Smoke Lake to Louisa

Meg and I decided to spend a week this year camping, and I was quickly able to convince her (it didn't really take any convincing :) ) that we'd want to go canoing, rather than just car camping. So we made plans to spend a night in the Cannsibay campground (the day after my sister's wedding), and then head into the interior for 4 nights. We had burgers cooked over a campfire and some beer before turning in for the night.

As you can see from the map linked here, we travelled down Smoke Lake through a couple of mid-length, but all uphill portages. We spent Monday night on Big Porcupine Lake, enjoying what was a fairly short paddle (we left the put-in around 10:30 or so and arrived sometime in the early afternoon). We knew that the next day was the real test of our journey. It held the longest portage I've ever done, 1460 meters. While I'd been out in a canoe with Meg once before (at her aunt & uncle's cottage), I was suitably impressed with her paddling ability.

Tuesday brought a day full of portaging. We probably spent a total of 2 hours in the canoe, and the rest of the time carrying it and the rest of our stuff. We did a muddy portage (a boggy beginning really) first thing in the morning, and met a father and son from Buffalo at the end. We also passed some park rangers who were busy clearing a fallen log off the portage trail.

The day of portages continued, with us hopping in and out of the canoe between carries. The two fellows from Buffalo seemed to stick around us all day. They made only one trip across, but really, until the end of the last portage of the day we'd keep catching up to them. We stopped for a light lunch on McGarvey Lake as we were making excellent time and had only the last portage to go before finishing for the day.

The last portage was long, hot and very long. Meg and I did the one and a half trips method where we both carried the majority of our stuff (only leaving the canoe and the day pack behind) to start with. At the midway point (where we just happened to catch up with the Buffalo boys again - for the last time though), I dropped the bags I was carrying and Meg kept going. I made my way back to the canoe and brought it across the portage while Meg finished, went back to the middle to retrieve my first load and then carried on again to the end. In this manner we were able to carry more stuff than one trip across without each having to walk the distance of the portage 3 times (in fact, we each walked the distance twice). The portage was long, but there was nothing hard about it. With the ultralight kevlar canoe we had it was very manageable.

We finished the portage and then went for a quick dip, clothes on, to cool down before getting into our canoe. We were on our last lake for the day, and in fact were about to choose a spot for two nights (we had planned an off-day on Wednesday). Unfortunately, whilst we were swimming, the wind picked up and forced us to delay our trip across the wide part of the lake. The water was quite rough and so we chose to paddle with the wind and wait until the evening to make our way to our site for the next two nights. We had a great dinner of chili and bannock coupled with some tetrapak wine we'd been lugging along on our journey (note: finish your wine before the long hard portages, at 2.2 lbs a litre, it does create quite a bit of weight). When the evening rolled around we paddled across the now much calmer waters to a coveted island site.

The site was pretty nice and we were able to set up our tent and relax before things got to buggy. We were able to watch a storm of thunder and lightning go by us to the north before settling into the tent to escape the bugs and play a game of cards. Wednesday began with a fairly breezy and overcast day. We spent the day just laying about, Meghan doing Spanish whilst I read. We were able to take advantage of a little sandy beach hidden amongst the rocks on our site, as well as some of the more finer points - a big rock table and a chair cut (with a chainsaw) out of a log - of what is obviously a popular site. We had an excellent lunch and dinner, again enjoyed with tetrapak wine.

While I had thought that we would avoid any rain on Wednesday the fall of evening brought a crazy rain storm as we were finishing up our pasta dinner. We rushed to get the dishes done and make sure we were well positioned for the night and then retired to our 'mostly' dry tent. Meg's tent did well, keeping most of what was a very heavy rain out. We passed the time with a game of cribbage before falling asleep when the rain had stopped and we were better able to stretch out.

Thursday morning we arose very early to the beginning of a beautiful day (typical after a summer storm) and packed up our wet stuff. We were hoping to spot Meg's first moose and wanted to be on the water early in the morning to avoid any loud campers. We were off on the water by 7:30am and made our way to the first of five portages on the day.

The first two portages were relatively short at around 500m, with the middle portage being the longest of our day at approximately 700m. Our food barrel was much lighter after having spent the two nights on Louisa and that made things a lot easier. Unfortunatley we saw nothing larger than a beaver in our paddles, so we'll have to get back to the park to find Meg a moose another time.

As we made it to the longest portage of the day we encountered our ranger friends again. This time they were much more talkative and asked us where we were headed and how we coped with the rain. They even gave us the lowdown on the weather for the next couple of days. They mentioned that the best campsites on Bonnechere Lake (where we'd be spending this, our final night) were down at the end we wanted to be at. Unfortunately they had also grabbed the best site available. Oh well, such is life.

Unfortunately this portage would turn out to be the worst of the trip. It wasn't that it was long or hard or anything, but because of hte rain the night before, everything was very slippery. And slip Meghan did; right down onto a bunch of rocks. She put a nice little cut into her forehead, scraped up a knee and a shin and managed to bruise her face. All in all she got off lucky, but I was quite frightened when I came around the corner with the canoe and found her tending to her wounds. That was the last time I let her carry the big canoe pack. I really shouldn't have let her carry it at all, it probably outweighed her.

We finished the last two (very short) portages eary in the day and had a beautiful sunny afternoon to have lunch, dry our stuff out and relax. As we were enjoying our day, our ranger friends canoed by and let us know they were going to try to catch some fish at their local fishing hole. They invited us over to try some fresh cooked fish and chips later in the evening. We didn't want to impose to much so we made our own dinner (a decent freeze-dried curry) and hopped on over to sample what was left. The rangers were interesting, they do the work seasonally and spend up to 10 days in the park. They're flown in by float-plane and don't travel light. They had two tents (one for each of them), a screened in dining shelter, a propane stove and lamp, two big chest coolers and a whole bunch of other stuff. They make it to each portage and campsite once or twice a season, and will address problems that people report (downed logs over portages) when they can. There are eight groups of two in the park and these two handle the southwest area, they've actually been doing it for 8 seasons. After our visit with the rangers we headed back to our site (certainly not as nice as theirs) and bedded down for our last night.

Our trip back to the car from Bonnechere was much like our trip on the first day, except for the fact that we had a massive headwind. It started as we were on Ragged Lake and continued in full gale force while we were on Smoke Lake. It was probably the least enjoyable part of our trip, and we were both glad to finally get to the end, portage the canoe back to the store and get a cold drink.

We then hit road and made our way back to my parent's place where we were going to stay for the majority of the long weekend.

All in all it was a great trip, and I look forward to doing it again.