Iain Leitch Photography

My most recent trip to Algonquin Provincial Park was a short one-night stay on Oram Lake. This was my third back country trip of the year, but what made this trip important was that it was my wife’s first time going back country camping. We left Ottawa around 6:45 and, after a quick stop at A&W, hit the road to the park. We got to the Shall Lake access point just before 11 a.m., including a quick stop in Bancroft to charge our EV. The parking lot at the access point was full, so full that there weren’t any spots, and I had to make the trek up to the overflow parking lot. We got on the water around 11:20 a.m. and made it to the portage around 11:45 a.m. The landing for the 480 m portage into Oram Lake is nothing but mud. My wife sank up to her knees, and I managed to sink up to my mid-calf. The thing with this landing is that the ground looks very solid, but it’s far from it. After a lot of work freeing ourselves, we scrambled onto some rocks and made quick work of unloading the c...

 Recently my wife and I went to Voyageur Provincial Park for the first time. We just did a short one night camping trip but quite enjoyed ourselves, and will happily camp there again.  We left work early on Friday and made it to the park by 2:30. It is just an hour drive from Ottawa for us, so we only needed to take half a day off.  Once we got to the site we were informed that there was a fire ban in effect as of that day, which was disappointing as we had planned to cook hotdogs over the fire for dinner but were able to adapt, because thankfully we had brought a little one burner stove to heat up water for coffee the next morning. This meant we were able to use a little frying pan to cook the hotdogs in, which really saved our dinner. As disappointing as a fire ban is, I completely understand why one was in effect because it was bone dry. The earth was super hard and compacted and some of the plants looked quite wilted and thirsty, not to mention that it was a humidex o...

The weekend after the Canada Day Long Weekend my wife and I went camping at Presqu'ile Provincial Park. We had never been to this park before and it is about a three hour drive from our home in Ottawa. However, one of our goals this summer is to go to new provincial parks, and this was one of them. We stayed just one night at site 177 in the Craig's area of the campground.  Once we got to the park we discovered that there were still people on the site we had reserved but they explained that they had another site booked and the people had just left that one so they would be quick moving their stuff over to their new site. We opted to go for a hike instead of just waiting around.  We went to the Marsh Boardwalk which was a 1.3km trail which consisted mainly of the boardwalk but also two observation towers and a bit through a cedar forest.  Once we finished the hike we headed back to set up camp. This didn't take much time at all to do considering it consisted of setting up ...

 With Canada Day falling on a Tuesday this year, I figured I would make the most of it and take the Monday and Wednesday off to make myself a nice long weekend to go paddling in Algonquin Park. To me, there would be no better way to celebrate being Canadian than being eaten alive by bugs and getting sun burnt deep in the back woods. I had planned a five day trip for this long weekend staying one night on Pen Lake, two on Madawaska Lake, and then the final on Cyldegale Lake before heading back on Wednesday. Before I left, this seemed like a great plan but it was just not meant to be. Day 1  My first day of my trip started out great. I was on the water by 11am and only had a short 380 meter portage until I was on the lake I had booked for the night. I started off at the Rock Lake access point and had a nice paddle down the lake until I needed to turn West and was hit by a wall of wind and 2 foot high waves. I tried to battle through this, as all I needed to do was get around a p...