We tend to think that the age of exploration is over. Someone has already charted every inch of land, climbed every peak, run every river. This might be true for famous and spectacular places, where new exploration means fanfare and a magazine article.
There are more obscure lands, though, with no way to know who has crossed them before. People have, of course, but they are remote and wild and forgotten enough that no one you know has done it. No resources exist online. Such places are ripe for micro-exploration. They may be just as beautiful as the famous spots, and the sense of personal discovery makes them more deeply rewarding.
Heading into the unknown always carries some risk. Even in relatively tame areas, the explorer might have to slog through hours of forest off-trail or down abandoned logging roads. A lack of expected water can cause a thirsty night. A mountain pass on the map might simply not exist.
The risk is what makes it fun, of course. And for the pure-hearted explorer, luck always seems to come at the right moment. On this trip, luck bailed me out in the form of a grown-up 70s flower-child with a stock of chilled Mike’s Hard Lemonade down an unused back road.
Algonquin to Kennisis
The plan was to try canoeing from Algonquin Provincial Park to my home base of Kennisis Lake, in Haliburton County, Ontario, Canada. The distance is short as the crow flies, but a famously long and winding trip by road. The mile-thick ice sheets that pulverized the Haliburton terrain 20,000 years ago riddled the region with deep, rocky lakes in every shape imaginable. The water is pristine and thick pine and hemlock forests fill every bit of land. It is my favorite place in the world.
No combination of lakes and rivers connects Algonquin and Kennisis directly. I would have to portage the canoe through the forests between lakes. On known paddling routes, local parks maintain trails and signage to allow portages.
Once I got off the known route, there would be no portage trails. I would have to shove through thick underbrush with a 16-foot canoe on my head, which is usually not possible. The success of the route hinged on finding streams, old logging roads, or other clearings through the trees.
My planned route passed through a dizzying array of lakes. Smoke and Kennisis, the start and end points. Kawagama, the big lake in the middle with risk of high winds. Ragged, Big Porcupine, Kimball, and Rockaway, the nice mid-sized lakes that promised easy paddling. Diving, Little Coon, and Minkey, the remote interior beasts. Slipper, Stocking, and Havelock, the biggest sources of worry, with no portage trails to speak of. All in all, a good paddle!
Alone on the water
My Mom gave me a lift to the starting point, Algonquin’s Portage Store, at the intersection of Smoke Lake and Highway 60. The highway is the only road running through a park nearly the size of Lebanon, a symbol of the vast green spaces that remain in Canada. We ate a huge lunch, got the permits, and looked at the store’s stock of used canoes, which go on sale every summer.
My own craft was a similar used canoe that my Mom and brother had bought and patched up a few summers before. We used it often and I believed in it, but it had never been so far from home. I hoped it wouldn’t choose an especially bad time to pop a leak.
I thanked Mom, said goodbye, and hit the water. Smoke Lake is a true highway: five kilometers of straight water with no islands. My mind quickly settled into a hypnotic rhythm as I steered a straight course, stoke after stroke. Snatches of songs stuck in my head but I could not remember all the lyrics. Wild trains of thoughts ran over themselves and then vanished. It was clear that being alone for three days would be an interesting mental experiment.
The trip’s first portage awaited me at the end of Smoke. I carried my two backpacks down the trail first, scouting for any obstacles, then dropped the packs at the end and came back for the canoe. It went smoothly. So far.
I camped that night on an island in Ragged Lake, staring into a sunset that was purple and gold. The wind died and the water became completely still, the stars came out, the fire crackled, and life was good. A pair of cackling loons put me to sleep.
The remote interior
The next day promised a challenging but known route through lakes and portages that a couple groups might pass through each summer weekend. The portage from Ragged to Big Porcupine, known as “The Devil’s Staircase” and sold as a huge challenge by some blogs, did not live up to the hype. Big Porcupine to Little Coon was also easy. The next portage made up for both of these, and more. It was over a kilometer on a rocky, buggy, ungroomed trail, balancing the canoe on my shoulders with one arm and desperately swatting at mosquitoes with the other. I dumped the canoe on a random boulder, sprinted a few minutes up the trail and back to confuse the bugs, and finally made it to Dividing Lake.
Diving Lake gets its name because it sits at a higher elevation, forming the boundary between two watersheds. Its location among hills and ridges has always made it remote. I had read that the difficult access spared some of its old white pines from the loggers who clear-cut the land in previous centuries. The few old-growth trees were immediately obvious, towering straight and high above the 80-year-old second-growth forest surrounding the lake.
I pushed through another portage to Minkey Lake, a long thin strip of water between two ridges. I sighted another massive white pine and bushwhacked to its base, which could have taken at least three of my arm spans to wrap around. It is sad and fascinating to imagine what these forests used to be. Stewarded by the people of the first nations, dominated by pines hundreds of feet tall that prohibited most undergrowth, walking through such forests would have been like walking through a pillared cathedral. We destroyed the forests and ravaged the first nations in the name of progress. The forests we have now are beautiful and precious, but we will never get the old ones back.
The last portage of the day brought me to the shore of pristine Rockaway Lake. Previous travelers had left a nice campsite with a plank nailed to a stump for use as a table. The exhaustion of a heavy portage day hit hard and I was asleep by dusk.
The power of wind on the water
An early start was critical the next morning. I would be paddling on big lakes, and needed to take advantage of the usual morning stillness. Rockaway full delivered the hoped-for calm. The water was an absolute mirror. A thin mist hovered over the lake at dawn, then burned off slowly as I paddled. Only flecks of pollen and insects on the water could have told the difference between reflection and reality.
Another portage led to Kimball Lake, which connected by river to Kawagama. When I paddled out into the first bay of the big lake, wind slammed the canoe so hard that I had to ground on a beach. It was blowing whitecaps straight down the ten-kilometer main axis of the lake.
While winds always make for a tough paddle, I was in an especially tough spot because I was alone in a very light canoe. Without another passenger, a heavy canoe, or much luggage, the wind could toss the boat around like a piece of paper.
I needed a new strategy. I put both packs right up at the bow of the canoe, and increased their weight with a few big rocks. I sat in the stern, hoping to act as a counterbalance, and paddled at an angle to the wind. Waves slopped into the canoe and constantly pushed it off course, but I made progress. The waves and wind relented somewhat when the canoe got behind a big island. I finally made it to shore after the trip’s most physically challenging paddle.
The impossible portages
The final part of the trip, from Kawagama to Kennisis, lacks known portage trails. I planned to forge a way through, using five small lakes: Slipper, Stocking, Havelock, Johnson, and Kelly. A river flows from Havelock into Johnson, then Kelly, then Kennisis, so nothing could stand in my way if I could just make it through to Havelock. I had no idea if it could be done.
A local cottager saw me washed up on the shore of Kawagama and pointed me to a dirt track that would bring me in the direction of Slipper Lake. The track passed about 100 meters from Slipper, and I simply shoved my way through “the bush” to cover that final stretch. Twigs scratched at my legs, roots and boulders forced weird evasive maneuvers, mosquitoes came out to play, and the canoe repeatedly bumped into trees. It took me half an hour to cover the 100 meters. The clear water of Slipper felt like a gift from above.
The next lake, Stocking, was actually visible from Slipper. The view seemed to promise an easy passage, but the promise was just a tease. Water passed between the lakes through a rocky, mucky marsh, rather than a river. It was too dry to paddle and too wet to walk.
There was a clear choice: do another forest bushwhack, or jump from rock to rock across the marsh, both while carrying a canoe. Feeling like another bushwhack would kill me, I decided to chance it on the rocks. After another half-hour of slow, unpleasant progress, the canoe and I were through into Stocking.
Stocking Lake feels stunningly remote. Despite its proximity to lots of cottages on Kawagama and Kennisis, there is no easy way to reach it. It is long and thin, with unbroken green ridges of forests rising on either side. As I paddled, I saw a curious structure at the end of the lake. Upon investigation, it seemed like an abandoned lodge with an overgrown field and decaying dock. Further back, there was a dirt logging road. These roads eventually connect with the main Kennisis Lake road, but they are not open to the public, leaving Stocking in beautiful isolation.
The topographical map showed a flat passage between ridges, probably a stream, from Stocking to Havelock. I paddled to that corner of the lake but found only a marsh full of driftwood logs. There was no outlet, no way to even reach the shore, and an unbroken ridge rising from the lake with no flat route through.
After a day that had started at dawn and already included several tough portages and the windy paddle across Kawagama, I knew this was my stopping point. I went back to the lodge to regroup. The only option was to leave the canoe at Stocking, carry the packs out to the main road, hitchhike to the family cottage, and come back later with a car to get the canoe.
Deliverance
The afternoon shadows were deepening and there was no way to know how long the walk would take. I wanted to take some rest, but had to get started.
Just as I picked up the packs, a car pulled into the lodge. It was shocking that someone was way down these untraveled private roads, visiting a clearly abandoned lodge, this late in the day. The car’s occupants were even more shocking. Rather than gruff property owners or surveyors who would yell at me for trespassing, they were a mother and daughter who looked like they had not a care in the world.
The delight of such an improbable meeting made us both spill our stories immediately. I told them about the whole trip, the rigors of the day, and the end of the road at Stocking. The mother, Linda, told me she had worked at this lodge back in the 70s. She had come to see it for the first time in twenty years, and it was her daughter Jade’s first time ever. Because of her alumni status, she had been able to pick up a key to the closed logging road. We all laughed at how this road probably had no traffic all week, but fate had brought us together at the exact right time and place.
They broke open some Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which tasted like the nectar of the gods, and we relaxed at the lake. Linda told some stories of the old days. The lodge used to be a fishing resort, back when all of Haliburton was much less developed. At that time, around when my family’s cottage was built, there were many fewer cottage on Kennisis and the road only reached one shore of the lake. As the lakes closer to Toronto filled up, even far-out Kennisis started attracting the big spenders, big boats, and big cottages. The fishing lodge slowly became redundant.
The golden days of the lodge sounded amazing, though. They fished all day on a private lake and partied all night. Linda strongly hinted that more than alcohol was consumed. Seeing the lake, which had been part of their lore for so long, was clearly an emotional experience for both mother and daughter.
With great kindness, they agreed to drive me all the way back to our cottage. My Mom was expecting me that evening, but thought I would be coming across the lake by canoe, rather than by road with no canoe. We sat down at the dock, and I told her the story.
While this Haliburton micro-exploration was not strictly successful, it provided a level of adventure that we usually associate with big exotic trips to faraway mountains. In the city or in the woods, the adventure is always right there, if you create it.
