkout Wiarton Willie, Punxsutawney Phil or Shubenacadie Sam tomorrow to see the results!

A Note on the Editing.  In extremely bright sunlight like today my camera automatically darkens the picture to try to balance the light.  It's a problem whenever you take pictures in a snowy landscape.  But editing to try and get the photos back to being bright again distorts the colour.  You can see above, snow often looks bluish, and the sky sometimes looks almost turquoise.  But they're close to correct colours if not perfect!

Paddling the Karst

I'm taking you out on a very unique ephemeral lake this time.  Wodehouse Creek is just a little stream, 3 or 4 feet wide most of the year.  It drains down into a sinkhole and disappears, only to emerge again in springs partway down the escarpment.  Every spring when runoff is high, the creek floods though, as there is too much water to fit down the sinkhole.  Then it backs up, forming an elongated lake.  After I realized this, the next spring I planned a paddle to explore it.

I'm hopeful a couple of air photos will help you understand this karst system.  These are photos I took myself.  I paid for a two hour flight in a tiny Cessna, got lucky with the weather, and flew down over Wodehouse Creek on a day when the creek and sinkholes were flooded.  This is the creek upstream from the area that floods; you can see that it's a typical small stream winding through its valley.  Beyond that is a round millpond, and beyond that you can see the flooded fields and woodland.

This photo, taken as we round the south end of the stream valley that had flooded, shows the route we paddled.   The dark blue water covers not only the valley, but the sinkholes, and the water overflows onto the fields below.  You may be able to pick out the sideroad where we started, almost at the top of the photo.  The extension of the flooded area to the right, extending into the woodland, is not a sinkhole, but a 'perched pond'.  It's only source of water is the spring flood.

 It was a little surreal paddling through the fencerows at first, where we knew there was a shallow creek below us.

We continued south, down passing through narrow gaps and across the broader open lake.

Until we emerged out onto the largest part of the ephemeral lake, right above the largest sinkholes.

We turned at that point and paddled east into the perched pond.

Then through the old fencerow and out onto the shallow flooded field.  At this point the walking trail through here is about 4 feet below us!

Then we were out over the flooded fields, and another large sinkhole, just about under that red kayak.

Eventually the water in the field got too shallow to paddle over,, and we turned back, paddling over the fencerow again and into the perched pond.

The perched pond looked like it had been dropped here from northern Ontario, all aspens, spruce and pine.  I could not believe how being here at this time of year made the entire geology of this place understandable.

We paddled back across the ridge between the perched pond and the big sinkhole, out into the open lake.  The water where those little trees and shrubs are is only about 4 feet deep; beyond that over the sinkhole, it's over 20 feet deep!

We paddled back up the flooded stream and eventually got ourselves back to the sideroad.

 The Temagami

I'm losing track of the sequence in which we paddled those northern rivers. but I don't think it matters now.  Temagami is a tiny village on the main highway to northern Ontario, beyond Sudbury, up into more mining country.  It's a very popular canoeing area, especially the beautiful Lady Evelyn Smoothwater Wilderness Park, to the northwest of Temagami.

Sadly, this is the trip I remember the least.  Old age does that to you I suppose, and all the other trips are frankly more memorable as places go.  In Temagami we met on a small tributary, and then paddled southwest out into Temagami Lake itself.  This is a huge but convoluted lake with numerous islands and channels, and designated campgrounds.  It was typical northern Ontario country of rock and pine trees.

We eventually reached a small sideroad where we could call for a shuttle as I recall, and the trip was over.  I guess sometimes they don't stand out any more than that.

Paddling Episode 5 Continued

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we continued up the stream, now an obstacle course of downed trees.  This is where we left off yesterday, an apparent barrier, but we never turned back without investigating.  So we did and managed to wiggle past these logs on the left.

The water was incredibly clear, and sometimes misleading.  We could glide across this submerged log easily.

Unfortunately we didn't get very far though before we ran into a serious obstacle, this log two feet above the water.  We couldn't get under, it was too big to cut, and if we went over we'd just be stuck again ten feet ahead.  So we turned back.

There were lots of submerged logs we had to watch out for on the paddle back.

A few Marsh Marigolds brightened the way.

The odd big interesting stump sticking above water.

A Mute Swan paddled serenely by, not too far away.  Made me wonder if its mate was on a nest nearby.

And a gull on one of the more interesting stumps.

Camping and Food on our Canoe Trips

A comment left by Leslie reminded me that I haven't said anything about overnights or food on our trips. so here's a little explanation.  

Snacks are of course most important.  Mid-morning and mid-afternoon we would either stop onshore or raft up (4 or 5 canoes together) to eat something, usually trail mix of some sort - peanuts, raisins, M&Ms and chocolate.  I actually reached the point on later trips where I volunteered to bring the snacks.  tt adds up when you count 8 or 10 people for 7-14 days!  But it refueled us and always made a nice break in the day.

One member of the group always offered to make breakfast, which would be eggs, sometimes with bacon, oatmeal with plenty of rehydrated fruit, or pancakes.  And of course lots of coffee. It's surprising how good such a breakfast tasted out in the wilds!  Lunches were some sort of bread or cheese, with salami or other dried meat.  There'd be carrot sticks for the first few days.  All in all very healthy!

Dinners were more varied.  It depended on what would stay unspoiled after a few days.  There was certainly never any commercially prepared dehydrated foods, but things like potatoes, carrots and onions will keep for quite awhile, as will some types of bread.  Putting together the experience of 4 or 5 wilderness canoe trippers we managed fine.

As for overnights, we were usually out of touch in the wilderness for the entire time, so each of us (or pairs of us) brought small tents and sleeping bags, along with all the other paraphenalia of camping.  We were usually on designated, heavily used canoe routes, so there were plenty of good campsites to be had.  You just had to be careful where you placed your tent in case of rain,

Since there were plenty of portages all of us had to be prepared with packs and waterproof sacks.  At each campsite we made a biffy, digging a hole between two trees and lashing a branch between them to do as a seat.  All in all the on-land part of these canoe trips worked well.

Paddling Episode 5

 We've paddled Lake Eugenia more than once, but it's been fun every time.  I'm going to show you an air photo first for a change, and try to explain where we went, but you can just skip that if you want.  The air photo below shows a mix of farmland, cottages, the lake and marsh.  If you've read my last few posts you'll know that we didn't bother paddling across the open lake - what fun is that?  Instead we explored the marsh and the shoreline.

Lake Eugenia was created in about 1905 when Ontario Hydro purchased the low-lying valley and built a dam in Eugenia, flooding a wide area of farms and piping water from the lake to the edge of the escarpment.  Even today this provides the highest drop of water for hydro production east of the Rockies.

Looking at this air photo you can see the dark water of the lake, a shoreline that is sometimes marsh (the very light colours), and a white line across the top.  That white line is the causeway, and we kept all our exploring south of that.  We put in off the dock of a friend's cottage in about the centre of the photo, and paddled south.  Eventually we attempted (mostly unsuccessfully), to explore up the Beaver River where it enters in the southeast corner of the photo..  The white lines in that area are simply property lines.  Let me know if you find this sir photo interesting.

Here we are putting in off the dock, my friend in his kayak, and my one-person canoe waiting while I take the photo.

  Blogger is really messing up my spacing today!

At this end of the lake the tree stumps were simply left, and the shallower water here means they are exposed.  Makes for an interesting paddle though!

We headed for the marsh first, but found it was way up over our heads from the vantage point of a canoe.

So we headed south where we could find our way to where the river flowed into the lake.  My canoeing buddy had a thing for exploring these narrow creeks.

It was very similar to exploring the creek that flows into the Robson Lakes, where we ran into frequent logjams.  Here you might think we were stuck, but we wiggled around the far left side of these logs and continued on.

You could watch the current as the aquatic vegetation moved in the water.  This story is obvios=usly going to take more than one day, so we'll return to this tomorrow.

The Coulonge River

The Coulonge is in Quebec, and runs southward into the Ottawa River, roughly parallel to the Noire which was my first northern river canoe experience.  In my memory the Noire flowed through sandy country (and was therefore fairly forgiving), but the Coulonge ran through rocky country, (and was therefore fairly unforgiving)!

We had to use a shuttle for this one, driving a bumpy backwoods road, pulling a trailer loaded with our canoes to get to our chosen put in point.  We were aiming for a seven-day trip.  Again there was lots of gentle whitewater, so I had an intense learning experience.  When you're heading fast toward a bit of whitewater you don't get much time to sit and ponder your options!

This was a trip with actual waterfalls, and one memorable portage that involved roping the canoe down a vertical slope to the water below!  Glad there were other more experienced folk to take charge of that one!  I also recall seeing half a canoe sticking vertically out of the logjam in front of a portage!  But the most interesting thing one of our members found was a name carved into the rock in large letters, mostly covered in moss, presumably the name of a lumberjack with time on his hands.

By the end of this trip, my third with this group of friends, I was beginning to think I knew how to handle things.  And each trip was incredibly interesting!

Canoeing, Episode 4

Before I go any further, I need to show you the Beaver River.  After all, we're often talking of the Beaver Valley, and it features a designated canoe route.  The core of the canoe route here is a wide meandering channel through a large Silver Maple Swamp, complete with designated access points and of course the river-side bakery in Heathcote.

The route starts just north of the village of Kimberley, where there's an inconspicuous sign, but this time we put in at the mid-way point, on the Epping Sideroad..

From there it's a pleasant drift downstream, though if you don't paddle the trip will take a long time!  As you ca see by the high water, we're paddling in the spring.

Soon you come to the 'Flower Bridge' where a neighbouring nursery hangs baskets of flowers and keeps them looking good over the summer, though it's too early this year.

At one point a pair of Turkey Vultures watched us from above.

After the village of Heathcote where we stopped to visit the bakery, the pace suddenly picks up quite a bit, and we've got some actual whitewater to contend with, leaving the swam behind.  They were little more than swifts and we enjoyed a faster paddle the rest of the way.

We passed pairs of Canada Geese in several spots.  The nesting pairs sat still and silent but the 'teenagers' flapped away honking madly.

The old low dam at Slabtown was our ending point, but we drifted down 100 yards to where we could easily bring the car close.

This is my two-person canoe, in comparison to the ;pack' cane I've mentioned.  This is an old canoe, rebuilt.  The body is original, but the gunwales and thwarts are all new, as is the colour, in a mix of ash, cherry and walnut.

The Spanish

The second river I joined my friends for was the Spanish.  The Spanish River is known as one of the best introductory rivers for those wanting to learn whitewater canoeing.  It's easily accessible, safe and definitely adventurous!  The river flows from north to south ending just west of Espanola, on the north shore of Lake Huron, west of Sudbury.  You can access the river at various points; we had a canoe rental outfit drive us north so we ended up with a five or six day paddle.

The river features lots of swifts, class I and class II rapids, as well as some class III (those might be wise to portage around if you're a beginner!).  I was lucky, I was in a group with at least six experienced whitewater paddlers.  They looked after me, gave me advice, and taught me how to watch for the rocks, follow the 'Vs'.  On easy whitewater you can make fast progress, and we did.

We took a detour onto Biscotasi Lake, one of the spots in northern Ontario tied by legend to Grey Owl.  Archie Belaney was an Englishman who came to Canada in 1906.  Fascinated by stories of the 'Indians' of North America as a child, he headed for Temagami in northern Ontario, and eventually made contact with a local group of Ojibwe.  He developed a life as a woodsman, trapper and guide, and many years later took on the personality of Grey Owl, claiming native ancestry.  In this guise he became a popular speaker and writer.  He spent part of his life in the region of the Spanish River.

I remember our trip as an exciting run down through a lot of gentle whitewater, learning fast how to handle it.  The days were long though; our leader had an idea of how far we'd go each day and I remember clearly complaining to my canoe mate 'how far does he want us to go anyway', after we had paddled 36 km. one day.  A great river for sure!