In mid-august, I brought my younger two kids (the twins, Aaron and Robin, who are 22) on a wilderness camping trip into the interior of Algonquin Park. Neither of them have ever been to the park, so it was a nice experience for them (and me).
We left on Thursday August 15 at around noon, and drove to Huntsville. I had my Delta 12.10 kayak strapped to the roof of my Jeep, and we had all our camping gear in the back. We pulled into Arrowhead Provincial Park at around five, and got our site registration done. I had decided to stay at Arrowhead for the night so we could get on the lake in Algonquin early the next morning (its a five hour drive from home).
Our campsite was a bit of a mess, with the fire pit full of bottles, cans, and even a dirty stainless steel cooking pot. We set up our two tents, and then we stopped at the park office on the way out to get dinner. When we got back all the garbage had disappeared, which was a good thing, given that we were in bear country.
The next morning we packed up our tents early, and were back on the road just before six. We reached Kearney around six thirty, and found an open restaurant we could eat breakfast at. Once we were done, we went over to Algonquin Basecamp, and picked up the paddles, pfds, and safety gear for the canoe we were renting, along with the key. A quick trip across the road to the park permit office to pick up our permit, and then we were on our way to Rain Lake (access point #4).
We saw a couple bull moose back from the road on our way to the lake, but I only took one picture, and it was really blurry. We got to the lake finally, found our canoe, and started loading everything up. There were a number of people loading up at the same time, although most of them were going much farther than we were.
We were on the lake by about eight forty-five, and the water was like a sheet of glass, with some neat mist just above the surface along one side.
We eventually got to the end of Rain Lake (its a long skinny lake), and did the portage to Sawyer Lake. A quick hop across Sawyer, and by twelve thirty or so we were on Jubilee Lake, our destination for this trip. The kayak wasn’t too bad to portage with the yoke I had built (patterned after Kayak Camper’s Yoke), and my custom-built back-frame worked reasonably well with the dry bags carrying all my gear. I’ll do a project page in the future discussing my portage gear, so I won’t post any more information here. My Delta 12.10 kayak is nice and light, weighing in at 41 lbs, so it is pretty reasonable to carry.
We spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday just hanging out, lazing around, exploring the lake, and generally relaxing.
I took what is probably the nicest picture of the trip on Saturday morning, while I was out exploring the lake.
Here’s a larger version of that image…
Finally, on Sunday morning we packed up all our gear, and headed back out.
There was a strong headwind we were fighting all the way down Rain Lake, so we were exhausted by the time we got to the access point. I literally fell out of my kayak, but fortunately I had a full change of dry clothes waiting for me in my Jeep.
It was a really nice trip, all in all. The last time I was in Algonquin was in 2013 with Nick, my older son. I had hoped to do a solo trip in September this year, but it turns out I have to spend a bunch of time flying back and forth to California this fall for the job, so maybe next year…