Midweek camping is a great treat of a flexible schedule. I saw the weather and a gap between my various projects and so jumped at the chance to go. The great thing is that school isn't out yet, kids and families are still tied up, so mid-week the odds are good that you can have an entire lake (sometimes a park) all to yourself.
Frontenac Park is a great spot - all the camping is hike or paddle in. The down side is that it is in a weird spot. It's not far away, but awkward to get to it. Really pushing it, you can now get there from Ottawa in just over two hrs. Recent upgrades to Highway 7 mean it's a four lane expressway almost to Carleton Place, so that trims some time off. The 401 route through Kingston is the other option. It's a bit quicker (maybe ten minutes) but it is one of the more boring drives you'll ever make.
I picked up a very light-weight one-person tent a few years ago for just such spontaneous solo trips as this one. When @skatem is not available to come along its good to have a lighter, one-man tent. It's a great little sarcophagus of a thing - good space inside for a tall person to stretch out, just enough room, and a bit of extra storage in the vestibule area.
The bush is quite wet this spring, so there were many spots where the rustic trails were mucky-messes, but a bit of creative skirting was no big effort. The mosquitoes were visibly pretty bad, but my far-northern Ontario mojo still works pretty well, and I don't think I had any bites. I saw many sizing me up though. I guess when they go in for a taste, they get confused and think I'm one of them, since I was injected with so much mosquito venom in my formative years.
The lake was very quiet, and after tent set-up and a cup of tea, I was still feeling sweaty and lethargic from the hike. I decided to go for a swim as a pick-me-up. The deer flies and horse flies both enjoyed that. I have no immunity to them, and they seem to still have a score to settle from the first few of their kind that I killed in the distant north off the Ogoki river, where one can almost saddle them up. Their
modus operandi remains the same: when someone swims, they zip around your head and take bites off you when they can. One will attempt to stay under the water as long as possible to cause confusion about where you've gone. You'll perhaps even surface elsewhere to elude them submarine style.
It doesn't work.
I got a fire started. Just a small one - I wanted the coals for cooking. I've thankfully transitioned from the adolescent approach of camping to burn things, though many never do. There is instead this great satisfaction of making the perfect cooking fire now. It's not as much about tall flames and banshee screams, but more about a nice bed of coals, with small flames in little orange caves.
I had a pork chop thawing and marinating in foil during the hike (ginger, cumin, garlic cloves, brown sugar). I fried the chop once the fire was down to cooking speed and it all worked out well. I used my tiny Whisperlite camp stove to boil up some pasta, then added some flavour with our home-garden basil pesto. I had sacrificed a bit of weight for a glass of wine, of course.
After supper I built the fire back up to flames, and boiled some water on my little Whisperlite for another tea, and watched the daylight fade out.
We're approaching the end of spring, and as such the days now are big, never-ending things. There is still light in the sky at 9:30 pm, 10:00 even, and twilight is slow and long. Last night it was particularly blue-tinted as well. A couple of grainy phone-camera pictures illustrate. The pictures capture that hue pretty well - with a bit of adjusting. There is no mobile reception out there, so my mobile served little other purpose than taking a pics. I skipped bringing my digital camera to save weight, but I wish in retrospect I'd brought it along. I've been out many times, and thought there wouldn't be much worth shooting that I hadn't seen before. But when you're out your perspective changes. This stuff never gets old, despite what you think before leaving.
I might have grabbed a picture of the low-flying flock of Canada Geese that cruised past after supper. I could hear them in the distance approaching, like a bunch of cocktail party rejects, gaggling and glorking as they went by about five metres off the water. I could have probably got some better pictures of the little brown squirrel removing and sampling the fungus off the end of a log. He really liked that stuff - I didn't know squirrels liked anything other than the seeds of our back-yard elm tree which they shred with glee.
Darkness set in, and no sooner had I put down the fire for the night, than the emerging stars were washed out by a full yellow moon that appeared unexpectedly through the tree line. It gradually crept up into full spot-light mode. Quite a surprise - I hadn't planned my trip around that, and I wasn't paying attention to moon phases lately. It seemed almost orchestrated to my evening schedule.
Just to add to the moment, unmistakable calls of a whippoorwill across the lake punctuated the stillness. They are a fondly remembered bird from my northern childhood too. My attempts earlier in the evening to call loons in had gone unanswered, but as the sun finally faded to black, a couple of talkative loons started up for full Canadiana effect. They were on a tour, no doubt, adding ambience around all the lakes in the park.
I'm not a birder, in fact I might have said something to the effect of "if I ever start identifying birds someone shoot me" in the past. So other other diverse winged beasts went nameless, though I'll add them to my 'life-list' anyway: small feathered bird, another small bird, with wings, etc.
By 1:30 am the full-moon was up in the middle of the sky, and it felt almost like a hazy afternoon - but the silver/blue version. Not great for someone who likes pitch-black for sleeping - but that's how I know what it was up to at that early hour. But still, it was a very unique and memorable image. I knew my phone-cam wouldn't be up to the task so I didn't bother. It was so 'unicorns and elves' out that I broke out a black-velvet canvas and did a couple of quick paintings. Well, not really, but it was that sort of thing. Weird, isn't it, how nature can get so strikingly beautiful as to approach tacky? Autumn is a bit like that. I think to take pictures but decide - no this is just going to look like a road-side diner laminated place-mat. So, I just look, enjoy and remember.
It was colder than I had expected out there last night. I'd brought my summer sleeping bag - a tiny, lightweight thing rated to +7C, so it says. One never believes those things, and so I had along also my silk (yes, silk) sleeping bag liner which is a
great comfort enhancer. Rather than sleeping in contact with nylon, you get this with a bit of extra flexibility for adding a degree or two of comfort. Even then, though, it was a little chilly by morning, but not so much that I wanted to break out the reflective 'emergency' blanket. I just put on my sweater and toughed it out.
By 5:00 it was light already. The nights are pretty short this time of year. I managed to doze for a couple of more hours then got up for a pancakes and sausage breakfast. A secret to success in this department we discovered a few years ago. Make pancakes from scratch before leaving home, and freeze the batter solid. It makes a good ice-pack
and makes the pancakes much more tasty! I much prefer these to the powdered 'just-add-water' pancakes whose texture always seems to be crumbly and taste rather artificial. Of course, some good Canadian maple syrup is
de rigueur. I feel good eating maple syrup in the depths of the 'forest' - feels like you're bringing it back home again.
A long sweaty hike out, finally, as the day once again crept up towards 30C. There are signs of wind damage here and there, I had noticed on the way in. A few very large trees had come down. Their leaves were still leathery and wilted - not yet gone crispy, so they've probably been felled just in the last week. One big one left a very curious strip of bark hanging, from where the trunk had sheered off, probably eight metres above ground. When you look up through it, it's like a hole through the tree canopy to the bright sky.
Lots of wildlife along the way too. The ubiquitous squirrels and chipmunks and birds (feathers, beaks etc). Several frogs and toads were enjoying the mucky conditions and high water. This part of the country is Canadian Shield - much like the area where I grew up and did my my first camping and canoeing, north of Lake Superior.
Hiking along here, I feel like I'm out whale-watching, with enormous rocky whales cresting through the loamy ground, because the rocks have that shape about them. You often come across a garter snake sunning itself on the pink granite in the dappled sunlight.
Some fresh new beaver dams had inundated a chunk of land I remembered as only a little swampy previously. One creek that drains a nearby lake was really rushing loudly where it plunges down into a ravine between the rocky slopes.
A couple of deer showed up out of nowhere. I'd seen tracks earlier, but this one leaped out and stopped in the path. I put a tree between me and him so he couldn't see me creep a bit closer and got a picture before they took both off. Can you see them in there?
For the drive home, I took the less interesting route along highway 401 to re-verify if it was appreciably quicker than the Highway 7 and 38 route I usually take. Plus the approach to the park from the northern route is under construction, so I thought I'd avoid the delays. It doesn't save much time, as I mentioned earlier, and is so bland a drive as to counter-act the enjoyment of time spent living slower in the bush, so I'll likely stick to the other route.
This trip seemed appropriately timed on the boundary of spring and summer. I've camped in this area in every season, and it has as much to offer in February snow as it does on a hot summer day. Spring with that verdant green everywhere and fall with the colours and stark forms of leafless trees are no less enjoyable. It's pretty out there, and a good reminder for us all what being a Canadian was like originally.
Talking to park staff in the office, before heading out, it sounds like the weekends are booking up pretty quickly these days. Everyone that gets out probably sees something different in the trees and lakes based on their own experience with the bush - that's 'forest' if you're a city kid. From the marks left-behind by campers who are less concerned about leaving no trace to beautiful unexpected moments captured like a bug in amber, it's a reflection of the diversity of life, and the people around us every day.
When the sun was just rising this morning, and the lake was like glass, I lay looking out at that perfect mirror effect along the opposite shore. It makes me think of
that Gordon Lightfoot song and the line about when 'the green dark forest was to silent to be real.' The reflected form was silent, and from my vantage point looked vertical, like some abstract sculpture - alien and unreal.
I guess it's okay if other people want to go and use my lake on the weekends. I suppose I can always try to scare up another free Wednesday.
Tofu is probably most often used in western culture as a substitute for something one is excluding from their diet (e.g. meat for vegetarians) but as I'm not avoiding anything in particular, this is more of a food experimentation opportunity. It does present an appealing option towards making a gluten-free version of French toast for those who find digesting gluten a problem.
