A video trip report documenting our 2020 trip through Mississagi River Provincial Park:
Tag: canoe route
VIDEO TRIP LOG: WABAKIMI PROVINCIAL PARK – ALLANWATER – WHITEWATER – CARIBOU
Just finished off a video trip report on our 2021 trip through Wabakimi Provincial Park:
TRIP REPORT: THE BARRON CANYON
The scene held a gloomy, wild beauty – darkened shorelines with tangled dark grey and purplish clouds above, and to the west the final warm, yellow rays of the ever shrinking sun struggling to pierce through their encroaching canopy; the trickle of rain drops cooling the skin and casting a hypnotic pattern on the monotone water; the call of a loon from somewhere off in the distance. Before long night will fall and the bellow of the timber wolf will echo over the lake in its stead.
TRIP REPORT: CHAPLEAU CROWN GAME PRESERVE – MISSINAIBI HEADWATERS
In the boreal highlands northeast of Superior, on the edge of Algoma, is a land of rugged adventure and romance. This country, where it has been spared from steel, is a lush, wilderness paradise that affords the type of quintessential setting that would be nostalgic and familiar to any Canadian: the hill-studded silhouette of the forested horizon, aglow in pink and gold with the last moments of the burning mid-summer sun; the air, sweet, with the fragrance of pine, and silent beyond the quiet murmur of a distant waterfall; two lonely canoes beached upside-down on the sandy shore, their slick hulls casting a reflection off the sky; three small tents nestled in the forest over a floor of pine needles, in their natural place amongst the spiring conifers; the ghostly smoke of a campfire hanging low and curling over the still air of the glassy lake; a dream-like world, which has no earthen match in tranquility or peace.
TRIP REPORT: WABAKIMI PROVINCIAL PARK – KOPKA RIVER
The magnificent, primeval ridges and valleys of Wabakimi were carved and scoured in the twilight of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago. Black spruce, tamarack and jack pine, thin and stunted from long, harsh northern winters, cling to the shallow veneer of soil that scantly coats this portion of the Shield country. This harsh world still wholly belongs to the woodland caribou, the grey wolf and the bald eagle.
Signs of humanity are sparse; few tread here. But if you endeavour to pass through this land, look carefully under the shadowy canopies of those weathered and stunted tamaracks; under the beard lichen and Labrador tea; amongst the sphagnum moss, wood ferns and wild blueberries bushes; you will find trails of another time. Gaze over the placid waters, down the tumbling rivers, across the serpentine lakes, and envision the water trails of yesteryear. These canoe routes were established over centuries by the North of Superior Ojibwe – ancestors of the Whitesand, Mishkeegogamang, Saugeen, and Eabametoong First Nations. Today those canoe paths remain.
WHERE THE RIVERS RUN WILD: A JOURNEY DOWN THE LOWER MISSINAIBI AND MOOSE RIVER
The cold subarctic gales, driving rains, unrelenting headwinds, the ruggedness of the lands, the turbulence of the waters – the Missinaibi and Moose Rivers in northern Ontario may well put you on a threshing floor and strip you down to your rawest emotions. Isolation, desolation, fear, and at times, utter despondency; nature here is unforgiving, uncompromising, and is capable of testing the upper limits of your endurance and fortitude. You may question why you do it.
But it is here that you will find colours you have never seen and Gods that you never knew existed. Swallows will flicker as they feed in the dimming dusk, the Aurora Borealis will dance through the northern sky as it has for aeons and you will edge closer to answering the great questions.
THE TERRA INCOGNITA 