Canoe Lake to Catfish & Beyond
Part Four: Opeongo to Two Rivers
Hi there! Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy and feel free to subscribe if you do! A quick note for anyone receiving this through an email subscription. First of all, thank you for subscribing. Secondly, this post looks better when viewed through the website. This link will take you there: Canoe Lake to Catfish & Beyond – Part Four (And, if you don’t already subscribe, there’s a subscription sign up at the bottom of this report!).
This is the final part of my Spring 2025 Trip Report. If you want to catch up on Part One, Part Two or Part Three you can find them here (Part One) here (Part Two) and here (part Three)
Day 6
The Opeongo to Sproule portage is a bit of a beast. It’s 3.3 kilometers of steadily rising trail from the south end of Opeongo to Sproule. It feels like an old trail. The path is a sunken ribbon between the trees; like it’s been ground into the forest floor by thousands of feet over hundreds of years. It’s very easy to follow, which is great, but it’s also narrow and, when we were there, littered with deadfall. The last quarter of the trail is particularly challenging, with large muddy areas and some steep, slippery spots that want very much to send you sideways into a nearby gully. I was relieved when finally arrived at Sproule and could put the portage behind us.
That relief lasted just as long as it took to get the canoe off my shoulders. It’s hard to really sink into that “at least the worst is over” feeling when you’re staring at a massive column of slate grey cloud bearing down on you and realizing that rumble you’re hearing in the distance isn’t plane engines.
Sproule Lake
Apparently while we’d been fighting the deadfall on the portage the blue skies we’d left behind on Opeongo had been fighting the thunderclouds, and losing. Within about three seconds of arriving on Sproule it became very clear that we weren’t going to make our date on Sunday Lake. It wasn’t even clear that we were going to find a place to set up on Sproule before the rain hit, but we were going to give it our best shot.
We loaded the boat faster than I think we’d done on any other portage all trip, then set out across Sproule at a pace that would have made those racers we’d passed on the Crow River proud. Sproule has five campsites. I’d actually been able to check them all out on a previous trip, so I knew which ones I’d want to target if we were stuck there for the night (sites 3 and 5 to be specific). Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones on Sproule, and both those sites were already taken. We ended up sprinting across the lake to site 2. This isn’t a great spot, even for a small group. The site is littered with rocks sticking out of the ground, making it hard to find space for tents. There were two sorta tent spots, neither of which are all that great. We ended up pitching the tent in a small divot beside a large boulder, and putting the bug tent/tarp up in the clearest spot near the water (first time all trip we’d had to break the bug tent out, and it wasn’t even for the bugs).
We finished our set up as the first drops began to fall. And fall. And fall.
What followed was one of the wettest nights I remember on trip. Once the rain and thunder arrived they were all too happy to settle in with us for the evening. There was a decent wind driving the rain through the mesh of the bug tent, meaning our secondary shelter wasn’t all that sheltering. I remember huddling against the wind while warming my hands on the flame from my stove and wondering if there was something lower on the scale than Type 2 fun, because at that moment it felt like we were somewhere south of Type 6. We ate an early dinner then beat an early retreat to the tent where it was at least dry and comfortable, if somewhat cozy for a 12 hour stay.
Day 7
The temperature dropped overnight, but I stayed warm thanks to my intricate and well thought out layering system that was essentially just every item of clothing I’d brought with me and prayer. The rain had given up by the time we were ready to leave the tent, but it had left behind a cold, grey morning and the promise of more rain down the road (we had cell service and weather reports on that site, and the reports weren’t great). On top of that, the wind was still driving through our site. And if it was blowing this hard on a small lake like Sproule, I was concerned what crossing a large lake like Two Rivers would look like (not great, as it turned out). Not ideal when that lake is smack in the middle of a 25 KM day meant to end up at Head Lake with very few backup site options along the way. Adding all this up, we realized we were faced with a Clash decision. Should we stay or should we go?
I mentioned earlier that Sproule is less than a kilometer from Highway 60. Along with giving us cell reception and weather updates, this also meant we had multiple outs available to us for the day. Our planned route took us past the Sunday Lake mini access point, through the Kearney and Whitefish campgrounds, past Two Rivers East Beach and campground and close to the Cache Lake access point. We realized that if we wanted to call the trip a day early we could keep paddling for the morning, cross a few more lakes off the list, and arrange a pickup at any one of the locations above from my (lovely and understanding) wife who just happened to be in the area.
So we bailed. We bailed like we’d just missed the last life boat on the Titanic. It didn’t even take us that long to make the decision. Neither of us were looking forward to another cold, soggy night, or to running the risk of not making it to Head Lake before the next storms hit. We decided to stuff as much gear as we could into Mark’s pack, then stash that pack at the Sunday access point. We’d paddle through to Two Rivers, then come back for the gear on our way out of the Park (this is, theoretically, a great plan. It becomes less great when someone whose name rhymes with Sprew inexplicably decides to pack the car keys in the pack that is being stashed. Makes driving back to get the pack somewhat tougher).
Plan in place, we repacked our gear and got ready to set off for what was now our last day on the water.
Wait. Is that a moose leg? Without the rest of the moose?
Turns out that we weren’t the only ones who’d had dinner on that campsite in the past few days. Hiding in the bush just a few steps from the thunderbox was a dismembered moose leg that is now firmly entrenched at the top of my “things I don’t want to look at while I’m sitting on the thunderbox” list. My guess is that some unlucky moose ran into a pack of very lucky wolves. God knows where the rest of the carcass ended up.
With that reminder of how the food chain works firmly imprinted behind our eyelids for future nightmare fuel, we packed the boat and set off for home. (Fun Fact! Well not so much fun as gross. Gross Fact! I saw twice as many dead moose this summer as I did live ones. This was by far the least gross of the dead ones. But more on that another time).
Sproule to Kearney Lake
After the rain, the P480 across to Sunday Lake was mucky. It was, however, a very easy to navigate portage so we were across it in no time. Mark was carrying his pack, which was basically as tall as he was (and Mark’s not short), and I had the canoe and the day pack. I bring this up solely because I want to use the picture of Mark with his Omega Pack.
When we arrived at Sunday Lake we met another trip who told us they’d startled a bear on their way across the portage. I feel like if they’d asked the bear it probably would have said it startled them, but who’s to say who’s right? (The bear. The bear is always right).
We made short work of the paddle across Sunday. Sunday is a relatively small lake with three campsites. The best, by far, is the island site in the middle of the lake. That had been our goal for the night before and I felt a small pang of regret as we paddled past. We’d had so many good sites on this trip it was a bit disappointing to have ended with what was inarguably the worst site of the week, especially when that awesome Sunday spot was a couple of kilometers away.
We dropped our stash pack at the Sunday access and continued on to the portage over to Little Rock Lake. This portage, and the two that came after, really surprised me. And not in a “well this is much easier than I thought it would be” kind of way. They were unexpectedly tough, but each in their own way. The Sunday to Little Rock portage was less a trail than it was a 600 meter ankle bath. The water running down the path was shin deep in many places, and where it wasn’t doing its best impression of a stream it had left behind slick mud patches and rockbergs just waiting to trip you up.
Little Rock to Pond Lake was slightly shorter (p520) and a lot flatter, but offered its own brand of misery in the form of some pretty dense deadfall at either end of the carry that required some light bleeding to push our way through.
All that said, the real treat of this string of portages was the third carry, the p900 between Pond Lake and Kearney Lake.
Jesus.
You’d think that a portage that is the first portage out from a Highway 60 lake, and also happens to be the first portage out from a very popular campground, would likely be fairly well travelled and in decent shape. But you’d also think that at some point groups of attractive college students would stop going to isolated cabins in the woods, and you’d be wrong about both.
To start with, while the takeout at the Pond Lake end is very pretty, it’s also a false start. You pull up to a lovely slope of exposed rock that looks like the beginning of a nice carry just to realize that that rock is basically an island and on the other side of that island is a creek-y bit that you can’t paddle, but you also can’t really walk. There was, at one point, a boardwalk across this stretch of muck, but that boardwalk now consists of three partially submerged and mostly rotted beams and the occasional spike hiding just below the surface. Once you wade across that mess the path alternates between overgrown and reasonably decent until the reasonably decent part peters out and the overgrown part is replaced with an overwatered part. The trail ends with a hundred meters or so of ankle deep (and surprisingly cold) water and mud before finishing off with a nice bit of path and put-in on Kearney.
The good news is that those three portages are kinda worth it. Both Little Rock and Pond Lake have their own appeal. Little Rock’s sole campsite is a nice looking, west-facing site on the side of a broad and gently sloping hill (I think. I don’t have a picture of it, but in my memory it’s on a hill. By all means let me know if that’s wrong). I enjoyed paddling through Little Rock and love the idea of having a private lake so close to the highway.
Pond Lake doesn’t have any campsites on it, but it’s a nice little spot. It only takes a couple of minutes to paddle across, but as you get to the south end of the lake you paddle through a short, rocky narrows that is as unexpected as it is pretty.
Kearney Lake … well, Kearney Lake is fine. I guess. From the portage put-in we could hear what was either a small waterfall or at least some fast-moving water. We couldn’t see the source of the sound once we were on the lake, but we did see an overturned canoe just around the corner from where we’d put in. Normally seeing something like that would worry me, but since we could also see the Kearney campground across the lake I was fairly certain we were looking at a canoe that tried to make a break for it from the campground beach, rather than one that had dumped some trippers. We stopped briefly to check it out and make sure there wasn’t anyone trapped underneath, then paddled over to the campground and the portage over to Whitefish.
In retrospect, this is where the trip ended. There was no denying we were back to civilization as we paddled up to campground’s beach and portage takeout. A remote control speedboat circled us as we got close, leading us back to shore like a pilot boat guiding a cruise ship into the harbour. There were people up and down the beach in jeans and winter jackets (it was a pretty cold/wet morning) and it felt like we’d crossed the threshold from canoe tripping to hanging out on Highway 60. It was at this point, as we were eating snack bars and trying to decide how much further we wanted to push it, that my wife called to let us know that she and the kids were hiking a nearby trail and did we want a pickup?
We did.
She figured she’d need about an hour to finish the trail so we decided to meet her at the East Beach on Two Rivers. Plan in place we headed across to Whitefish and our last paddle of the trip.
Kearney to Two Rivers
The portage between Kearney and Whitefish is along the internal roads of the Kearney and Whitefish campgrounds. It’s flat, wide and easy to get across. That said, it’s also the portage that came closest to killing one of us on this trip, so it deserves a bit of respect. The carry ended with a slightly grassy downslope and a wide beach area. Normally this wouldn’t be particularly difficult, but after the rain the grass was slicker than a greased up slip’n’slide. Mark was carrying the boat and about two steps into the downslope his feet went out from under him and he went down hard. I’m not sure how he managed to contort his body so that he didn’t break six different bones when the canoe landed on top of him, but when the dust settled, he was still in one piece (and, as an added bonus, so was the canoe).
After taking a minute for Mark to catch his breath and make sure that there truly wasn’t anything broken from the fall, we got into the canoe and started upriver.
Whitefish is connected to Lake of Two Rivers by a stretch of the Madawaska River. The Madawaska isn’t exactly a raging river, but it does have a bit of a current. And that current was doing its best to keep us from leaving the Park. Apart from the somewhat frustratingly slow progress, this is a fun part to paddle. The river winds past the Pog Lake Campground which was full of activity that day. The waterway is wide and easy to navigate, without too many switchbacks or potential dead ends. In other words, it’s a really pleasant way to wind down a trip.
And then the trip was fully unwound. We came around a bend in the river, saw Lake of Two Rivers opening in front of us and a stretch of windswept beach just to our right. East Beach. Our pickup point and, that morning, the best place in Algonquin to fly a kite. Remember how I’d mentioned being worried that we might have a headwind on Two Rivers based on the morning breeze on Sproule? Well, it turns out that, like a stopped clock, I occasionally get things right. The wind was up on Two Rivers and the waves were dancing. I stood on the beach looking west across a couple of kilometers worth of wannabe canoe capsizers and was feeling pretty good about our decision to call it while we were still somewhat dry. Of course, those good feelings were offset by the downer of knowing that the trip was over. So I guess I was neutral? But neutral and dry!
And that’s it. A massive trip report for a massive trip. This was an awesome week and an awesome trip. All told we covered 145 KM over 7 days. We visited lakes I’ve wanted to see for the better part of a decade and revisited some old favourites that I want to keep seeing in the decades to come. We had one of the best streaks of campsite luck I’ve ever had. Our first four nights were on sites that were progressively better than the ones that came before, and that list started with what I’d probably consider a top 20 all time site on Misty Lake for night one. We paddled a part of the Tim River I’ve never seen before, met one of the most interesting people I’ve come across in the Park, and checked out one of the coolest pieces of Park history I’ve seen so far, the cellar on Burntroot. We connected to at least four of our previous trips along the way, and crossed off some hard to reach spots from the overall list. All in all it was a great way to spend a week. Can’t wait to do it again.
Afterword
If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you! This is the longest trip report I’ve ever written, both in terms of words and time spent writing. To give a peek behind the curtain, I usually write my trip reports within the first two weeks of the trip ending, then take another few weeks to lay out the blog posts. For the most part the finished report is ready to go within about a month of the last day of trip. Not this one. I started writing this report in May and it’s December 2 as I type this (and January 2 as I finish the post layout). Why did it take such a long time to write? Well, lack of time, mostly. As you may know if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, I’ve got three kids and a full-time job, both of which keep me busy. I love writing these posts, but they’re a distant second to hockey practice, basketball games and Cubs meetings. Right now I’ve got three more reports sitting in the backlog, along with the annual Moosie Awards and a whole bunch of campsite reviews. At this rate they should all be ready for Christmas. 2026. (That joke worked better when it was written before Christmas 2025).
Why am I telling you this? Honestly, just to let you know how much I appreciate people keeping up with this site, even if it’s been a while since there’s been any new content. All of Algonquin had over 200,000 views in 2025, and over 77,000 visitors. That’s incredible. When I started this thing I figured I’d be lucky if both my wife and my mom read it. So thank you. Thank you for reading along with me and thank you to those of you who keep coming back. Hopefully you’re still enjoying reading these reports, because I know I’m still enjoying writing them.
Until the next one, happy paddling.
Stats
New Lakes Paddled: 17
Total Lakes Paddled: 45
Total Portages: 42
Total Portage Distance: 38.77 KM
Total Travel Distance: 145.61 KM
