In 2019 a friend and I booked a canoeing holiday in Woodland Caribou Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada for the following summer. For me, the trip was my 60th birthday present to myself. Coronavirus stopped that.
In 2021 my friend had a medical event which meant travel to such isolated places was not wise.
I never forgot about this so as my 65 present to myself, this year the trip finally happened. Me and my son spent 13 days paddling and portaging about 130 miles in the southern part of the park, including around 60 portages (longest 750M). To facilitate this we used Goldseekers Outfitters in Red Lake: Albert made route suggestions and provided all our kit and food (complicated that we required a Gluten free diet) and arranged our transport to and from the park. I highly recommend Goldseekers. We had Souris River kevlar canoes ; much easier to carry than my cedar canvas boats but noisier and not as good looking.
We flew out from Red Lake on a float plane landing on Donald lake. Our route was then Hammerhead, ‘C’, Adventure, Haven, Cyclops, Rostoul, Hansen, Glen, Mexican Hat, Jake, Lunch, East Lunch, Bunny, Boot Jack, Elephant Head, Upper Kilburn, Middle Kilburn, and Kilburn, a quick look into Sydney and then back through Kilburn to finish at Leano lake. We paddled through old burn, new burn and untouched forest.
Water levels were low which meant what should have been shallow creeks had to have all kit carried and the boats dragged.
We came across a wide range of wild life - Moose, Beaver, Otter, Mink, Garter Snake, Turtle, Chipmunks, Squirrels, Black vultures and Bald eagles.
The weather was mostly warm sunshine but we did have a couple of wet and windy days and one morning was foggy so we ended up paddling off compass bearings.
For Navigation we used Canadian Topo maps, the Ontario parks map (below) with camping and portages marked, and the amazing ‘MyWoodlandJourneys’ map.
WCPP is 1737 square miles of boreal forest and lake. For UK readers, that’s a bit bigger than the county of Suffolk. There are no roads, no one lives there but there are a small number of fishing lodges. On returning to civilisation, I asked at the parks office how many people were in the park at the time we were out: Including us, 14 - we didn’t see any of the other 12!
