Trip Reports, Campsites & More
Year in Review (2024)
Lessons Learned
Most years I manage around six or seven canoe trips. I get a long one in the spring, a few short ones with the family throughout the summer, maybe a solo some time in August, then a couple of fall trips with buddies to close out the season (and maybe, if I’m feeling adventurous, a late season day trip). This is ideal from both a general life enjoyment viewpoint (more trips > less trips) and from a “Hey, don’t I usually write a Lessons Learned post around now” viewpoint (More Trips = More Opportunities For Drew To Do Something Stupid And, Hopefully, Learn From It. Or Not).
Sadly, this was a light year for canoe tripping. I got out for an overnight in April thanks to the early ice out, a fantastic week in May just as the bugs arrived, a fun family two nighter over Labour Day and a late season day trip in November. And that was it. The good news is that I don’t need a huge window of time to do something poorly. Despite having fewer hours than usual in the Park, I still managed to find some ways to improve Future Drew’s canoe tripping experiences. Let’s dive in (but carefully, and checking for rocks and logs in the swimming area first).
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1 - Maybe Food Doesn't Have To Come Exclusively From A Bag?
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed that I don’t spend a ton of time talking about what I eat on trip. That’s because, by and large, I don’t particularly care about what I eat on trip. My three main criteria for any meal are:
- I want it to be as easy to prepare as possible.
- I want as few dishes as possible (if I’m washing more than a spoon I’ve failed)
- It needs to fill me up.
- (Also chocolate).
As long as I’ve satisfied those first three (and buried myself in number four) then I’m a happy camper. This has meant that, for the most part, my dinners on trip come from a bag (with the exception of night one which is usually steak and veggies). Any meal where all I have to do is pour water into a pouch, stir it with a spoon, then eat whatever comes out of it ten minutes later is fine with me. In particular, I’m a big fan of the Alpinaire dehydrated meal line. I could live off of their Forever Young mac and cheese or Three Cheese lasagna for a long time. At the other end of the spectrum, if I never eat another one of their Mountain Chili meals again it will be too soon (this is not an ad for Alpinaire, but it could be! Hit me up Alpinaire, I’m surprisingly cheap!). That said, and in direct contradiction to my previous sentence, eating the same thing on every trip can get kind of boring (and expensive!). So, for my spring trip this year, I decided to try something new:
Cooking.
(that sound you just heard was a whole herd of pigs taking off from Pearson Airport).
Now, before we start filling out applications to Le Cordon Bleu, it’s not like I went from eating out of bags to five course backcountry dining. Basically, I just added a couple of extra bags and tried not to mind too much that I was now washing a pot as well as a spoon. For these non pouch meals I dehydrated some bell peppers before leaving, brought along a few packs of Uncle Ben’s Bistro Express Vegetable Medley Rice, vegetarian chick broth powder and an excessive amount of Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP). I threw all that together in a pot and tried to ignore the fact that the result looked a bit like the floor of our bathroom the last time a gastro virus hitchhiked home from school on one of the kids.
And you know what? It was delicious! Maybe even more so than the pound of salt disguised as pasta I usually eat. On top of that, it packed up way more efficiently. The TVP and chicken broth for three meals took up less room than a single dehydrated pouch. The vegetable medley packs are bigger, but not as big as the dehydrated bags. All together I think I saved about a meal and a half’s worth of space, which is very welcome when you’re trying to shove eight days worth of food into a bear vault that really only wants to take six (no, you’re packing too much extra portage chocolate). I’m probably not breaking any news here, but it turns out there’s a benefit to putting a couple minutes thought into your menu. I don’t think I’m exiting the 12 minutes or less just add water space entirely, but after this summer I feel a lot better about the occasional extra dish.
2 - The Aylen River Between McKaskill and Roundbush is What You Get When Hell is Full
Pretty much what the title says for this one.
Fine, you want more detail? Let’s do it.
The penultimate day on my spring trip was a 20 KM day trip starting and ending from the McKaskill Ranger Cabin. My buddy Mark and I planned a loop south of the cabin that would take us through some relatively out of the way lakes. It would also, although we didn’t know it at the time, take us through the single worst stretch of godforsaken river I have ever visited in my life (and an equally godforsaken portage that gets you to that river).
The Aylen River runs southeast out of Algonquin from the Shall Lake access point area. Having spent thirty exhaustive seconds looking at the map, my best guess is that its headwater is Kinglet Lake. This makes sense to me. Kinglet Lake is a shallow looking lake with a very mucky shoreline in places and the Aylen River is the 10th circle of hell, uh, I mean, the Aylen River is also shallow and mucky in places.
Of course, “shallow and mucky in places” doesn’t really do the stretch in between McKaskill and Roundbush justice. To start with, if you’re coming from Roundbush, you’re going to have to navigate a 2.4 km portage that lost its battle with the blowdowns about a decade ago. The portage hurdles moved in and the path moved on. It’s hard to pick a low point from this portage, the entire carry is basically one extended low point, but if you want to pick the Marianas Trench of the experience it’s probably the place where one of the blowdowns sprawled across the path isn’t quite low enough to be seen if you’ve got a canoe on your head but isn’t quite high enough for that canoe to clear if you’re walking under into it. Mark hit that thing with a head of steam and it knocked the canoe off his shoulders and onto his head. Which, in case you’re wondering at home, is not fun.
Once you arrive at the end of the portage you’re greeted not so much with a river as you are a new portage that’s just a bit soggier and a whole lot more aggravating. And alders. So. Many. Alders. As the crow flies, the distance between the end of the p2400 up from Roundbush and the start of the p1100 up to McKaskill Lake is roughly 450 meters. As the crow struggles to push its canoe through the dense alder, over the occasional beaver dam and around each sandbar guarded bend in the river, the distance from the p2400 up from Roundbush to the p1100 up to McKaskill Lake is roughly half a year off its life. It takes an Olympic sprinter about 43 seconds to cover 400 meters. It took Mark and I the better part of an hour. By the time we finally dragged the canoe around that last bend in the river we were both exhausted, soaked and scratched to bits. The bug gear that I’d been wearing now looked like those jeans you can buy with pre ripped knees, which is not ideal when that thin layer of mesh is all that’s standing between you and the hordes of mosquitoes waiting to drain you like a keg of PBR at spring break. The canoe was filled with alder branches and regrets. Spiders, too. And I was done.
So, what’s the lesson here? I’ll let mid Aylen River Mark have the final word:
3 - You Need A Longer Tripping Season For A Longer Lessons Learned Post
This is actually a poorly worded title. The tripping season this year was pretty long! Thanks to Mother Nature, with a healthy assist from global warming, the ice went out early enough that I was paddling in April, and it stayed away long enough that I was still paddling in November. I just didn’t do much paddling in between. Which means we’ve got ourselves a short and sweet Lessons Learned after a (figuratively) short and sweet tripping season. Up next we’ll have the annual Moosie Awards. I’m encouraged that I’m publishing this part of the Year in Review somewhere close to the actual year it’s reviewing. I think last year’s Lessons Learned didn’t come out until the end of February. With any luck I’ll have at least part one of the Moosies ready before January is out. In the meantime, I’ve got a spring trip to book and a date with a lake that’s been on my list for a very long time. Want to know which one? You’ll have to wait for this year’s Moosies. I’ll have a preview of the 2025 tripping season after we hand out the hardware for old favourites like best lake and worst portage. Until then, Happy New Year to everyone, hope it’s a great start to 2025!
