Temagami – Our First Crown Land Canoe Trip

This summer I really wanted to try somewhere new, off grid, crown land canoe camping.  Dan had another week of vacation to use, and I knew I wanted to go canoe camping….somewhere…. After some research I landed upon Temagami.  If you know this park, it is quite big, and you can travel for a long time and not cover the same area.  With this being such an unknown I continued to ask for help as to where is the best place to start.

Enter Matt Olsen from Paddle In.  We had some good chats about shorter routes, kids, easy portaging ,etc.  We also only had roughly 3-4 days to use for this trip.  Matt has been to Temagami a number of times with his wife and two kids, and I knew he would be a big help.  We settled on 1 of 2 routes that he suggested and I proposed the idea to Dan.  At this point, we weren’t entirely sure if we would go this far north, or stick a little closer to home.  As you can see from this post, we opted for the Temagami route.

I spent a good few days gathering, organizing, cooking and packing all our gear. Below is our 30L barrel with our food for 3 nights, plus an extra 2 meals (just in case).  I am quickly realizing that if we are to venture on trips longer than this, we would need to invest in the 60L barrel. (Guess that means a trip to MEC, one of my favorite places).

The drive for us to Temagami took roughly 6 hours.  We headed north through Hunstville and North Bay, then west until we were close to Sudbury, before heading north once more. We were to enter Temagami area through Metagamasi Lake.  This lake is big, which means there is wind and waves.  However, we entered the parking area to an almost full spot.  Hopefully this wouldn’t affect us too much since there are lots of  cottages in the area.

We paddled for a bit, against the wind, and kept an eye open for available sites.  The first one we checked out was not the best, and we quickly decided to move along.  Once we came around a point, there were two sites together on these two points, and we quickly picked the site with the homemade kitchen table.  It is clear that someone has some love for this site.

It was getting late, so we set up camp, looked for firewood, prep the ropes for the barrel to be hung, all the usual camp things.  Our fire was a bit of a problem as the wood was really wet from the rain the day before.  We did get enough of a fire going to warm up our supper.  Then we sat and watched the sun set, the loons call and play and eventually headed to bed.

It was a long night as both Dan and myself woke up a few times (there were sounds in the woods, which we never found out what it was).  About 2 am, Dan got up and eventually stayed up to take some pictures of the milky way.  Check out the link to see what he was able to capture!Milky way picture.

The sun was up early, shining into our tent marking the time for us to get going.  We knew there was a longer paddle today, with a couple of portages.  I really wanted to get there by lunch so that we had the rest of the day to enjoy. This meant getting breakfast, packing up the gear and getting the canoe on the water. This was accomplished by 9 am!

The intention of this new canoe was to have a built in seat for Hayden.  It seems that he is enjoying the seat more as a lounger… hmm….

We paddled on into Wolf Lake, passed a few people who were heading home and gave us some intel on sites and other campers in the area.  I knew where I wanted to stay, so we made a bee line for the site.  Once on shore, we were hot and the water was beautiful.  It was one of the few times that I went directly into the water before setting up camp.  The water was lovely and so refreshing.

Not to bore you with details, but you know the drill… Camp set up, food, wood, fire, etc, etc.

During the afternoon, we did get a visit from The Camping Family. They came to stay for the week, total coincidence that we ended up in the same area, let alone the same lake.  We discussed plans, and we knew with the impending weather we would leave a day early.  This left our site open the next day and they would break camp early and move over to this site.

We could have easily shared the site that night, but I didn’t think of it until after they had left and was already set up on a different site for the night.  Next time my friends, next time!!

So, Monday morning, we packed up early, The Camping Family moved in and we headed back to our vehicle.  We knew that thunderstorms and heavy rain was not our ideal take out, so this was the best decision for us.  If we had planned to stay longer, we would have toughed it out.  

Our early departure was important, as we wanted to stop at Paradise Lagoon (found on Jeff’s Maps) and get back to Metagamasi Lake before the winds could possible pick up. I didn’t want to get stuck wind-bound on a lake for the night.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that the lake was not very windy, and we had a decent paddle back to our vehicle.  It did take 4 hours (which included the two portages AND a stop at the lagoon) to paddle to the take out, but that was really good timing!

On our way back to North Bay, I did convince my boys to do a stop at another put in to collect some #paddlepoints but that is a story for another blog in the future!

I hope you enjoyed reading about our first crown land camping experience.  It will definitely not be our last time!  This new canoe of ours has only just begun it’s journey!