My brother Todd and I went up to Lake Superior Provincial Park to hike the Coastal Trail, or chunks of it. Todd supplied the impetus, the car, the 22 hours of driving, the ultramarathoner's athletic conditioning, and the backcountry experience, and I brought a mostly-full bag of mini-Snickers. Todd's also a serious amateur photographer, and the expectation was that my slow-and-laboured hiking style would complement his constantly-stopping-for-pictures hiking style. If I had to pause to, for example, lie down on the trail for a while, he'd be able to find a tree or a piece of moss that would repay photographic study.
Our planning amounted to a few e-mails and a bad photograph of the park map exquisitely decorated by me in Microsoft Paint, the serious adventurer's trip-planning tool of choice. The lines and numbers I added made it possible to talk about "Point 1" and "route option 3", which is a cool way to sound like you've figured things out.
The drive up took 11 or 12 hours. Up past Sudbury, civilization is scraped pretty thin. Enigmatic cement blocks, abandoned ferry crossings, stopped trains loaded with lumber, boat graveyards, ravens, wobbly docks, rickety barns, firehalls, LCBOs, town halls, precarious farms hemmed in by granite outcroppings, boarded-up buildings, insistent warnings about moose on the road, rust, and weird billboards trying to induce religious awakenings in people shooting past at 100kph — some vaguely threatening ("Prepare to meet thy God!"), some just odd (a drawing of God's hands holding a cell phone: "Your Father sent you a message, he is waiting for your reply").
We spent the night in the Agawa Campground, because it was late, and because Point 1, which I'd confidently identified as the best starting point, turned out — whether due to some kind of error on my part, or on the map's part, or on the part of the people who had built Point 1 in the first place — to be a parking lot on the wrong side of the highway with no actual link to the trail.
In the morning, we drove up to Gargantua Bay for an overnighter. There were at least two hands at work in making the map of this area. There's a Plato Lake, and the main features are named after characters from Rabelais. But there's also a Dead Otter Lake, a Dead Moose Lake, a Mom Lake, and a Dad Lake. My idea is that there were rival explorers criss-crossing the territory, the first determined to give the region a bit of class, the second to annoy the first.
The trailhead at Gargantua Bay (Point 4) is at the end of a 25km gravel road. This road has two points of interest. One is an esker, which is a thing that appears on maps that you drive over without noticing. The other is the one point of cell coverage we found on the whole trip, an eerie geomagnetic or topographical or ley line-related anomaly where electronic devices suddenly start pinging like mad before going dead again twenty metres further on.
This northern stretch is easy, sometimes dull. The first third is an overgrown road set back from the coast. It leads to a muddy clearing where someone seems to have started to develop a picnic stop and then thought, "nah". By this is a cove, the northern tip of Gargantua Harbour, with a side trail promising a climb to a scenic outlook and a derelict ranger cabin. Todd took the side trail and reported that the outlook is only mildly scenic. I checked out the cabin. In general, Todd took the side trails, and I listened to his descriptions of them. This seemed like a good division of labour between Todd, who is indefatigable, and myself, who is quite easily fatigable.
The cabin, once red, is now fading and peeling to gray, with buckling floors, patches of rotten carpet, rusted bits of stove, curled strips of pink formica, punched-through window screens, crude shelves, missing outer walls, and white inner ones covered in scratched graffiti — the earliest dating to 1996, which must be when the rangers moved out and the mice and tetanus bacteria checked in.
The old road ends here, and the trail runs north into the woods. It's a brown lawnmower strip through a damp green forest full of creeks of cola-coloured water and thick mattresses of moss. A lot of effort has gone into the trail: all deadfall was freshly chainsawed, and there was a big new bridge across a river — underneath it, a group of big gray trout psyched themselves up for the run up the rapids — and a nice new duckboard lying on its side at the bottom of the muddy ravine it was probably supposed to save us from having to climb down into.
You edge your way along the riverbank, walk back into the woods, and come out onto a long, sandy beach at Warp Bay. Here, there's a row of campsites here set just back in the trees, and a sign at the northern end claiming that it's only 2km more to Devil's Chair. I still think this is a lie; but the issue may just be that this is the only stretch of the northern trail that's at all difficult. You climb and descend and swat your way through disturbingly well-harvested fields of wild raspberries. We'd planned to camp at Devil's Chair, but the sites were small and lumpy clearings on rocky coves. At least, the first one was, and the second one seemed to be when Todd came back and told me about it. We backtracked to Warp Bay, where the sites were breezy and beautiful.
At night, there were flashes of lightning out on the lake, and a storm swept over. In the morning, everything was dripping, and there was a cold, dense fog. Far out on the lake, a white light blinked on and off: the beacon at Gargantua Bay, I think. An otter (possibly) was swimming across the bay, just at the limit of sight. Todd announced that he was going for a wade and walked into the river, emerging twenty minutes later with eerie photographs and an exciting theory about the river actually being a channel. There were patches of quicksand along the beach — solid-looking surfaces that dissolved when you stepped on them. And no jungle vines to pull yourself out with. But it was only ankle deep. Drowning in quicksand is a fate for supervillains; getting a wet foot is about right for my low-level villainy.
We hiked back to the trailhead and went to Wawa for the night, stopping to take pictures of the giant goose (rated 4.3 stars on Google by people who found some sort of context for rating giant goose sculptures). This goose is brand-new, unveiled just a few months ago. A few years back, a study by goose engineers concluded that the old goose was in a state of decay, and a major goose-stabilization effort was undertaken. There was a fundraising drive asking people to "buy a feather", and governments got involved. The old goose, for anyone who wants to really trace the history of the thing, is apparently the one at the weather-beaten general store that looks like a cheap knockoff.
Todd got on the phone and booked a cabin in one of Wawa's old roadside motels. Wawa is full of old roadside motels, about a third of them boarded up and waiting to be torn down, a third of them run-down and waiting to be boarded up, and the remaining third divvying up the traffic among them. Ours was a cabin of thickly-lacquered logs. We ate in the motel restaurant, a big pink room unchanged for at least thirty years. Old stubby beer bottles lined the wall, as though someone set them down there in the early '70s and no one found time to clear them away before they became quaint and decorative. My own housekeeping operates on the same principle and with the same hopes. I had a greasy shrimp basket that came with a big tub of cocktail sauce.
Wawa's lumber mill closed in 2007 and its last mine in the 1990s, and this has put a lot of pressure on the goose. There is a shiny new visitor centre, put up with the kind of blithe optimism you only see in public spending in depressed towns — like giving a rowing machine to a man dying of some wasting disease. Apart from that and other public buildings, nothing bigger than a chip shack seems to have been built in Wawa since the 1980s. The economic collapse sucked out all powers of regeneration. It's an architectural and cultural bubble of the 1970s standing a bit off from the mainstream of civilization, warily trading lumber and goose photos for frozen food and cocktail sauce. There are sprawling parking lots with one or two pickups, a Royal Canadian Legion, a bowling centre with a 'Roxy' upstairs, and a treeless central drag of square brick low-rises with angle parking and overhead wires. Above all, there are the disintegrating old motels, their pleading last words falling off marquees letter by letter: "clean comfor_a_le rooms res__u_ant q_en6am".
After being big city jerks in Wawa, we drove back down to start the real hike. Squinting at the map and thinking about what we'd like the trail to be like led us to think we could easily do the stretch from Orphan Lake down to the visitor centre in two nights, with a third as an option if we wanted to be relaxed about it. A woman at the park office said the trail conditions were fine, and advised us to stop at Robertson Cove. I said "oh, that should make for a nice easy first day", and she smiled in what I decided was probably agreement.
The Orphan Lake trail was steep but not hard. We passed a pair of day-hikers talking loudly about brassieres, and then it was eerily still, as though a storm were about to strike. The coast, when we reached it, was a sloping beach of smooth pink, blue, and gray pebbles. Then there were dikes of wrinkly pink granite, bright pink at the water, like a row of ancient, battle-scarred walruses of impossible size and truculence. We saw flashes of lightning far out over the lake, and told each other that the storm seemed to be moving off. When it crashed into us, we carried on for a while. Route-finding started to seem difficult, probably because my system was overburdened trying to transmute Pop Tarts and instant coffee into elevation gain and good decisions about lightning safety. When the thunder got loud, we squatted down back in the trees to wait it out while Todd explained some interesting things about ground currents.
The trail ran along the coast. When the coast was impassable or lethal, the trail cut inland, running high up onto smooth domes that were themselves a bit hairy in the wet weather. We started to bushwhack around the worst parts, because of a superstition I have about traversing wet granite slabs above jagged rocks lashed by freezing water. These were interesting side trips: squeezing through brush where branches grabbed at your backpack, clambering through moss-choked ravines, and searching along the edges of steep drops to find a place where you could worm back through to the coast.
Todd initiated a series of depressing Strava bulletins: our pace was under 1kph. We cursed Strava and its lies, and finally packed it in south of Coldwater River, a couple of kilometers short of Robertson Cove, on a damp little site just inland from a coast of amazing flat red granite. Todd got quite excited about the sunset, and I got quite excited about lying down for nine hours.
The morning was clear and warm, and Robertson Cove was as great as promised, a thin isthmus of sand running out to a bulb of smooth gray rock with a clump of trees. It would have been a fantastic place to camp, if we'd made it that far. As it was, we just had a look and stopped for a snack.
For the next few hours, we were poling up and down chutes of rock and mud, climbing over fridge-sized gray boulders, and inching across beaches of slick stones. Superior does driftwood on a grand scale: piles of whole logs, planks, rusted chains, barrel hoops, and a purple bag that said "Happy birthday!" in sparkly letters. Somewhere along here, we met the only other multi-day hiker we encountered on the trip, a solo backpacker from Michigan. He'd hiked the trail before, and thought it was harder this time, because water levels were high, an excuse I seized on gratefully and will probably get a lot of use out of. We asked him how the trail was up ahead, and he said it was awful. He asked us how the trail was behind us, and we said it was awful. And we parted with mutual good wishes.
The coast here alternates between flat and sloping lumps of scored rock, jagged boulders, and smooth pebbles. These were slow and sometimes complicated to cross, but not scary; twisting an ankle was likely, getting smashed up on jagged rocks and swept out into the world's largest freshwater lake (by surface area) wasn't. And I still had some medicinal whisky, and was confident in Todd's ability, in an emergency, to rig some kind of sledge or wagon and drag me out to the highway.
At Sinclair Cove, there was a boat launch, and a sandy beach. We ran across a couple of day hikers and a family with an aggressive dog, barely restrained by a small boy, and a father who chatted with me about buddies of his who had done the trail a few years ago. At this point, my air horn suddenly failed; it somehow developed a leak, and my waist belt pocket bloomed with frost as the compressed air expanded.
On the high dome overlooking a beach, we stopped and ate. Having run through the day's food already, I fished out the bear barrel, spread its contents on the rock, and ate the best of what was left. With the air horn gone, my new plan was to lure multiple bears and play them off against each other. (In fact, we hadn't seen the slightest sign of bears. And after cresting the tenth mini-mountain of the day, you realize that no bear is as stupid as you are — it wouldn't cross this country just to devour some stringy and malodorous backpacker. Anyway, as the day wears on on the Coastal Trail, you start to lose interest in whether anything eats you or not.)
There was another little interval back in the woods, and then the shore turns to sand again and the hike becomes a weird mosey along the beach in front of a lot of sunbathers. People were swimming here, out to a little island, where they'd stand around in little groups or lie in the sun. Not something you'd expect to see on Lake Superior in late September. We thought of stopping there and camping by the beach. Then we wondered what was on the other side of the map. It turned out to be quite a lot of trail — so much trail that camping around here would probably leave us on it for 4 nights.
We decided to cheat. At Sand River, where the trail takes you back to the highway to use a bridge, we stayed on the road to snip off a bit of trail. The highway here climbs an enormous mountain, which appears on no maps, for some reason, but which you have to plod up while the sun blazes and cars and transport trucks whiz past. Hi! We're hiking the Trans-Canada to raise awareness of people who can't read maps. Someone stopped: a nice woman who asked whether we were injured and offered us a ride. We explained that we were just headed up to the next bridge, and that we weren't hurt, just dumb. With her was a woman we'd passed a few hours earlier and said "hi" to. She remarked that we'd come an awfully long way, which was not true.
An hour on the highway was a pretty grim slog, but it cut several hours off our day, which meant Todd wouldn't need to explain to our parents why I'd died on the trail. We came back down the trail where Barrett River trickled feebly into the lake, cut back south along the beach, and pulled into the first site along it, a buggy one up on the eroded edge of the forest.
I got into my tent and explained through the mesh that I was going to stay in it until the sun was gone and all the mosquitoes were dead. My arms were covered in bites; and I was tired of looking down and seeing one slurping contentedly away like a child with a milkshake. LSPP is tremendously beautiful, but there are times you feel it would be hugely improved by the explosive delivery of nine hundred thousand tons of DDT. It's not that the bugs were bad by northern Ontario standards — they weren't — it just that it was late September, and I really wanted them to be dead. I suppose you don't get to be where they are by dying off when people expect you to. I'm not sure I'd want to come earlier in the summer. You'd be too busy wishing you were dead to really enjoy yourself. The mosquitoes weren't bad on the beach, at least, possibly because of the wasps.
The disgusting heat wave continued the next day. We had late-fall sleeping bags, long shirts, and puffy jackets, but the problems were sun and dehydration. I soaked a travel towel in the lake and wrapped it around my head. It looked amazing, which is important, because I think of myself as the Beau Brummel of the back woods ("do you call that thing a fleece?").
Instead of crossing the bridge at the highway, we heroically forded the mighty Barrett River, even though it meant getting my shoes wet and slightly sandy. This was a hard day of climbing, descending, and rock-hopping. Spiders had spun their webs across the trail, possibly with the idea I wouldn't by now have the strength to break through them and that they'd have a magnificent feed, and when I got tired of sweeping them out of the way with my face I had to constantly wave a pole ahead of me. (We'd agreed early on that I should take the lead, either because of my route-finding skills, my ghostlike scouting ability, or the fact that I'm by far the slower hiker, I forget which.) We had a lot of trail to cover, and it included the stretch south of the Agawa petroglyphs, which even my limited research had flagged as a difficult bit. Todd showed no particular sign of fatigue, and kept pointing out interesting sights. It was like being on a death march with someone who keeps saying what a nice day it is.
At the petroglyphs, a path, marked at intervals by bright red warning signs, leads down a rough staircase of stone blocks, improved at some point with splashes of asphalt, past a life preserver, to a cliff face at the water's edge. Here, you can walk out onto a sloping shelf to look at the pictographs: red ochre images of canoes, fish, and a fantastical horned beast, possibly the 'Great Lynx', painted here by Ojibwe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The shelf is what the bright red signs were warning about, and they're not wrong: it would be horrendously dangerous when the water is rough. It tilts uncomfortably, and a bad wave or a slip would send you into the lake. There's a chain to hold onto for the first stretch, and then nothing — a couple of rusty old bolts dangle short lengths of thick, furry old rope, but the main supports have been removed.
Back up at the trail, a sign points to a parking lot with a kiosk. We struck out for the kiosk eagerly, but there was only little booth for self-serve permits. I don't know if I've ever been so disappointed by a kiosk. I think now that the kiosk is seasonal; it probably packed up its nutty cones and potato chips and left at the end of high season. But it might have left a note or something to explain it had left, and maybe where it was going. I was quite ready to track the kiosk to its lair. Maybe find the secret spot where kiosks overwinter and loot their troves of junk food and informative brochures.
From the petroglyphs facing south, a sign says "Caution: Trail is rated as difficult. Agawa River 7km / 6 hours south". And 1.17kph is about right. But, of what we did, this is the part I'd be most interested in doing again. It's hard: it leads you constantly up and down, with short rock scrambles and tricky descents. But you pass through an amazing cave, under low-ceilinged passages, between low cliffs, and then through a funky slot where you shove your pack on ahead and then shuffle after it in a seated position. The landscape, as Todd pointed out, is like the Niagara Escarpment, broken limestone covered in thick moss, tiny ferns, and unlucky saplings, rooted in an inch of soil, that are tipping over as they grow.
We camped at Agawa Point. The northern two sites were awful; the third was fine, with space for two tents, a slick, rocky cove with only slightly treacherous water access, a rocky dome where the wind at least made the insects work for you, and a cairn in the shape of a horse, which Todd called a ponycairn. We had an interesting conversation about it:
- Someone built a ponycairn!
- What?
- A ponycairn.
- What?
- <points>
- What?
On the map, the last stretch looked long, but smooth and flat. That was good, because my legs felt like they'd been beaten with golf clubs. I claimed we'd be finished by noon, a stupid joke that came true — we reached the visitor centre at 11:55. From about the Awasusee trailhead — just north of the Agawa River — down to the end is easy and, really, kind of pointless. An easy walk along a dirt track parallel to the beach. South of the river is a ruined log cabin, with insulation hanging in tatters, a young maple growing in the middle of a room, a mattress slumped in a doorway, a plaid couch of unbelievable dirtiness, and a kitchen with an ancient can of Squirt soda on the floor and an open oven stuffed with an unopened bag of marshmallows, chip bags, and other garbage. An interesting fact about marshmallows: you can leave them in an abandoned oven in a ruined shack in the wilderness for untold years, and they'll still look like they're sitting on a grocery store shelf (consult my other blog, interestingfactsaboutmarshmallows.blogspot.ca).
We were operating a bike shuttle, which involved Todd riding a crappy old road bike 25km up the Trans-Canada to the car while I browsed the gift shop. I also ate two bags of Doritos, to replenish depleted electrolytes and cheeses. There's a small museum in the centre, a tiny black bear skeleton, and a ledger for recording animal sightings in which kids had described spotting their ugly sisters. Every now and then, someone would come in to ask the staff for advice or tell them stories of incredible dullness and irrelevance. I waited to pay for something behind a woman who was, for no conceivable reason, showing them pictures of her parents' house. One of the trying things about a job like that, I guess, is that you're not allowed to tell people to go away. Another is all the filthy backpackers hanging around: their scratched-open mosquito bites look like a medieval skin disease, they smell awful, and they buy up all the Doritos you have on display so you have to go to the back for more.
Todd survived the Trans-Canada, came back with the car, and we made it to Sudbury before crashing in a Motel 6. We pulled back into Toronto around noon the next day and I started my recovery program of 9 hour sleeps and gigantic meals.
Our planning amounted to a few e-mails and a bad photograph of the park map exquisitely decorated by me in Microsoft Paint, the serious adventurer's trip-planning tool of choice. The lines and numbers I added made it possible to talk about "Point 1" and "route option 3", which is a cool way to sound like you've figured things out.
The drive up took 11 or 12 hours. Up past Sudbury, civilization is scraped pretty thin. Enigmatic cement blocks, abandoned ferry crossings, stopped trains loaded with lumber, boat graveyards, ravens, wobbly docks, rickety barns, firehalls, LCBOs, town halls, precarious farms hemmed in by granite outcroppings, boarded-up buildings, insistent warnings about moose on the road, rust, and weird billboards trying to induce religious awakenings in people shooting past at 100kph — some vaguely threatening ("Prepare to meet thy God!"), some just odd (a drawing of God's hands holding a cell phone: "Your Father sent you a message, he is waiting for your reply").
We spent the night in the Agawa Campground, because it was late, and because Point 1, which I'd confidently identified as the best starting point, turned out — whether due to some kind of error on my part, or on the map's part, or on the part of the people who had built Point 1 in the first place — to be a parking lot on the wrong side of the highway with no actual link to the trail.
In the morning, we drove up to Gargantua Bay for an overnighter. There were at least two hands at work in making the map of this area. There's a Plato Lake, and the main features are named after characters from Rabelais. But there's also a Dead Otter Lake, a Dead Moose Lake, a Mom Lake, and a Dad Lake. My idea is that there were rival explorers criss-crossing the territory, the first determined to give the region a bit of class, the second to annoy the first.
The trailhead at Gargantua Bay (Point 4) is at the end of a 25km gravel road. This road has two points of interest. One is an esker, which is a thing that appears on maps that you drive over without noticing. The other is the one point of cell coverage we found on the whole trip, an eerie geomagnetic or topographical or ley line-related anomaly where electronic devices suddenly start pinging like mad before going dead again twenty metres further on.
This northern stretch is easy, sometimes dull. The first third is an overgrown road set back from the coast. It leads to a muddy clearing where someone seems to have started to develop a picnic stop and then thought, "nah". By this is a cove, the northern tip of Gargantua Harbour, with a side trail promising a climb to a scenic outlook and a derelict ranger cabin. Todd took the side trail and reported that the outlook is only mildly scenic. I checked out the cabin. In general, Todd took the side trails, and I listened to his descriptions of them. This seemed like a good division of labour between Todd, who is indefatigable, and myself, who is quite easily fatigable.
The cabin, once red, is now fading and peeling to gray, with buckling floors, patches of rotten carpet, rusted bits of stove, curled strips of pink formica, punched-through window screens, crude shelves, missing outer walls, and white inner ones covered in scratched graffiti — the earliest dating to 1996, which must be when the rangers moved out and the mice and tetanus bacteria checked in.
The old road ends here, and the trail runs north into the woods. It's a brown lawnmower strip through a damp green forest full of creeks of cola-coloured water and thick mattresses of moss. A lot of effort has gone into the trail: all deadfall was freshly chainsawed, and there was a big new bridge across a river — underneath it, a group of big gray trout psyched themselves up for the run up the rapids — and a nice new duckboard lying on its side at the bottom of the muddy ravine it was probably supposed to save us from having to climb down into.
You edge your way along the riverbank, walk back into the woods, and come out onto a long, sandy beach at Warp Bay. Here, there's a row of campsites here set just back in the trees, and a sign at the northern end claiming that it's only 2km more to Devil's Chair. I still think this is a lie; but the issue may just be that this is the only stretch of the northern trail that's at all difficult. You climb and descend and swat your way through disturbingly well-harvested fields of wild raspberries. We'd planned to camp at Devil's Chair, but the sites were small and lumpy clearings on rocky coves. At least, the first one was, and the second one seemed to be when Todd came back and told me about it. We backtracked to Warp Bay, where the sites were breezy and beautiful.
At night, there were flashes of lightning out on the lake, and a storm swept over. In the morning, everything was dripping, and there was a cold, dense fog. Far out on the lake, a white light blinked on and off: the beacon at Gargantua Bay, I think. An otter (possibly) was swimming across the bay, just at the limit of sight. Todd announced that he was going for a wade and walked into the river, emerging twenty minutes later with eerie photographs and an exciting theory about the river actually being a channel. There were patches of quicksand along the beach — solid-looking surfaces that dissolved when you stepped on them. And no jungle vines to pull yourself out with. But it was only ankle deep. Drowning in quicksand is a fate for supervillains; getting a wet foot is about right for my low-level villainy.
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| (Todd's photo) |
We hiked back to the trailhead and went to Wawa for the night, stopping to take pictures of the giant goose (rated 4.3 stars on Google by people who found some sort of context for rating giant goose sculptures). This goose is brand-new, unveiled just a few months ago. A few years back, a study by goose engineers concluded that the old goose was in a state of decay, and a major goose-stabilization effort was undertaken. There was a fundraising drive asking people to "buy a feather", and governments got involved. The old goose, for anyone who wants to really trace the history of the thing, is apparently the one at the weather-beaten general store that looks like a cheap knockoff.
Todd got on the phone and booked a cabin in one of Wawa's old roadside motels. Wawa is full of old roadside motels, about a third of them boarded up and waiting to be torn down, a third of them run-down and waiting to be boarded up, and the remaining third divvying up the traffic among them. Ours was a cabin of thickly-lacquered logs. We ate in the motel restaurant, a big pink room unchanged for at least thirty years. Old stubby beer bottles lined the wall, as though someone set them down there in the early '70s and no one found time to clear them away before they became quaint and decorative. My own housekeeping operates on the same principle and with the same hopes. I had a greasy shrimp basket that came with a big tub of cocktail sauce.
Wawa's lumber mill closed in 2007 and its last mine in the 1990s, and this has put a lot of pressure on the goose. There is a shiny new visitor centre, put up with the kind of blithe optimism you only see in public spending in depressed towns — like giving a rowing machine to a man dying of some wasting disease. Apart from that and other public buildings, nothing bigger than a chip shack seems to have been built in Wawa since the 1980s. The economic collapse sucked out all powers of regeneration. It's an architectural and cultural bubble of the 1970s standing a bit off from the mainstream of civilization, warily trading lumber and goose photos for frozen food and cocktail sauce. There are sprawling parking lots with one or two pickups, a Royal Canadian Legion, a bowling centre with a 'Roxy' upstairs, and a treeless central drag of square brick low-rises with angle parking and overhead wires. Above all, there are the disintegrating old motels, their pleading last words falling off marquees letter by letter: "clean comfor_a_le rooms res__u_ant q_en6am".
After being big city jerks in Wawa, we drove back down to start the real hike. Squinting at the map and thinking about what we'd like the trail to be like led us to think we could easily do the stretch from Orphan Lake down to the visitor centre in two nights, with a third as an option if we wanted to be relaxed about it. A woman at the park office said the trail conditions were fine, and advised us to stop at Robertson Cove. I said "oh, that should make for a nice easy first day", and she smiled in what I decided was probably agreement.
The trail ran along the coast. When the coast was impassable or lethal, the trail cut inland, running high up onto smooth domes that were themselves a bit hairy in the wet weather. We started to bushwhack around the worst parts, because of a superstition I have about traversing wet granite slabs above jagged rocks lashed by freezing water. These were interesting side trips: squeezing through brush where branches grabbed at your backpack, clambering through moss-choked ravines, and searching along the edges of steep drops to find a place where you could worm back through to the coast.
Todd initiated a series of depressing Strava bulletins: our pace was under 1kph. We cursed Strava and its lies, and finally packed it in south of Coldwater River, a couple of kilometers short of Robertson Cove, on a damp little site just inland from a coast of amazing flat red granite. Todd got quite excited about the sunset, and I got quite excited about lying down for nine hours.
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| (Todd's photo) |
For the next few hours, we were poling up and down chutes of rock and mud, climbing over fridge-sized gray boulders, and inching across beaches of slick stones. Superior does driftwood on a grand scale: piles of whole logs, planks, rusted chains, barrel hoops, and a purple bag that said "Happy birthday!" in sparkly letters. Somewhere along here, we met the only other multi-day hiker we encountered on the trip, a solo backpacker from Michigan. He'd hiked the trail before, and thought it was harder this time, because water levels were high, an excuse I seized on gratefully and will probably get a lot of use out of. We asked him how the trail was up ahead, and he said it was awful. He asked us how the trail was behind us, and we said it was awful. And we parted with mutual good wishes.
The coast here alternates between flat and sloping lumps of scored rock, jagged boulders, and smooth pebbles. These were slow and sometimes complicated to cross, but not scary; twisting an ankle was likely, getting smashed up on jagged rocks and swept out into the world's largest freshwater lake (by surface area) wasn't. And I still had some medicinal whisky, and was confident in Todd's ability, in an emergency, to rig some kind of sledge or wagon and drag me out to the highway.
At Sinclair Cove, there was a boat launch, and a sandy beach. We ran across a couple of day hikers and a family with an aggressive dog, barely restrained by a small boy, and a father who chatted with me about buddies of his who had done the trail a few years ago. At this point, my air horn suddenly failed; it somehow developed a leak, and my waist belt pocket bloomed with frost as the compressed air expanded.
On the high dome overlooking a beach, we stopped and ate. Having run through the day's food already, I fished out the bear barrel, spread its contents on the rock, and ate the best of what was left. With the air horn gone, my new plan was to lure multiple bears and play them off against each other. (In fact, we hadn't seen the slightest sign of bears. And after cresting the tenth mini-mountain of the day, you realize that no bear is as stupid as you are — it wouldn't cross this country just to devour some stringy and malodorous backpacker. Anyway, as the day wears on on the Coastal Trail, you start to lose interest in whether anything eats you or not.)
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| (Todd's photo) |
We decided to cheat. At Sand River, where the trail takes you back to the highway to use a bridge, we stayed on the road to snip off a bit of trail. The highway here climbs an enormous mountain, which appears on no maps, for some reason, but which you have to plod up while the sun blazes and cars and transport trucks whiz past. Hi! We're hiking the Trans-Canada to raise awareness of people who can't read maps. Someone stopped: a nice woman who asked whether we were injured and offered us a ride. We explained that we were just headed up to the next bridge, and that we weren't hurt, just dumb. With her was a woman we'd passed a few hours earlier and said "hi" to. She remarked that we'd come an awfully long way, which was not true.
An hour on the highway was a pretty grim slog, but it cut several hours off our day, which meant Todd wouldn't need to explain to our parents why I'd died on the trail. We came back down the trail where Barrett River trickled feebly into the lake, cut back south along the beach, and pulled into the first site along it, a buggy one up on the eroded edge of the forest.
I got into my tent and explained through the mesh that I was going to stay in it until the sun was gone and all the mosquitoes were dead. My arms were covered in bites; and I was tired of looking down and seeing one slurping contentedly away like a child with a milkshake. LSPP is tremendously beautiful, but there are times you feel it would be hugely improved by the explosive delivery of nine hundred thousand tons of DDT. It's not that the bugs were bad by northern Ontario standards — they weren't — it just that it was late September, and I really wanted them to be dead. I suppose you don't get to be where they are by dying off when people expect you to. I'm not sure I'd want to come earlier in the summer. You'd be too busy wishing you were dead to really enjoy yourself. The mosquitoes weren't bad on the beach, at least, possibly because of the wasps.
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| (Todd's photo) |
Instead of crossing the bridge at the highway, we heroically forded the mighty Barrett River, even though it meant getting my shoes wet and slightly sandy. This was a hard day of climbing, descending, and rock-hopping. Spiders had spun their webs across the trail, possibly with the idea I wouldn't by now have the strength to break through them and that they'd have a magnificent feed, and when I got tired of sweeping them out of the way with my face I had to constantly wave a pole ahead of me. (We'd agreed early on that I should take the lead, either because of my route-finding skills, my ghostlike scouting ability, or the fact that I'm by far the slower hiker, I forget which.) We had a lot of trail to cover, and it included the stretch south of the Agawa petroglyphs, which even my limited research had flagged as a difficult bit. Todd showed no particular sign of fatigue, and kept pointing out interesting sights. It was like being on a death march with someone who keeps saying what a nice day it is.
At the petroglyphs, a path, marked at intervals by bright red warning signs, leads down a rough staircase of stone blocks, improved at some point with splashes of asphalt, past a life preserver, to a cliff face at the water's edge. Here, you can walk out onto a sloping shelf to look at the pictographs: red ochre images of canoes, fish, and a fantastical horned beast, possibly the 'Great Lynx', painted here by Ojibwe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The shelf is what the bright red signs were warning about, and they're not wrong: it would be horrendously dangerous when the water is rough. It tilts uncomfortably, and a bad wave or a slip would send you into the lake. There's a chain to hold onto for the first stretch, and then nothing — a couple of rusty old bolts dangle short lengths of thick, furry old rope, but the main supports have been removed.
Back up at the trail, a sign points to a parking lot with a kiosk. We struck out for the kiosk eagerly, but there was only little booth for self-serve permits. I don't know if I've ever been so disappointed by a kiosk. I think now that the kiosk is seasonal; it probably packed up its nutty cones and potato chips and left at the end of high season. But it might have left a note or something to explain it had left, and maybe where it was going. I was quite ready to track the kiosk to its lair. Maybe find the secret spot where kiosks overwinter and loot their troves of junk food and informative brochures.
We camped at Agawa Point. The northern two sites were awful; the third was fine, with space for two tents, a slick, rocky cove with only slightly treacherous water access, a rocky dome where the wind at least made the insects work for you, and a cairn in the shape of a horse, which Todd called a ponycairn. We had an interesting conversation about it:
- Someone built a ponycairn!
- What?
- A ponycairn.
- What?
- <points>
- What?
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| (Both Todd's photos) |
We were operating a bike shuttle, which involved Todd riding a crappy old road bike 25km up the Trans-Canada to the car while I browsed the gift shop. I also ate two bags of Doritos, to replenish depleted electrolytes and cheeses. There's a small museum in the centre, a tiny black bear skeleton, and a ledger for recording animal sightings in which kids had described spotting their ugly sisters. Every now and then, someone would come in to ask the staff for advice or tell them stories of incredible dullness and irrelevance. I waited to pay for something behind a woman who was, for no conceivable reason, showing them pictures of her parents' house. One of the trying things about a job like that, I guess, is that you're not allowed to tell people to go away. Another is all the filthy backpackers hanging around: their scratched-open mosquito bites look like a medieval skin disease, they smell awful, and they buy up all the Doritos you have on display so you have to go to the back for more.
Todd survived the Trans-Canada, came back with the car, and we made it to Sudbury before crashing in a Motel 6. We pulled back into Toronto around noon the next day and I started my recovery program of 9 hour sleeps and gigantic meals.
