Iain Leitch Photography

 McManus Lake was glass calm on my most recent canoe trip. There wasn't a single bit of breeze, but yet it wasn't too hot either. It was the perfect canoe tripping day.  I started my most recent canoe trip from access point 21: McManus Lake. This was going to be a short trip, with just one night day on Smith Lake before heading home again.  I made to the access point around 10am after a brief 15- minute stop in Pembroke to add a little extra range to my car. The road in was delightful to drive on as it had just been graded recently, so it was smooth sailing. I made the mandatory stop at the Sand Lake Gate to register and was on my way again in no time. After turning off of the Barron Canyon Road onto the McManus Lake road, the road quality went down slightly. The road itself was fine for the most part with only a few washboard sections, but the biggest change was how narrow the road got at times, only wide enough for a single car.  Once I had everything loaded into t...

The Algonquin backcountry is a wilderness treasured by many people, sometimes too many. Your quiet backcountry escape can sometimes feel more like a car camping site than a rough backcountry site. As a result of this, I wanted to know if it was just because I was bad at picking lakes to camp on or if there was something else behind it. To answer this question, I wanted to know which lakes were the busiest and which were the quietest in any given year. I filled a Freedom of Information request with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks to get the booking data for each “booking zone” for 2024 and 2025. A booking zone is what you see online when you make a reservation. This data provides a lot of information. Easy access lakes are the busiest, while hard to access lakes are often the most quiet ones in the park. The data also shows that lakes such as Burnt Island, which has 43 campsites, are more busy than lakes such as Frank, which only has 1 campsite on it. To try to u...

I spent a day hiking a cluster of trails off of the Basin Depot Road in Algonquin Provincal Park. My day started at the Charles Lafleaur Homestead trail and ended at Buck Lake, which is a drive-in backcountry campsite. In between, I hiked three more trails and stopped to check out a historic building at Basin Depot.  The Charles Lafleur Homestead The first trail of the day was a short 0.88km round-trip trail, accessed just off of Basin Depot Rd. There's a small grass parking lot right off the road,  the trail itself is cut grass that runs from the parking lot to the historical homestead. At the homestead, there are a few decaying buildings alongside two log cabins that are being maintained. The buildings are locked, and there isn't anything to see through the windows. A few dozen signs scattered around the homestead, telling you about the history of the place.  Historic homestead building. Whispering Winds (Egg Rock) The second trail of the day was Whispering Winds (Egg R...