I went on a five-day solo hike on the outer loop of Algonquin's Highland backpacking trail. This route doesn't really take five days; most people take two or three, and some have done it in one.
Preparations
Solo trips are undertaken by only the most well-prepared or unpopular backpackers. Emergency plans must be well-developed. Mine was to assume I'd be adopted by the park's animals like an oversized Mowgli. Probably by the wolves, but I think we all assume it would be the wolves; it never occurs to us that we might end up running with the minks. Emergency plan B was to live permanently in the woods by robbing people's food barrels, possibly starting a society of bearded outcasts and becoming a wilderness legend.
At some point last fall, I also picked up a survival blanket, the "SAS survival manual", and a book on wilderness first aid. I can report that survival blankets work, and that wearing one in an apartment makes you feel crazy in a glamorous way, like a rock star having a nervous breakdown. I resisted trying it out for a long time because I knew it would be hard to refold; but then I thought, no, that's not how I want to live my life. Then I had to try to stuff it back into its package and I thought no, this isn't how I want to live my life, either. And that's how I became an existentialist.
The "SAS survival handbook" is massively entertaining. It's in no way an official survival handbook; it was written by an SAS veteran who understood the marketing potential of the name. It covers topics like the construction of spear traps and the order in which household pets should be eaten. It has subsections with titles like, If You Are On Fire. And it has 'case studies' of survival situations that explain how to get into terrifying situations, but not, generally, out of them. I heartily recommend this work.
The first aid book I skimmed, skipping most of 'fractures' and 'hypothermia' but gaining some expertise in 'foreign bodies in nose'. My hope is that this will make me more of an asset to groups in the back country ("do you know wilderness first aid?" / "Well, I am kind of narrowly specialized.")
I also shopped for clothes: the most high-performance underpants available, and a pair of pants incorporating the latest breakthroughs in trouser science. These are prominently co-branded with National Geographic, so you know they're for explorers. (The world's forests are probably full of skeletons wearing these pants.)
I also went and camped overnight in a conservation area near Guelph, to see how silly that was (fairly) and to try out equipment and food. Food-testing results:
The freeze-dried meals are grim enough that you assume you must be able to do better. Consulting the web sites of lunatic chefs, and allowing my standards to gradually sink, I worked out dinners of instant potatoes, couscous, soy jerky, shelf-stable parmesan, tortillas, and nuts. For breakfast, I had instant oatmeal packets. These are only 110kcal apiece, so I repackaged three into each breakfast bag. It turns out that the packets aren't the size they are because that provides a good meal; they're the size they are because that is the most oatmeal it is reasonable to eat at one time.
My meal planning spreadsheet totted up 20,000 calories. At first, I wasn't going to pack quite so much food, but then I thought, what if I survive the whole trip? In the end, this was about the right amount, and is also close to the limit of what can be crammed into a bear canister.
The remaining anxieties were insects and bears. I bought a DEET lotion much enthused-over by MEC reviewers. It was scented, which I would rather have avoided; but it was a chance of being eaten by bears versus the certainty of being eaten by insects. And to deter and combat bears, I had my tiny air horn, my can of bear spray, and my commanding personality.
The day before was one of packing, backpack-weighing, map-studying, and sanity-questioning.
Day 1
The first stage was a walk down to Carlton to catch the Parkbus, which said "Barrie Colts" on the side. The Barrie Colts are apparently a hockey team. I don't know why we had their bus, or whether anyone who saw us file off it was misled into betting against their performance next season.
It's easy to imagine Parkbus as a bus to summer camp, with singalongs and arms waving out windows. In fact, it's a bus charter like any other: comfortable seats that were a bit too close together and one talkative person with a piercing voice – someone who might be useful in the wilderness as a beacon, or on a dangerous shore to repel ships. Many passengers were European tourists: German girls with nose rings, hyperkinetic French guys too free-spirited for socks. Almost everyone was quite young, which produced a strong sense of being a remedial student on a school bus.
It's a good service: not outrageously cheap or quick, but on time, more or less well-run, and absolutely the only way to reach places like Algonquin without a car, which is an important point in its favour. It has volunteers who get free trips in exchange for counting heads and handling paperwork, but none were on our trip. Our outgoing driver, a nice man with the facial hair of a cavalry general of the American Civil War, was unhappy about that, and tried to sell us on the benefits of the volunteer lifestyle. We had to pass a list of passengers up and down the aisles and tick off our names. Other than that, it didn't seem like much of a problem.
Three of us got off at the Lake of Two Rivers store. The others were a man and woman – they might have been mother and son – who had filled half the luggage compartment with, not camping gear, but random chattels, which they piled onto a pair of old hand carts and wheeled away down the dirt path towards the campground. They looked like they were fleeing the Franco-Prussian War. Which isn't to say that they had the wrong idea; they'd spent about $8 on gear, and they were towing everything effortlessly while I steamed along behind with 40 lbs. on my back.
To hike the Highland trail, you need to collect permits from the Mew Lake campground office. From there, getting to the actual trailhead on foot means walking back to the highway and then a couple of kilometres along it. But it's also possible to get on the trail more directly, if you're willing to cheat, which I am: you can get on the Old Railway Bike Trail and then turn onto the Highland trail, cutting about 2km off the trail itself and avoiding a long stroll along a busy road.
This produced the trip's sole navigational challenge. The teenager at the park office couldn't or wouldn't direct me this way (a sign at the beginning of the bike path forbids overnight backpackers to start there, probably because they don't want cars parked there), and I hadn't found a map that covered this shortcut well – it's mostly something that's alluded to vaguely in unhelpful blog posts like this one. Finding it meant puzzling over a map and compass and getting directions from people hanging out at the Mew Lake laundromat.
From this trailhead, a packed-dirt path led off through tall grass and low pines to an unexpected T junction. My notes implied that I should go left, which quickly began to feel like a mistake. This clearly wasn't the Highland trail; and my instincts about direction are generally wrong (but not always, because then I could just do the opposite, which would be too useful). I pulled out the map and compass, deduced – guessed – that I was going the wrong way, and found the trail, which, after this, was very easy to follow. There are usually plenty of blazes, and the trail is the part not covered in plants – going off it would usually mean shoving your way through the brush, which you wouldn't do accidentally.
This first section was one of steep, rocky climbs and swampy stretches spanned by short bridges or rotten, squared-off logs. It was fairly busy with day hikers, and a dozen people in swimsuits sported on the rocks at a little waterfall. The mud and the mosquitoes were manageable, which produced a feeling of optimism that was to prove wildly ill-founded. Because of wet recent weather, the mosquito forecast – there is a mosquito forecast – had been ugly. My plan was to wear so much DEET that they'd fall dead out of the sky wherever I passed; and here, it worked pretty well. But I was just brushing the edges of the mosquitoes' domain.
I'd reserved a spot at Provoking Lake West, the group of sites closest to the trailhead. The goals for this day didn't include hiking any great distance. They were to get up on time, remember everything, catch the bus, reach the park, get the permit, find the trail, get on a site, set up, and then reflect triumphantly on those achievements. The site I landed on, which I think was on the second side trail, was open and breezy, with bare rock sloping down into the water, an old rope hanging from a small tree, and a fire pit where an unappreciative reader had tried unsuccessfully to burn a copy of a book called True Blue by David Baldacci. The rope was one of the park's countless old bear hangs. It was a sad effort – close to the trunk, close to the ground, close to the tent site. Anything hung on it could have been taken down by a child wearing oven mitts.
Here, there were two cheap lessons in not being a careless idiot. I threw my sleeping pad down onto the rock and lay down, and my phone went skittering down into the water. I scooped it up and frantically dried it off: without it, I'd have no way of contacting anyone in an emergency, and no way to entertain myself without actually enjoying nature in some way. It seemed to still work. Relieved, I turned back to see my sleeping pad bobbing in the lake.
I lay in the tent watching fat, bloodthirsty flies batter themselves against the mesh. I made a meal, put earplugs in, and went to bed. Earplugs were an important part of the plan. Snapping twigs, mysterious rustling, creaking trees, growling, snatches of theremin music – whatever noises nature wanted to make were fine, but I'd sleep better not hearing them.
Day 2
At the first oatmeal breakfast, the first flaws in the purely accountancy-based approach to meal planning began to be uncovered. There were things the spreadsheet's plan for 20,000 joyless calories had failed to take into account.
By nine, I was back on the trail. This was one of the two longer days, with a hike of a little over 10km. This isn't particularly far, but it was still not an easy morning. Long stretches of the trail had turned to bog. The wobbly logs set down to bridge some wet sections now only covered the middle bit of them. In other places, you had to bushwhack around craters of ooze, step precariously from stone to stone, or just squelch through. There were moose tracks and droppings everywhere (but no sign of the moose themselves, who may have been devoured completely by the mosquitoes). The day before, the repellents had worked. Here, they were overwhelmed. You felt you were taking an active part in mosquito evolution by providing blood to those most resistant to DEET. They drive you on like tiny Furies. The faster you go, the more you sweat. The more you sweat, the more intrigued they are.
At lunch, I stopped at what appeared on the map as a 'scenic lookout': a bald crest of rock with a small clearing ending in a wall of trees. Its real appeal is that it's open, windy, and sunny. The mosquitoes hang back, humming evilly to themselves as they wait for you to return to the dark and muddy places.
The rest of the day was the same: climbs and descents, dry patches and swamps. It took 4.5 hours to go 10km. A few metres from the first site at Head Lake, a yellow dry bag hung from a tree. Its bottom had been slashed open as though with a razor. There was someone at the site who said he was just leaving, and that I could set up, if I liked, but I decided to move on to one that hadn't recently given a bear a food reward.
The next site had a little trail leading down to the water, on a stretch without much easy access to the lake, and, along this little trail, a birch covered in claw marks. I pitched the tent as far away from that as possible. The site also had one of those friendly chipmunks that greets you whenever the last occupants were slobs. It sat on a little shelf of moss slurping up a package of cooked ramen. When it saw me looking, it gave a guilty start and began shoveling the noodles into its mouth with both paws. I picked up the ramen with a sheet of paper and built a twig fire to burn it. The lighter I brought failed immediately, and I then went through a shameful number of matches; but when it finally did get going, it was such a nice little blaze that I also incinerated the pair of white cotton socks lying in the fire pit.
Day 3
Early in the morning, there was a thunderstorm that dwindled eventually into a steady rain. I tried to wait it out. At 2PM, I gave up: the trail was only going to get worse, and I wanted lots of daylight to spare – I trust myself to follow an obvious trail during the day, but not to accomplish anything useful on one after dark. It was a useful but unwelcome lesson in packing up in the rain. I stuffed my sleeping bag and dry clothes into a plastic bag, stuffed that into another bag, stuffed that, and everything else, into the contractor bag I'd lined the pack with, stuffed the wet tent in on top of that, lashed the bear canister to the bottom, hefted the whole mess onto my back, and splashed off. The chipmunk hung about my legs, worried I might have forgotten that it was customary to tip the site rodent.
This was a very short hike, just a 4km walk over to Harness Lake, but I was still counting on it taking the better part of two hours, which it did. The trail had been muddy before the storm, and hadn't been improved by it. It wasn't cold, and the rain wasn't much of a problem, really. It still felt slightly like a panicked flight. There's a scene in Jurassic Park where the traitorous programmer, after a jeep accident, has to make his way through the jungle on foot. He rubs futilely at his glasses, stumbles forward in the streaming rain, and is eaten by dinosaurs. This was like that, except for the dinosaurs, and that bit is only one hubristic genetic experiment away.
The plan had been to get to the further sites on Harness Lake, to cut down the march back up to Provoking Lake, so I skipped the first two side trails. At the site the third led to, there were no tents, but by the fire pit there was a part-full bottle of cheap rum, a stack of granola bars, a folded tarp, and assorted other junk. It was impossible to tell whether this was the cache of obnoxious canoeists, the full gear of alcoholic ultralighters, a misguided gift to the next occupants, offerings to the spirits of the forest, or what; but I didn't like any of the possibilities, so I backtracked.
The second trail led to a huge and beautiful site full of mossy trees and quiet little clearings. It made you want to start some sort of druidic cult. There were flat spots for three or four tents and good water access. Off the lake swept a wind that was strong, cool, and mysteriously incapable of drying things. It was almost disappointing to find there was no weird garbage lying around. I set up in the rain, dried out the inner tent as best I could, lay my shirt out on a boulder, and looked for a rock to weigh it down.
Underneath the rock was a tampon.
A look around revealed feminine hygiene products secreted all over the place: in the hollows under tree roots, in folds of ground, under bushes. It was like some twisted menstrual Easter egg hunt. The garbage on the sites gives you the feeling of being on the trail of a gang of vandals who are always one step ahead, always leaving new messes to taunt you. But this was a strange escalation.
Day 4
This was a rest day, mostly because the sites further along had been booked, and because I was on the trail for an unnecessarily long time, anyway. I'd had the idea that I'd use the day to scout ahead up the trail, or swim, or find something interesting to do. What I actually did was to lie around reading, napping, reorganizing things, and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to field repair my phone's micro USB port with a safety pin and a wet wipe. I also dropped my cup – which was also my only cooking pot – in the lake and had to wade in a bit to fish it out again. This habit of dropping things in lakes was becoming disconcerting. As it is, a solo backpacker has about as many critical points of failure as a space shuttle: lose a shoe, lose your food, lose your water treatment system, sprain an ankle, get a down sleeping bag wet – there are so many ways for it all to go wrong. It's not necessary to add to the problem by continually letting things plop into lakes out of clumsiness or carelessness.
Day 5
This was the longest march. The first third or so is quite easy. After that, the path becomes eager to show you all of the most poorly-drained parts of the region. It's especially insistent that you see plenty of Mosquito Creek, through which Mosquito Lake drains into Fly Lake. (There are thousands of creeks in Algonquin. Only one of them could be called 'Mosquito Creek', and they chose this one.) You cross it, pass between two lobes of a swamp, follow it for a while, walk around the eastern half of Fly Lake, and then cross it a second time. This second crossing was a stretch of flat rock; the far parts were dry, the near part was slime-coated and under a foot of fast-flowing, rust-coloured water. I just stared at this for a while. It was hard to like the odds of getting across without pitching over and being swept down Mosquito Creek. I didn't know where Mosquito Creek went next, but if I ever wanted to know, it felt like a good thing to research on the internet.
Pushing through the high grass a little ways downstream, I found a chain of little rocks. I took a breath, wobbled across them, and went crashing through the brush on the other side like a panicked caribou. From here, the trail climbed strenuously up into healthier territory, land that's only temporarily muddy rather than a permanent marsh. The trail jogs back and forth, and you can tell it's thinking about taking you down to Mosquito Creek again; but it leads instead, eventually, back to the inner loop, which I followed west to the sites on the southwest corner of Provoking Lake.
There are two of these, down a side trail which seemed cruelly and unnecessarily long. I looked at both; the one on the east was small, which was fine, but also full of mosquitoes, which wasn't. I'd given them enough; I was already godfather to most of the next generation. Maybe I'll come back sometime to see how the swarms raised in my blood turned out; for now, I needed some time away from them.
The other site was huge and spectacular, with a mossy limestone cliff, jumbles of square boulders, and a chain of rocks leading out into the lake. For some parts of the trip, I'd been too muddy, preoccupied, busy, fly-bitten, or tired to appreciate the sites, but a lot of them are stunning. It was also becoming easier to relax; to appreciate that, at any given moment, it's actually more probable that a bear isn't going to burst out of the brush and seize you in its slavering jaws.
On Provoking Lake, unfortunately, there are quite a lot of sites. At the one across the lake, the one I'd stayed at my first night, a party of idiots were bellowing about how they were going in the water, how they were in the water, what temperature the water was. I lay on a rock with my feet in the lake and ate a Snickers bar by way of showing the genteel way to enjoy nature. There was an up-side: bears who fear people, or like quiet, will flee the area, while bears looking to terrorize humans will go over there. Helicopters also passed overhead occasionally, for some reason, hauling things on long tethers.
This last dinner was a question of seeing what was in the bottom of the bear barrel. For a first course, there were campfire-roasted tortillas. Here's how that works. First, you build a hot twig fire using hand sanitizer and storm matches. Then, the first tortilla you pick up is so battered and travel-scarred and doily-like that you drop it in the fire and think, "that's probably for the best". Then you roast the second tortilla over the first one. This actually does improve tortillas of a certain age and quality, and is a charming complement to instant potatoes with soy jerky. I think this trip is the only time I've had a craving for multivitamins.
Day 6
It was a cold night, and in the morning there was a heavy mist on the lake. The mosquitoes floated lethargically, still trying gamely to attack when you came near, but swinging and missing like punch-drunk boxers.
Breaking things down and packing them up was becoming faster, though this may have had more to do with casualness than skill. When I first got the tent, I'd at least try to emulate the man in the manufacturer's video, who rolls it up so caressingly that it's uncomfortable to watch. Now, I fold it roughly and stuff it into its sack.
The hike out brought me along the route I'd taken on the first and second days. The same climbs, descents, and long fingers of swamp from which eager mosquitoes rise in clouds. I met another hiker. I said "good morning" and she said, "I think there's a bear up there. I saw bear poo, and something was in the woods breaking a lot of twigs."
"That's awkward, I have to go that way."
"Well... have a good day."
I opened the velcro on my bear spray holster, unzipped the belt pocket that held my air horn, and edged forwards, clacking my trekking poles together every few seconds, hoping that would make me seem like some threatening giant insect. Coming out into one of the trail's rare little clearings, I found my air horn was gone, dropped my pack, and nervously retraced my steps. When about to give up, I finally spotted its blue plastic bell poking out of the deepest mud puddle I'd passed.
The horn is my favourite deterrent. Clutching it is just as reassuring as clutching a can of bear spray, and it's also lighter, smaller, and less dangerous. It's the better talisman. This does leave out the issue of effectiveness – a small stuffed animal would have been even lighter and cheaper – but air horns are reported to work pretty well, and they don't care about wind or rain. Much of the time, I kept the spray in a hard-to-reach side pocket as a last line of defense. Second last, if you include bearing a crust of sunscreen, dried sweat, bug spray, and swatted mosquitoes that should repel anything. The full defense is one of many interlocking layers: avoidance; reasoned argument; belittling comments; air horn; bear spray; trekking poles; capoeira; smelling awful.
I saw and heard nothing. No bear encounters, then, but an encounter with a hiker who had a theory about a bear, which felt like enough. Apart from the ripped-open dry bag and some old claw marks, there were no signs of any bears in the area of the trail at all. The mud showed the tracks of every other animal: lots of moose, lots of small mammals, lots of people and dogs (or coyotes). Anything could have been in the woods breaking twigs: birds, moose, the idiots from the site across the lake (although then there would also have been shouting about how they were breaking twigs and what they felt about that). The only time I've been close to a black bear, in fact, was at an animal rehabilitation centre on Vancouver Island earlier this year, when I saw one through a chain-link fence. It was taking a nap. After a minute, it got up, defecated explosively, and shambled off to have a snack.
On the way out, there were groups of teenagers, half a dozen or ten at a time, with matching backpacks – scouts, or cadets, or something. One group was standing at the intersection when I turned off onto the bike trail towards Mew Lake. They turned to follow me. I explained that I wasn't going to the trailhead, and they claimed that that was all right, they were on their way to the scenic lookout. It was a few hours later that I looked at the map and realized that they were in completely the wrong place. But I haven't seen anything in the news about lost scout troops; very likely, they reached the end of the trail (it's not long), thought "well, that's not very scenic", and went back again.
At about 11AM, I reached Mew Lake and hit the showers. I wasn't staying there, but it seemed like it was in everyone's interests. Changing and searching a giant backpack in the muddy and slippery shower vestibule was extremely awkward. After a slip or two, I became extremely careful, thinking: "don't come back from 5 days in the back country and then require rescue from the campground shower." From there, it was a short walk back to the Lake of Two Rivers Store and Restaurant, where I ate a pizza and caught the bus back home.
Preparations
Solo trips are undertaken by only the most well-prepared or unpopular backpackers. Emergency plans must be well-developed. Mine was to assume I'd be adopted by the park's animals like an oversized Mowgli. Probably by the wolves, but I think we all assume it would be the wolves; it never occurs to us that we might end up running with the minks. Emergency plan B was to live permanently in the woods by robbing people's food barrels, possibly starting a society of bearded outcasts and becoming a wilderness legend.
At some point last fall, I also picked up a survival blanket, the "SAS survival manual", and a book on wilderness first aid. I can report that survival blankets work, and that wearing one in an apartment makes you feel crazy in a glamorous way, like a rock star having a nervous breakdown. I resisted trying it out for a long time because I knew it would be hard to refold; but then I thought, no, that's not how I want to live my life. Then I had to try to stuff it back into its package and I thought no, this isn't how I want to live my life, either. And that's how I became an existentialist.
The "SAS survival handbook" is massively entertaining. It's in no way an official survival handbook; it was written by an SAS veteran who understood the marketing potential of the name. It covers topics like the construction of spear traps and the order in which household pets should be eaten. It has subsections with titles like, If You Are On Fire. And it has 'case studies' of survival situations that explain how to get into terrifying situations, but not, generally, out of them. I heartily recommend this work.
The first aid book I skimmed, skipping most of 'fractures' and 'hypothermia' but gaining some expertise in 'foreign bodies in nose'. My hope is that this will make me more of an asset to groups in the back country ("do you know wilderness first aid?" / "Well, I am kind of narrowly specialized.")
I also shopped for clothes: the most high-performance underpants available, and a pair of pants incorporating the latest breakthroughs in trouser science. These are prominently co-branded with National Geographic, so you know they're for explorers. (The world's forests are probably full of skeletons wearing these pants.)
I also went and camped overnight in a conservation area near Guelph, to see how silly that was (fairly) and to try out equipment and food. Food-testing results:
- Snickers bars: quite good.
- Everything else: ghastly.
The freeze-dried meals are grim enough that you assume you must be able to do better. Consulting the web sites of lunatic chefs, and allowing my standards to gradually sink, I worked out dinners of instant potatoes, couscous, soy jerky, shelf-stable parmesan, tortillas, and nuts. For breakfast, I had instant oatmeal packets. These are only 110kcal apiece, so I repackaged three into each breakfast bag. It turns out that the packets aren't the size they are because that provides a good meal; they're the size they are because that is the most oatmeal it is reasonable to eat at one time.
My meal planning spreadsheet totted up 20,000 calories. At first, I wasn't going to pack quite so much food, but then I thought, what if I survive the whole trip? In the end, this was about the right amount, and is also close to the limit of what can be crammed into a bear canister.
The remaining anxieties were insects and bears. I bought a DEET lotion much enthused-over by MEC reviewers. It was scented, which I would rather have avoided; but it was a chance of being eaten by bears versus the certainty of being eaten by insects. And to deter and combat bears, I had my tiny air horn, my can of bear spray, and my commanding personality.
The day before was one of packing, backpack-weighing, map-studying, and sanity-questioning.
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| The waffles didn't actually fit in the canister. The enchilada didn't make the cut, either. |
Day 1
The first stage was a walk down to Carlton to catch the Parkbus, which said "Barrie Colts" on the side. The Barrie Colts are apparently a hockey team. I don't know why we had their bus, or whether anyone who saw us file off it was misled into betting against their performance next season.
It's easy to imagine Parkbus as a bus to summer camp, with singalongs and arms waving out windows. In fact, it's a bus charter like any other: comfortable seats that were a bit too close together and one talkative person with a piercing voice – someone who might be useful in the wilderness as a beacon, or on a dangerous shore to repel ships. Many passengers were European tourists: German girls with nose rings, hyperkinetic French guys too free-spirited for socks. Almost everyone was quite young, which produced a strong sense of being a remedial student on a school bus.
It's a good service: not outrageously cheap or quick, but on time, more or less well-run, and absolutely the only way to reach places like Algonquin without a car, which is an important point in its favour. It has volunteers who get free trips in exchange for counting heads and handling paperwork, but none were on our trip. Our outgoing driver, a nice man with the facial hair of a cavalry general of the American Civil War, was unhappy about that, and tried to sell us on the benefits of the volunteer lifestyle. We had to pass a list of passengers up and down the aisles and tick off our names. Other than that, it didn't seem like much of a problem.
Three of us got off at the Lake of Two Rivers store. The others were a man and woman – they might have been mother and son – who had filled half the luggage compartment with, not camping gear, but random chattels, which they piled onto a pair of old hand carts and wheeled away down the dirt path towards the campground. They looked like they were fleeing the Franco-Prussian War. Which isn't to say that they had the wrong idea; they'd spent about $8 on gear, and they were towing everything effortlessly while I steamed along behind with 40 lbs. on my back.
To hike the Highland trail, you need to collect permits from the Mew Lake campground office. From there, getting to the actual trailhead on foot means walking back to the highway and then a couple of kilometres along it. But it's also possible to get on the trail more directly, if you're willing to cheat, which I am: you can get on the Old Railway Bike Trail and then turn onto the Highland trail, cutting about 2km off the trail itself and avoiding a long stroll along a busy road.
This produced the trip's sole navigational challenge. The teenager at the park office couldn't or wouldn't direct me this way (a sign at the beginning of the bike path forbids overnight backpackers to start there, probably because they don't want cars parked there), and I hadn't found a map that covered this shortcut well – it's mostly something that's alluded to vaguely in unhelpful blog posts like this one. Finding it meant puzzling over a map and compass and getting directions from people hanging out at the Mew Lake laundromat.
From this trailhead, a packed-dirt path led off through tall grass and low pines to an unexpected T junction. My notes implied that I should go left, which quickly began to feel like a mistake. This clearly wasn't the Highland trail; and my instincts about direction are generally wrong (but not always, because then I could just do the opposite, which would be too useful). I pulled out the map and compass, deduced – guessed – that I was going the wrong way, and found the trail, which, after this, was very easy to follow. There are usually plenty of blazes, and the trail is the part not covered in plants – going off it would usually mean shoving your way through the brush, which you wouldn't do accidentally.
This first section was one of steep, rocky climbs and swampy stretches spanned by short bridges or rotten, squared-off logs. It was fairly busy with day hikers, and a dozen people in swimsuits sported on the rocks at a little waterfall. The mud and the mosquitoes were manageable, which produced a feeling of optimism that was to prove wildly ill-founded. Because of wet recent weather, the mosquito forecast – there is a mosquito forecast – had been ugly. My plan was to wear so much DEET that they'd fall dead out of the sky wherever I passed; and here, it worked pretty well. But I was just brushing the edges of the mosquitoes' domain.
I'd reserved a spot at Provoking Lake West, the group of sites closest to the trailhead. The goals for this day didn't include hiking any great distance. They were to get up on time, remember everything, catch the bus, reach the park, get the permit, find the trail, get on a site, set up, and then reflect triumphantly on those achievements. The site I landed on, which I think was on the second side trail, was open and breezy, with bare rock sloping down into the water, an old rope hanging from a small tree, and a fire pit where an unappreciative reader had tried unsuccessfully to burn a copy of a book called True Blue by David Baldacci. The rope was one of the park's countless old bear hangs. It was a sad effort – close to the trunk, close to the ground, close to the tent site. Anything hung on it could have been taken down by a child wearing oven mitts.
Here, there were two cheap lessons in not being a careless idiot. I threw my sleeping pad down onto the rock and lay down, and my phone went skittering down into the water. I scooped it up and frantically dried it off: without it, I'd have no way of contacting anyone in an emergency, and no way to entertain myself without actually enjoying nature in some way. It seemed to still work. Relieved, I turned back to see my sleeping pad bobbing in the lake.
I lay in the tent watching fat, bloodthirsty flies batter themselves against the mesh. I made a meal, put earplugs in, and went to bed. Earplugs were an important part of the plan. Snapping twigs, mysterious rustling, creaking trees, growling, snatches of theremin music – whatever noises nature wanted to make were fine, but I'd sleep better not hearing them.
At the first oatmeal breakfast, the first flaws in the purely accountancy-based approach to meal planning began to be uncovered. There were things the spreadsheet's plan for 20,000 joyless calories had failed to take into account.
By nine, I was back on the trail. This was one of the two longer days, with a hike of a little over 10km. This isn't particularly far, but it was still not an easy morning. Long stretches of the trail had turned to bog. The wobbly logs set down to bridge some wet sections now only covered the middle bit of them. In other places, you had to bushwhack around craters of ooze, step precariously from stone to stone, or just squelch through. There were moose tracks and droppings everywhere (but no sign of the moose themselves, who may have been devoured completely by the mosquitoes). The day before, the repellents had worked. Here, they were overwhelmed. You felt you were taking an active part in mosquito evolution by providing blood to those most resistant to DEET. They drive you on like tiny Furies. The faster you go, the more you sweat. The more you sweat, the more intrigued they are.
At lunch, I stopped at what appeared on the map as a 'scenic lookout': a bald crest of rock with a small clearing ending in a wall of trees. Its real appeal is that it's open, windy, and sunny. The mosquitoes hang back, humming evilly to themselves as they wait for you to return to the dark and muddy places.
The rest of the day was the same: climbs and descents, dry patches and swamps. It took 4.5 hours to go 10km. A few metres from the first site at Head Lake, a yellow dry bag hung from a tree. Its bottom had been slashed open as though with a razor. There was someone at the site who said he was just leaving, and that I could set up, if I liked, but I decided to move on to one that hadn't recently given a bear a food reward.
The next site had a little trail leading down to the water, on a stretch without much easy access to the lake, and, along this little trail, a birch covered in claw marks. I pitched the tent as far away from that as possible. The site also had one of those friendly chipmunks that greets you whenever the last occupants were slobs. It sat on a little shelf of moss slurping up a package of cooked ramen. When it saw me looking, it gave a guilty start and began shoveling the noodles into its mouth with both paws. I picked up the ramen with a sheet of paper and built a twig fire to burn it. The lighter I brought failed immediately, and I then went through a shameful number of matches; but when it finally did get going, it was such a nice little blaze that I also incinerated the pair of white cotton socks lying in the fire pit.
Day 3
Early in the morning, there was a thunderstorm that dwindled eventually into a steady rain. I tried to wait it out. At 2PM, I gave up: the trail was only going to get worse, and I wanted lots of daylight to spare – I trust myself to follow an obvious trail during the day, but not to accomplish anything useful on one after dark. It was a useful but unwelcome lesson in packing up in the rain. I stuffed my sleeping bag and dry clothes into a plastic bag, stuffed that into another bag, stuffed that, and everything else, into the contractor bag I'd lined the pack with, stuffed the wet tent in on top of that, lashed the bear canister to the bottom, hefted the whole mess onto my back, and splashed off. The chipmunk hung about my legs, worried I might have forgotten that it was customary to tip the site rodent.
This was a very short hike, just a 4km walk over to Harness Lake, but I was still counting on it taking the better part of two hours, which it did. The trail had been muddy before the storm, and hadn't been improved by it. It wasn't cold, and the rain wasn't much of a problem, really. It still felt slightly like a panicked flight. There's a scene in Jurassic Park where the traitorous programmer, after a jeep accident, has to make his way through the jungle on foot. He rubs futilely at his glasses, stumbles forward in the streaming rain, and is eaten by dinosaurs. This was like that, except for the dinosaurs, and that bit is only one hubristic genetic experiment away.
The plan had been to get to the further sites on Harness Lake, to cut down the march back up to Provoking Lake, so I skipped the first two side trails. At the site the third led to, there were no tents, but by the fire pit there was a part-full bottle of cheap rum, a stack of granola bars, a folded tarp, and assorted other junk. It was impossible to tell whether this was the cache of obnoxious canoeists, the full gear of alcoholic ultralighters, a misguided gift to the next occupants, offerings to the spirits of the forest, or what; but I didn't like any of the possibilities, so I backtracked.
The second trail led to a huge and beautiful site full of mossy trees and quiet little clearings. It made you want to start some sort of druidic cult. There were flat spots for three or four tents and good water access. Off the lake swept a wind that was strong, cool, and mysteriously incapable of drying things. It was almost disappointing to find there was no weird garbage lying around. I set up in the rain, dried out the inner tent as best I could, lay my shirt out on a boulder, and looked for a rock to weigh it down.
Underneath the rock was a tampon.
A look around revealed feminine hygiene products secreted all over the place: in the hollows under tree roots, in folds of ground, under bushes. It was like some twisted menstrual Easter egg hunt. The garbage on the sites gives you the feeling of being on the trail of a gang of vandals who are always one step ahead, always leaving new messes to taunt you. But this was a strange escalation.
Day 4
This was a rest day, mostly because the sites further along had been booked, and because I was on the trail for an unnecessarily long time, anyway. I'd had the idea that I'd use the day to scout ahead up the trail, or swim, or find something interesting to do. What I actually did was to lie around reading, napping, reorganizing things, and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to field repair my phone's micro USB port with a safety pin and a wet wipe. I also dropped my cup – which was also my only cooking pot – in the lake and had to wade in a bit to fish it out again. This habit of dropping things in lakes was becoming disconcerting. As it is, a solo backpacker has about as many critical points of failure as a space shuttle: lose a shoe, lose your food, lose your water treatment system, sprain an ankle, get a down sleeping bag wet – there are so many ways for it all to go wrong. It's not necessary to add to the problem by continually letting things plop into lakes out of clumsiness or carelessness.
Day 5
This was the longest march. The first third or so is quite easy. After that, the path becomes eager to show you all of the most poorly-drained parts of the region. It's especially insistent that you see plenty of Mosquito Creek, through which Mosquito Lake drains into Fly Lake. (There are thousands of creeks in Algonquin. Only one of them could be called 'Mosquito Creek', and they chose this one.) You cross it, pass between two lobes of a swamp, follow it for a while, walk around the eastern half of Fly Lake, and then cross it a second time. This second crossing was a stretch of flat rock; the far parts were dry, the near part was slime-coated and under a foot of fast-flowing, rust-coloured water. I just stared at this for a while. It was hard to like the odds of getting across without pitching over and being swept down Mosquito Creek. I didn't know where Mosquito Creek went next, but if I ever wanted to know, it felt like a good thing to research on the internet.
Pushing through the high grass a little ways downstream, I found a chain of little rocks. I took a breath, wobbled across them, and went crashing through the brush on the other side like a panicked caribou. From here, the trail climbed strenuously up into healthier territory, land that's only temporarily muddy rather than a permanent marsh. The trail jogs back and forth, and you can tell it's thinking about taking you down to Mosquito Creek again; but it leads instead, eventually, back to the inner loop, which I followed west to the sites on the southwest corner of Provoking Lake.
There are two of these, down a side trail which seemed cruelly and unnecessarily long. I looked at both; the one on the east was small, which was fine, but also full of mosquitoes, which wasn't. I'd given them enough; I was already godfather to most of the next generation. Maybe I'll come back sometime to see how the swarms raised in my blood turned out; for now, I needed some time away from them.
The other site was huge and spectacular, with a mossy limestone cliff, jumbles of square boulders, and a chain of rocks leading out into the lake. For some parts of the trip, I'd been too muddy, preoccupied, busy, fly-bitten, or tired to appreciate the sites, but a lot of them are stunning. It was also becoming easier to relax; to appreciate that, at any given moment, it's actually more probable that a bear isn't going to burst out of the brush and seize you in its slavering jaws.
On Provoking Lake, unfortunately, there are quite a lot of sites. At the one across the lake, the one I'd stayed at my first night, a party of idiots were bellowing about how they were going in the water, how they were in the water, what temperature the water was. I lay on a rock with my feet in the lake and ate a Snickers bar by way of showing the genteel way to enjoy nature. There was an up-side: bears who fear people, or like quiet, will flee the area, while bears looking to terrorize humans will go over there. Helicopters also passed overhead occasionally, for some reason, hauling things on long tethers.
This last dinner was a question of seeing what was in the bottom of the bear barrel. For a first course, there were campfire-roasted tortillas. Here's how that works. First, you build a hot twig fire using hand sanitizer and storm matches. Then, the first tortilla you pick up is so battered and travel-scarred and doily-like that you drop it in the fire and think, "that's probably for the best". Then you roast the second tortilla over the first one. This actually does improve tortillas of a certain age and quality, and is a charming complement to instant potatoes with soy jerky. I think this trip is the only time I've had a craving for multivitamins.
Day 6
It was a cold night, and in the morning there was a heavy mist on the lake. The mosquitoes floated lethargically, still trying gamely to attack when you came near, but swinging and missing like punch-drunk boxers.
Breaking things down and packing them up was becoming faster, though this may have had more to do with casualness than skill. When I first got the tent, I'd at least try to emulate the man in the manufacturer's video, who rolls it up so caressingly that it's uncomfortable to watch. Now, I fold it roughly and stuff it into its sack.
The hike out brought me along the route I'd taken on the first and second days. The same climbs, descents, and long fingers of swamp from which eager mosquitoes rise in clouds. I met another hiker. I said "good morning" and she said, "I think there's a bear up there. I saw bear poo, and something was in the woods breaking a lot of twigs."
"That's awkward, I have to go that way."
"Well... have a good day."
I opened the velcro on my bear spray holster, unzipped the belt pocket that held my air horn, and edged forwards, clacking my trekking poles together every few seconds, hoping that would make me seem like some threatening giant insect. Coming out into one of the trail's rare little clearings, I found my air horn was gone, dropped my pack, and nervously retraced my steps. When about to give up, I finally spotted its blue plastic bell poking out of the deepest mud puddle I'd passed.
The horn is my favourite deterrent. Clutching it is just as reassuring as clutching a can of bear spray, and it's also lighter, smaller, and less dangerous. It's the better talisman. This does leave out the issue of effectiveness – a small stuffed animal would have been even lighter and cheaper – but air horns are reported to work pretty well, and they don't care about wind or rain. Much of the time, I kept the spray in a hard-to-reach side pocket as a last line of defense. Second last, if you include bearing a crust of sunscreen, dried sweat, bug spray, and swatted mosquitoes that should repel anything. The full defense is one of many interlocking layers: avoidance; reasoned argument; belittling comments; air horn; bear spray; trekking poles; capoeira; smelling awful.
I saw and heard nothing. No bear encounters, then, but an encounter with a hiker who had a theory about a bear, which felt like enough. Apart from the ripped-open dry bag and some old claw marks, there were no signs of any bears in the area of the trail at all. The mud showed the tracks of every other animal: lots of moose, lots of small mammals, lots of people and dogs (or coyotes). Anything could have been in the woods breaking twigs: birds, moose, the idiots from the site across the lake (although then there would also have been shouting about how they were breaking twigs and what they felt about that). The only time I've been close to a black bear, in fact, was at an animal rehabilitation centre on Vancouver Island earlier this year, when I saw one through a chain-link fence. It was taking a nap. After a minute, it got up, defecated explosively, and shambled off to have a snack.
On the way out, there were groups of teenagers, half a dozen or ten at a time, with matching backpacks – scouts, or cadets, or something. One group was standing at the intersection when I turned off onto the bike trail towards Mew Lake. They turned to follow me. I explained that I wasn't going to the trailhead, and they claimed that that was all right, they were on their way to the scenic lookout. It was a few hours later that I looked at the map and realized that they were in completely the wrong place. But I haven't seen anything in the news about lost scout troops; very likely, they reached the end of the trail (it's not long), thought "well, that's not very scenic", and went back again.
At about 11AM, I reached Mew Lake and hit the showers. I wasn't staying there, but it seemed like it was in everyone's interests. Changing and searching a giant backpack in the muddy and slippery shower vestibule was extremely awkward. After a slip or two, I became extremely careful, thinking: "don't come back from 5 days in the back country and then require rescue from the campground shower." From there, it was a short walk back to the Lake of Two Rivers Store and Restaurant, where I ate a pizza and caught the bus back home.
