The Great Outdoors

I just got back to Toronto on Saturday after spending a really great week up in Killarney. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Killarney it's a town on the North shore of Georgian Bay (Lake Huron if you're going to make me get really specific) which happens to be situated very close to a Provincial Park which shares it's name. We were in both Killarneies. I apologize for that strange pluralization of Killarney.

I went up with my Dad for the week. We headed to the Killarney Mountain Lodge in town for the first evening (last Saturday) so that we could head into the interior of the park feeling fresh on Sunday morning. We put in at George Lake. I've got a picture here of our boats fully loaded. As you can see, we managed to keep the gear pretty light, and didn't end up with huge amounts of equipment strapped to the decks of the boats.



This next shot was taken shortly after we got underway, and I think it's a good example of the kind of landscape that the park has to offer.



We had a pretty strong wind at our backs as we travelled East across George Lake, and we made pretty good time. I had the GPS monitoring our progress, and it informed me that I was travelling at 8 km/h while I had the wind to help. Not bad for a kayak, given that I wasn't really paddling that hard. You can see a bit of the wind's effects in the roughness of the water here:




If you look to the centre of that shot, to the right of the bow of my boat, you'll see a narrowing. That's actually showing the portage into Freeland Lake. It had quite the nice waterfall running along it.



That was a short portage, we just had to carry the boats around the waterfall. We continued through Freeland, and into a longer portage into Killarney Lake. It was a longer paddle through Killarney, and we had the wind in our face for awhile as we turned back to the West. After that it was another short portage into our final destination, O.S.A. Lake, named after the Ontario Society of Artists that helped found the park. We got a campsite on an island in the lake, and spent the next two nights there. Here's a shot of the site once we'd made camp:




I'm facing West here, and what you can't really see in this photo is how exposed the camp was to the North and South. Unfortunately that's where the wind came from on Day 1 and Day 2 of camping respectively. Things were quite calm on Monday morning though, and I got some great shots of the lake.




Shortly after sunrise there.




You can really see the clarity of the water in the shot above. O.S.A. is a dead lake, and as sad as that is, it makes for stunningly clear water.


Having made camp on Sunday night we were free to explore on Monday. We wandered around our little island, and then headed out to the mainland for a hike. The lake is surrounded by granite ridges, so we just picked one and started to climb up.



As you can see, things got a bit vertical there. The climb offered a great view of the lake.

I'm looking south in this shot at the island that we were camping on. We were on the Eastern tip of the island, to the left in the photo. We got to this height in the afternoon, and you can already start to see the wind picking up in the ripples across the lake below. It was a South wind, but it was cold, and things got pretty chilly by the evening. Fortunately, someone who was at the site before us had cut a huge number of green branches and left them in a pile. We were pretty confused by that, and thought that they were just gathering kindling, however that pile of evergreen boughs proved useful in the evening as the wind really started to get cold and fierce. We moved the pile of boughs in behind were we were sitting and they made an excellent windscreen.

The plan was to wake up on Tuesday and move back into Killarney Lake, and camp there for an evening. It would give us a chance for some different hiking, and remove one portage from our final trip out of the park. However, we woke up on Tuesday to a steady rain. We tried to wait it out, but by noon we were forced to get a move on, and had to break camp in the rain. We were managing to keep out of the rain, and keep our equipment dry, but once we started to break down the camp it was inevitable that critical items like our tents would get soaked. We got packed up as quickly as possible and got out of there, but not without a good drenching first. Since it was still raining quite steadily by the time we got to the next camp site, and our gear was already pretty wet we decided to call that last evening a failure and continue on out of the park. That made for a pretty long haul, and we were quite tired by the time we got back to the Lodge, but fortunately they had a room for us, even though we were a day early getting back.

We stayed at the Lodge until Saturday morning, and then headed back home. I'll save the details of that part of the trip for another post, as this one is starting to run a bit long. The camping aspect of the trip was excellent, despite being cut short. I'll write about the rest of the trip soon.