Iain Leitch Photography

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...

Our latest camping trip was to Murphy's Point Provincial Park on June 19–20. We stayed at site 197, which we'd stayed at before back in 2021. Murphy's Point is great as it's about a 1.5-hour drive from my home in Ottawa, and it's a well-managed and well-kept park. I find there are always people around, but it never books up fully, and the sites are spread far enough apart to make it feel private. We like site 197 as it's a bit on its own, and is right beside a water tap and a short walk to the vault toilets, or a bit longer walk to the comfort station if that's more your style. Once we had camp all set up, we wanted to go for a hike before it rained, as it was calling for scattered storms later that evening. Since my wife and I had been to this park before, we had done most of the trails except for Loon Lake (which is a loop) and McParlan House Trail (which is a there-and-back trail that branches off the Loon Lake Loop). My wife is pregnant, so we wanted som...

 My brother and I would always go camping as a family when we were kids. Since we've grown up, we still try to go camping together when we can, which averages out to about once per summer. However, this had all been front country camping (car camping). We had never been back country camping together before, so it was time.  When we were planning, we wanted something in the middle of where we each live. Because I'm in Ottawa and he is near Kitchener, we figured that Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park would be a good bet. It's a bit more developed than Algonquin and was only about a three-hour drive for each of us.   I left home around 7 am and got to the EV charger in Madoc around 9:20. I charged for a bit up to 88% and then made it to the access point on Long Lake around 11:20. My brother showed up around 11:50 as he hit some traffic going around Toronto.  We loaded up the boat and were on the water by 12. Our campsite for the night was on Sparkler Lake, it's a ...

 Mid-week in April, my wife and I took a trip down to Montreal from Ottawa to go see Lewis Capaldi in concert. We decided to make a little vacation out of it, as it's not often that we get the chance to head down to Montreal.  We took the train from Ottawa to Montreal the morning of the concert and arrived in town just after 12:30. It was too early to check into our hotel, so we went out for lunch at an Irish pub, that was just a few streets over from our hotel. The lunch portions were huge and very fairly priced.  After lunch we were able to check into our hotel early, which was convenient. We dropped our bags and then walked down to the Old Port, just to wander. We ended up at the waterfront, which was pretty, and then took the subway back to our hotel to relax a bit before dinner.  We went out for a sit down pizza dinner with a friend who lives in town, so it was nice to catch up with them. After dinner we headed down to the Bell Centre for the concert. We were se...

 The second hike of the day was in Charleston Lake Provincial Park. The write up of the first hike can be found here . This park is mainly front-country camping but has a few backcountry campsites along this trail. The trail is 10 km long, but due to how busy the trailhead parking lot was, I had to park 600 m away at a different trailhead and walk back to the trailhead. The first section of the trail is shared with the Quiddity Trail, which is a short 600 m trail that leads to a lookout. The first maybe 400 m or so is wheelchair accessible, as it is a bed of level, smooth gravel with two boardwalk sections. Once you get to the Tallow Rock Bay Trail, it splits in two as the trail is a loop—you can choose either side to go down. I picked the side closest to Charleston Lake to start with, for no other reason than the fact that a couple had picked the opposite side a short while ago and I didn’t want to follow them. I recommend you pick this side of the trail to start with first, as ...