Lake Opeongo North Arm Base Camp
Moose, Marshmallows & (Minor) Mayhem
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There’s a campsite on the North Arm of Lake Opeongo that I love. It’s a big site on the north shore, just east of the Proulx portage. It sits on a long, flat stretch of shoreline fronted by an equally long, flat stretch of beach. The site is dotted with tall, hydro-pole pines. The first time I stayed there I felt like a starving man staring down an all-you-can-eat buffet as I walked around the site with my hammock. The swimming from the beach is awesome for kids and adults alike, and the sunset views are phenomenal. Best of all, even though it’s 15 km north of the Opeongo access point, you can be dragging your comically overpacked food barrel up to its fire pit less than half an hour after pulling that same barrel out of your car thanks to the door-to-door service of Algonquin Outfitter’s Opeongo water taxi. Add all this up, and you’re left with a site that is absolutely perfect for large groups (and absolutely perfect for my Labour Day 2025 family-and-friends trip).
The Plan
For the past few years my oldest daughter (and sometimes the whole family) has been joining my friends Gordon, Jess and Amanda and their families on a two-night base camp out of the Shall Lake access point. We’ve done Booth Lake twice, and Shirley Lake once. As nice as that area is, we thought it might be fun to branch out a bit this past summer and started looking at lakes near other access points that would let us set up a base camp while still giving plenty of day-trip options. Opeongo scratched that itch almost perfectly. Smack in the middle of the Park, Algonquin’s largest lake (by far) is a gateway to multiple canoe routes and offers a ton of exploring even if you never leave its waters. The biggest drawback to Opeongo is, well, that it’s big. If the wind is up, crossing Opeongo by canoe can be difficult at best, deadly at worst. Given that we were only heading out for a couple of nights, we didn’t want to run the risk of being windbound either coming or going. The water taxi solved that problem neatly. There are a couple of outfitters who run taxi services from the access point to multiple spots around the lake, meaning that for a fairly reasonable (but not negligible) cost, you can get yourself and your gear delivered to multiple portage or campsite locations throughout the North and East Arms.
Which is exactly what we did.
This particular trip was taking place over the Labour Day long weekend. We settled on Opeongo’s North Arm as it would give us access to both Red Rock Lake, which is a lovely day-trip destination up from Opeongo, and nearby Nepawin Lake, which had so far managed to stay off my list of lakes visited. The plan was to arrive the Friday of the long weekend and head up to the cluster of sites between and around the Red Rock and Proulx portages. There are quite a few sites in this area, all of which would be workable for a group as large as ours (we had eight people for this trip, one shy of the Park’s maximum site-occupancy level). I wanted the site I mentioned in the intro (Site 2 if you’re looking at the Campsite Report Archive) but figured any in the area would do. Gordon, Jess and Amanda were going to be arriving ahead of my daughter and me, which meant that they would be doing the heavy lifting of finding the site while all we had to do was have our taxi take us to wherever they ended up.
Bates Island Aftermath
We arrived at the access point just before five. Our taxi was waiting for us and before long we were on the water, racing towards the North Arm. As we headed up Opeongo we passed Bates Island, a long island that sits across the top of what I think of as the first segment of the South Arm. Bates is somewhat notorious in Algonquin history for being the site of a fatal bear attack in the early ‘90s and, much more recently, being absolutely flattened by a massive storm that swept through in June of 2025. I’d seen videos of the aftermath of the storm when it happened, but it was surreal seeing the damage in person. There were trees down across the island, some snapped off halfway up the trunk. Looking at that mess, it’s a miracle that no one was killed (further north one boy was badly injured and had to be evacuated, but to my knowledge injuries in the Park were relatively minimal despite the destruction).
You could actually track the path of the storm as we continued north. The western shore across from Bates had a similar swath of downed trees, bordered on either side by normal forest. It was crazy to think about how localized the worst part of the storm was as it swept through. That patch of downed trees wasn’t all that wide. It looked like a bulldozer on steroids had ripped a very specific path through the Park, taking out everything in front of it and leaving the rest untouched.
Seeing the devastation on Bates made me think about what I’d do if I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of trees falling over like Godzilla was marching through. To be honest, I don’t know that there is too much you can do. Sitting in the tent you are essentially blind. You won’t know that tree is coming down until it’s crashing through the roof. But getting out of the tent in the middle of a massive storm and trying to find shelter seems just as risky. My buddy Mark and I have talked about this a few times on our spring trips. We settled on the idea that if there is a large enough rock nearby it might make sense to shelter against that, as it will at least provide something solid between you and falling branches. Beyond that, it’s how you prepare that matters most. When you’re setting up your tent, look above you for dead branches or nearby trees that look like they’re nearing the end of their careers. Avoid setting up at the tops of hills or in overly exposed areas if there is a risk of lightning. Above all, find some sources that aren’t me to help guide your thinking on this. I’m the guy who once tried to outrun a thunderstorm on Kiosk. Maybe check in with someone who doesn’t have that kind of boneheaded decision on their resume. Kevin Callan has a decent video with a few other tips that is worth a watch. In fact, I’ll put it right here and then we can get back to the canoe trip.
Arrivals (& Departures)
The ride up to the North Arm took around 15 minutes. The good news was that the group had ended up exactly where I hoped they would. Site 2 was empty (which Gordon was able to confirm to me via text because Site 2 also gets cell service) and they were nicely settled in and waiting for us on the beach by the time we arriv – wait, is that blood?
Oh, that’s blood.
It turns out that our friends weren’t so much waiting for us as they were waiting for our water taxi. One of the kids had had a run-in with a hand saw, in that the saw had run into her hand. The skin on her finger had been torn along a jagged seam and looked as though it would require at least a stitch or two. It was the kind of cut that if you were two days out from the access point you’d try to patch together with gauze and maybe a bit of super glue and then hope like heck it doesn’t get infected while make your way back to civilization. On Opeongo Lake, with a water taxi at hand and the Huntsville hospital an hour away, the decision was easier. Save the backcountry medicine for the backcountry and let’s get this patched up by someone with more than a weekend’s worth of Wilderness First Aid training. When the taxi left it was carrying Gordon and his daughter who were now looking forward to some universal healthcare and a night in one of Huntsville’s finest motels before they would rejoin us the next morning (assuming the doctor didn’t have any concerns about bringing a freshly sewn-up finger into the back-ish country).
Once things settled down my daughter and I got ourselves set up. It was a beautiful evening. Late August in the Park is usually peak Algonquin. The air feels like summer during the day but hints at fall at night. The water is warm and the days are long enough without being too long (I like my daylight. I don’t love it at 9:30 at night). We fried up some quesadillas for dinner and then enjoyed my first ever backcountry trifle. What is a backcountry trifle you might ask? It’s a giant bowl of trifle that you eat in the backcountry. Usually at the same time as other people are eating out of the giant bowl of backcountry trifle. It’s a communal backcountry trifle dessert, and it is delicious.
After dinner we watched as the remaining kids went for an evening paddle up and down the shoreline in front of our beach. Once the sun neared the horizon we headed up to the fire pit for some marshmallows, because apparently we hadn’t gotten enough of a sugar fix from the bowl of cake and whipped cream we’d devoured an hour earlier. Once the sugar had worked its way through my system and my heart rate had dropped back below 200 bpm, I crawled into my tent, excited for day 2 (or day 1, really. That first day was more of a day 0 given how long we were actually out there).
Day 2
We woke up slowly the next morning. We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, then got ready for the day. Gordon and his daughter were due back at around 9:30, and they arrived right on schedule with smiles and a freshly stitched finger. We gave them some time to get settled in but not too settled. Our plan for the day was to day-trip up to Red Rock Lake, and we were on the water about an hour after they arrived.
The portage to Red Rock was a couple kilometers of paddling from our campsite. That usually wouldn’t be much of a workout, but the wind was up and wanted to make us work for it. I had the two older girls with me in my boat, and we made steady progress. Gordon was paddling with the two younger guys and the weight imbalance meant his bow was sticking out of the water and acting like the world’s most aggravating wind vane. He was paddling twice as hard as I was just to keep the boat straight, and his reward for all that effort was the p1900 up to Red Rock Lake.
Red Rock Lake
That portage up to Red Rock makes you work. It’s uphill both ways, with a significant slope down to Red Rock at the end. The two older girls each took a canoe for part of the carry, giving us parents a preview of a possible future where we get to wander across the portage with nothing but our cameras in hand while the kids schlep the boats and gear. I like that future.
We arrived at Red Rock to find a reasonably stiff onshore wind and a moose waiting for us.
Wait, let’s see if we can rework that one for clarity.
We arrived at Red Rock to find a reasonably stiff onshore wind and a dead moose waiting for us.
Okay, that’s better, but it doesn’t quite capture the essence of the moment. Let’s try one more time.
We arrived at Red Rock to find a reasonably stiff wind and the bloated body of a long-dead moose bobbing up and down in the waves just past the portage take-out.
That’s it. That’s the one.
I had four moose sightings last year, but half of those weren’t the kind you’re going to be writing down on the Visitor Centre’s big board of animal sightings. This was my second dead moose of 2025, and by far the grossest. We smelled the moose before we saw it. There was a faint odour of rot at the end of the portage that was quickly explained by the not so faint vision of rot in front of us. The moose was floating about 20 meters offshore, its body bloated and decaying. We didn’t get too close. In general, I try to give all dead things, from road-kill squirrels to ravaging hordes of zombies, a wide berth. But we did take a few minutes to check it out from a distance before our thoughts naturally turned to lunch.
(Ewww).
Our plan for lunch was to find a site on Red Rock and hang out for a bit. I’d been hoping that Site 5 might be free as I’d been there a few years before and really enjoyed how much room it offered, its comfortable bench set up and great views. Unfortunately, someone else was currently enjoying those features, which meant that we needed to find an alternative.
We ended up on Site 4, a sheltered site on Red Rock’s south shore. From the water this one looks like it might be on the smaller side. The canoe landing is on a small point and looks a bit overgrown. However, once you’re past the slanted cedar that overhangs the landing area and up the slight hill to the site proper, the site really opens up. We spread out and made some lunch, trying to ignore the massive Algonquin Anaconda that was sunning itself nearby (there was a small garter snake hanging out on that slanted cedar, apparently enjoying the afternoon sun with absolutely no regard for the fact that snakes are the worst and I hate them).
Nepawin Lake
With lunch in the books, we paddled across to the p870 leading up to Nepawin Lake. Nepawin is a small, dead-end lake just north of Red Rock. I’d never been up there before and was looking forward to changing that fact. We left the canoes and packs behind, the kids leading the way while the adults strolled along after. I really enjoyed this hike. The forest was bright green and the air was beautifully warm out of the wind. There was a spot about a quarter of the way up the path where a couple of massive maples had grown at an almost 45-degree angle out of a hill and across the portage. Branches hung over the path, creating a leafy curtain as I walked beneath them.
We arrived at Nepawin to find the kids already done with Nepawin. I don’t blame them. They’d been there for a few minutes already and I feel like that’s more than enough time to get the Nepawin experience (that said, I bet this is a good spring fishing lake. There are no campsites and according to Maps by Jeff’s Algonquin Map it’s known for brook trout. You’d probably have the lake to yourself if you went up that way).
The trip down from Nepawin and back to Opeongo was uneventful. We were back on the site by 4:30 and ready for another gorgeous sunset. Do you know what else we were ready for? A clinic on how to make that loon sound by cupping your hands together and blowing into them. Gordon’s kids were pros at this and after a looooooot of patient tutoring on their parts I was able to take my loon-call skills from “is there a dying ox nearby?” to “hey, that actually kind of sounds like a loon (if you’ve never heard a loon before)”.
We finished out the night with more marshmallows under a beautifully starry sky. I slept like a log, dreaming of trips to come while nearby a single, forlorn loon hunted for the source of that beautiful call it had been hearing all night. Or maybe just looking to see if that dying ox needed some help.
Day 3
We woke up to flat water, blue skies and another fantastic morning. Unfortunately, we weren’t going to be around to enjoy it for long. Our water taxi was due to pick us up at 11:30, and we spent most of the morning packing up. The kids did get out for another paddle to check out some nearby islands, but for all intents and purposes the trip was over. The taxi arrived right on schedule (honestly, AO runs this service with the precision of the Swiss rail system; it’s impressive) and we were back at the access point by noon.
This was a fantastic family trip. The site was perfect for our group, the weather was cooperative and we had just the right mix of exploring and campsite hang-out time. Ideally you would prefer to avoid a hospital visit on any trip, but even that worked out well once it became necessary. I would highly recommend an Opeongo base camp to anyone looking for a low-key weekend that still feels like a backcountry adventure. I would also highly recommend marshmallows, because they are delicious.
Stats
New Lakes: 1
Total Lakes: 3
Total Portages: 2 (X2)
ortage Distance: 5.57 KM
Total Distance: 15.44 KM
