3/30/96 - 3/31/96 : My friend Corey and I headed up to the Northwest corner of the Western Uplands Backpacking trail in Algonquin (Rain Lake access point) to do some 'winter' hiking/snowshoeing. It was at least halfway winter camping -- it did get down to -7C or so at night, there was lots of snow on the ground, the lakes were frozen over ... temperature did rise to +8C and sunny on Saturday though. Hardest part was getting to the access point, seems they don't plow the road all the way in during the winter. Oh well a good trip nonetheless and my first! attempt at "winter" camping. I could see how it would be distinctly less pleasant when the temperatures reach a high of -7C, but something to work towards anyways.
Even with a late start and a 2 hour delay trying to find the trailhead, still managed about 10 km of showshoeing with fully loaded packs, and about another 10-15 km as a day hike on the trail/lakes on Sunday.
Pictures coming soon (once Corey finishes the film and gets them developed ...).
04/14/96 : My friend Mark and I threw the kayaks on top of his jeep and drove up to Edenvale (near my cottage) to paddle on the river for the day. Water levels were nice and high, the water itself was fairly cold, but with a good pair of Goretex overmits on as pogies, the water temperature was never a problem. We paddled upstream into the Minesing Swamp where with the high water levels, the banks have overflowed into this low-lying watershed. This means, of course, that one can have a great time paddling in among the trees! There are a couple of spots where one can paddle a few hundred metres away from the main river channel, into the woods. Very cool.
We also spent some time living the life of a beaver, as at one point on the river there is an enormous log jam of fallen tress that have collected at this one spot. The magnitude is difficult to express, but consider that the length of river which is entirely clogged with deadfall is probably a couple of hundred meters. No kidding! So anyways, after working our way around this log jam (paddling up the "whitewater" in the trees!?!) we continued paddling until suddenly we noticed something large moving on the river ahead of us. Turned out to be a pretty large tree floating downstream. So we had fun playing beaver/lumberjack, steering the tree with our kayaks until we got it rammed into the main log jam. Having some fun with this we went in search of other deadfall by the banks (where there were banks) that we could get to float freely downstream. If only the early lumberjacks knew how fun and easy it was ...
05/11/96 - 05/12/96: The distinguished group of myself, friend Mark and his girlfriend Deb, and friend Corey and his friend Meredith headed up to the Bruce Trail north-east of Meaford for a short overnight hike. Reflections on the trip:
05/17/96 - 05/20/96 : Take a day off and make a long weekend into a 4 day excursion to West Virginia and the New River Gorge for some rock climbing was the plan. Good plan. Despite the unfortunate aspect of the 12 hour trip to get there, the hot, sunny weather and excellent climbing make it wholly worthwhile.
We left stupidly early from Toronto on Friday morning (yeah ... waking up at 4:30am, my favourite). This did, however, allow us to get down there at a leisurely pace with still plenty of time to get a campsite, do some grocery shopping and head over to the Junkyard Wall to do some bouldering in the neat cave that they have there (and to fall on our asses in the cave).
Saturday morning breakfast at the Western Pancake House -- soon to become a classic food stop -- made for a good start to the day. Good thing too, because we needed the strength to last through the long hike along the base of Endless Wall to get to Fern Buttress and Star Trek Wall. Some good climbing though, got to lead my first ever 5.6! Unfortunately we misjudged the timing a little bit and ended up walking the last bit of the way out in the dark. Not having brought enough water for the heat during the day didn't help matters either.
Sunday saw us correct a couple of mistakes that we made on Saturday. We started by making breakfast (bacon & eggs), which wasn't a mistake the day before but made up for the getting away from the cliff late and ending up at the Western Pancake House for dinner the night before. We packed a super-load of water, and the lunch supplies which we hadn't done the day before and headed out to Beauty Mountain for the day's climbing. Unfortunately the guidebook was wrong and we ended up walking about three times farther than we were supposed to, had to rappel down the "easy trail to the bottom" and could not match the climb descriptions with what we saw on the cliff (as expected as we were on a totally different section than we thought we were). The climbing was quite nice nonetheless, and I guess the good news was that the climb I lead that I thought was a 5.6 actually turned out to be a 5.7 ... my first 5.7 lead ever!
Monday and time to head back to Toronto. But not before getting one more morning of climbing in! Off to the Bridge Buttress, where we knew the hike in was no more than about 30 seconds. The nice 5.6 that we wanted to set was taken so we played on a couple of nasty crack climbs instead (a 5.8 and a 5.9). The skin on my hands and legs were doing not TOO bad until the 5.9 crack. Oh well, what would a climbing trip be without trashing your body? A bit of the touristy thing at the Visitor centre and off for the drive home. All in all an excellent trip.
6/1/96 - 6/2/96 : Finally after a year of procrastination, I got myself signed up for a canoe course to begin the long, drawn out, costly process of getting certified in multiple levels of canoeing from the Ontario Recreational Canoeing Assocaition (a.k.a. "ORCA"). The way ORCA structures its levels of certification is that there is a common Basic course after which the certification splits up into 3 distinct streams (pun intended ...): Lakewater, Canoe Tripping and Moving Water. In each of these three divisions there is a Level I, II and III; where Level III is the senior instructor level. In addition to all of these there is a Basic Instructor course which certifies you to teach the Basic course.
It was a beautiful weekend in Guelph (the only one so far?) for paddling. The fisrt day saw the 4 students, one instructor and one person going for his Basic Instructor certification on the Speed River in Guelph. This was of course the day of some kind of festival in the park the section of river we were on ran through, so we were 'treated' to sound checks followed by a number of local bands. However we circumvented this problem on Sunday by agreeing to go to Robbie Burns Conservation area instead -- a very nice, though small Conservation area.
I entered the weekend with the expectations of getting the Basic ORCA certification, however, Steve (our instructor from ECHO! Adventures <-- blatant advertising plug) asked all of us why we were taking the course and allowed us to try for our Lakewater I certification. A couple of days of solo and tandem paddling, and many draws, prys and sculls later step one of my eventual goal of getting certified as an instructor in Lakewater and Canoe Tripping was done. As a blatant advertising plug (purely on my own accord) I definitely recommend ECHO! adventures to anyone wanting to take a guided trip or who wanted to take any canoeing courses.
7/1/96 - 7/4/96 : Headed up north of Peterborough (and south of Bancroft) to Eels Lake for the next stage in my quest for ORCA certification. This time is was a 4 day excursion where we practiced lakewater skills and learded how to make other people learn. That is the group of 7 'students' learned how to become Basic Instructors. Fortunately, except for one unseasonably cool and cloudy/rainy Tuesday evening and Wednesday, we finally got a bit of a taste of summer weather. Too bad about a million mosquitoes also got a hold of me!
The Basic Instructor course made us demonstrate and improve our personal paddling skills so that we would be able to demonstrate proper paddling to a bunch of beginners. As we had a number of relatively strong paddlers (skill-wise that is, not strength-wise), our instructor Steve pushed us in many of the skills to a higher-than-required level. Most importantly though, the course made us practice and understand how to lay out and teach the theory and skills associated with the ORCA Basic certification level.
Once again, a positive experience through ECHO! adventures. A combination of laid back, but quality instructors with a good group of people, and the fact that I haven't been out on a canoe trip yet this year (ARRGH...though see my Canoe Building page for the reason why) made for an excellent, and sorely needed 4 days.
7/18/96 - 7/21/96 : Drove up to Restoule Provincial Park (west of North Bay), on Thursday afternoon and spent the night in the Provincial Park. How can people really consider this camping? Don't they know how much better it is 'out there'? Encountered some rain. O.k. lot's of rain, torrential rain, continuous rain, make the road look like a river kind of rain. Oh well, stuff's wet, it can't rain like that for long. Well at least it isn't raining. Friday started cloudy but cleared up by mid afternoon to lovely sunshine. Unfortunately what cleared it up was WIND . Lot's of wind, torrential wind, "haven't seen wind like this in 31 years" says the locals kind of wind. So we sat around ... eat lunch ... go for a walk ... try a test paddle with an empty boat, am wiped out just trying to get out of the little bay the boat launch sits in, with a large lake to cross after that ... sat some more ... found a secluded camp spot ... settle in for the night. My first wind-bound day canoeing ever. Strange experience, it is almost like the day never existed. Got away finally on Saturday and had a great two days paddling down, then up the Restoule River. Pretty scenery, not really particularly different from the West side of Algonquin (which isn't that far away). Couldn't believe how quiet it was, people wise that is. We saw a grand total of zero people past the one small portage around a dam. Very nice. Tried out the new boat, seemed to handle well, drifts a little in the wind, though that was expected. It certainly paddled well on Saturday night on the glassy water under the clear, moonless sky looking at the stars ... very nice.
8/3/96 - 8/5/96 : Did my first Algonquin trip of the year (about 3 months later than usual) over the Civic holiday weekend. Headed up with my friend Corey and our respective bosses from work -- hey what can I say, some people are blessed with cool employers. Did a relatively long loop up around North Tea Lake, into Birchcliffe Lake and back out through Biggar Lake. We opted for the get up stupidly early on Saturday morning and drive up as opposed to the leave Friday night and find some place to crash. We drove up through some intermittent fog/low lying clouds on the way up, which was actually quite neat.
Had three days of unbelievably good weather -- bordering on too hot for the couple of long portages on Sunday, but with cool lakes to swim in at the end of each, who can really complain? The first day ended up being a little too long, we should have known the little squiggle called Birchcliffe Creek would turn out to be little more than a squiggle of water in real life ...
Introduced my new cedarstrip canoe to Algonquin. It got well initiated, particularly through Birchcliffe Creek, scraping over logs and rocks -- well at least I'm less paranoid about it touching anything now! It continues to perform well, still tricky to handle in the wind because of a lack of keel, but that's the way I like it (even if nobody else does)!
8/10/96 : For the first time in well over a month (and probably only the second time since West Virginia(?), I managed to find time to go climbing. A small group of us headed to the busy-as-usual Rattlesnake Point on the Niagara Escarpment, just outside of Milton. We had a couple of new climbers with us, so we set a few moderately easy climbs (5.5 and 5.6's), but which had some more difficult sections on which to play around. Getting the late start that we did, the cliff soon emptied out, and we got a few hours of quality climbing in before it got dark, with few other people around. All in all it was good to get back out on the rock -- having a few easy climbs set for the beginners was a good way to get the feel and confidence of climbing back again. Not quite enough to be ready to lead anything on this day, seconding my friend Godwin will have to do.
8/29/96 - 9/1/96 : Well what began as an 8 day solo trip around the heart of Algonquin Provincial Park turned into a pleasant 4 day solo trip along a main corridor of Algonquin. I had been hoping to go on a Canoe Tripping Level II course up in N. Superior country the week before, but the trip was cancelled due to lack of people. So in its place I decided to partake in a week long solo trip through the very heart of Algonquin. However, by the time I was actually driving up to the Park I was not feeling completely into such a trip. Nonetheless I registered my 8 day wandering at the permit office and headed out expecting to return 8 days and 125 km later.
By the end of the second day I knew I had bitten off more than I should chew. The first couple of days were basically average in the length of paddling and portaging that I had scheduled, yet I felt worn out by the days end both days. This was in part due to the actual distance I had paddled (15-20 km) each day, but more importantly was the mental drain I experienced I think. As much as I was looking forward to some peace and solitude, one needs to be in a certain frame of mind to travel for 8 days by themselves with only the occasional "Hi, how's it going?" to passing paddlers. It became apparent to me that I was not in the correct frame of mind. So on the third morning, about 35 km from where I started, I turned around and made my way back.
I certainly couldn't have asked for better weather (sunny and warm every day), and I have to look back upon this as a good 4 day solo trip - not bad for the first solo paddling trip I've done really - but what I will be most likely to take away from this trip was the importance of one's mental state when heading out on a trip. I planned my trip so I could get back to nature, get away from all the crowds and think about a few things, but when some of the things I wanted to think about sort of resolved themselves before I left, there was a bit of a mental void which was difficult to fill with all the time I had to myself. As I keep telling people, when you're alone for that long you start talking to yourself -- and I'm just not that interesting a person to talk to!
9/20/96 - 9/22/96 : For the third year in a row, a group of us from the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto (and some other friends) have gone on a large 3-4 day canoe trip to Algonquin Park. I have organized the last 2 trips, with the design that they be a fun, relaxing adventure suitable for people who are familiar with canoe tripping, or who have never gone canoe tripping before. This year the trip was nicknamed the "Ebola" trip by my friend Corey because the number of people interested dropped from 17 to 7 in the week before we went. However, the seven of us that did end up going had a great time.
We were blessed by wonderful weather, which was a welcome change after the preceeding couple of weeks dealing with the tail ends of hurricanes Eugene and Fran. We went to the Park's east side to redo a Grand Lake to Squirrel Rapids on the Barron River trip that we had done two years ago. The only downside to such a trip is the long drive to get there and come back. The added hassle of having to do a car shuttle because we were not paddling a loop just added to the delay before putting in the water. It all becomes worth it in the end though.
Once again a great time was had at a terrific, but scary looking, natural waterslide above High Falls. I was worried that the water would be pretty cold because it was the end of September, but it turned out to be pleasantly warm. We played in the water until sunset before heading back to camp. The next day we got to trudge over a number of small to medium portages, which were more difficult than the distances suggested because of their rocky nature. We were rewarded by our efforts though by entering the Barron River Canyon in the late afternoon. Unfortunately the day cooled off enough, and it was getting late enough that we did not choose to do any cliff jumping, but the sight of the canyon was rewarding enough. As my friend Chris said, it's too bad you can just put in and paddle upstream for a short way to get to the canyon, a place like that should be difficult to get to. The next day we went for a hike to the top of the canyon to get a bird's eye view of the world and welcomed in the autumnal equinox before heading out and heading home.