Obabika Birthday Weekend Part 1

Last year I celebrated my birthday with Camper Christina on Black Lake in the Haliburton Highlands Water Trails and we had so much fun that we decided to do it again this year. We knew we wanted to head to Temagami, but exactly where was hard to decide. Since Christina is more familiar with the park, she finally settled on heading to Obabika Lake where she had arranged a special surprise for my birthday.

Thursday Evening

It is a very long drive from my house to Temagami, so we made arrangements for me to drive to Christina’s place Thursday night so that we could get an early start at the trip on Friday morning. We are both big fans of sushi, so I stopped along the way to buy us some for dinner at a great little place in Bracebridge. It may look like a lot, but we polished off the meal easily! We spent the rest of the evening making sure all of our gear was ready and enjoyed chatting and getting caught up on the last few months.

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Friday

It was an early rise for our four hour drive North to the access point and portage in Chinaman’s Bay (which opens into Obabika Lake). Obabika is a big lake and big waters can produce challenging situations for paddling so we hoped that starting as early as possible, when the water is calmest, would give us the time we needed to paddle to our campsite.

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The Temagami region has a very strong connection with the First Nations Community, so to show our respect we did an offering of tobacco at our official start on Chinaman’s Bay. As we made our offering we also asked Mother Nature to be kind to us in hopes of having good passage for our trip. As we headed out onto the bay, the wind and waves were at our back giving us a little push up the lake, however the weather around us was very precarious as dark clouds seemed to surround us. As experienced paddlers, we knew that there was the possibility that we may have to stop before getting to our site if the weather got bad, but we were both hopeful that wouldn’t happen.

Along the route we passed a couple of pictograph locations, which Christina had a difficult time finding, but with a few stops we were able to spot some on the cliffs.

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The next few hours were challenging. As we had feared, rain clouds moved in fast and the wind came seemingly from out of nowhere. Before we knew it, we were in a huge rain storm so we quickly put on our rain jackets and headed towards a small cove to wait out the storm.

Luckily, the rain passed quickly and we were able to keep paddling… for a short while. The waves were still quite high and I am a little nervous in big water, so I asked for another break at a campsite on a point so that we could wait for the the wind to die down. This was when the Native Elder Alex Mathias – who Christina had met on a previous trip, and we had planned to visit later – came by in his speed boat. He wanted to make sure everything was OK, which was really nice and we assured him we were fine.

After a short break, we continued our trek, until we were forced to stop yet again. As we rounded another point, the wind was so strong that it started to push us backwards! Luckily there was a campsite directly to our left and we headed to shore where we waited some more… and waited… and waited…

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We actually debated multiple times just setting up camp and staying on this site for the night and then head to our chosen site the next morning, but neither of us wanted to set up, take down, paddle more and set up again. Finally, after about an hour the waves and wind settled a bit and we both agreed it was time to move on.

It was getting late, but we finally arrived at our site and wouldn’t you know it, Mother Nature decided we had had enough and she presented us with the most beautiful evening. We even had a greeting party of about 30 loons! Our camp chores were completed quickly and camp was finally set for the weekend on the beautiful beach from which we could explore Obabika by boat over the next few days.

Christina cooked us the most wonderful meal of pork and steak kabobs accompanied by a Greek salad. It looked like a huge amount of food, but we both devoured it.

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I was happy to finally go to bed as we had a long day and needed rest for our adventures planned for Saturday.

Saturday

If you know me and have camped with me, you know I like my morning sleep. So when I got up and met Christina on the rocks by our site before the sun rose, I got some funny looks. The morning was beautiful and serene and we both sat and enjoyed the rising sun.

Christina prepared some morning drinks (hot chocolate and tea) and we sat on the rocks for a long time playing with the morning sun. You will have to watch her video series to see what we did.

For breakfast we had egg, sausage, and cheese wraps that I prepared. It was an early morning feed as we had some big plans for the remainder of our day.

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Once breakfast was eaten, we headed out on the lake to explore. In contrast to the day before, we had a mirror lake for our paddle around Obabika. We visited a cool rocky beach, looked for more pictographs, and paddled our way into Chee-skon Lake where Spirit Rock is located.

On the portage into Spirit Rock, we bumped into Alex again, who gave us a couple of paddles so that we could use his canoe at the other end to paddle to Spirit Rock instead of hiking. This was a pleasant surprise as we could explore the lake even more.

After eating our lunch we hiked one of the trails which provided us a view over Obabika. I couldn’t believe how beautiful this place was and I knew that I will be coming back.

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We headed back towards camp chatting about how great our day had been so far and realized that we had been away from camp for about 8 hours! That evening we hung around camp, were entertained by the loons calling to each other, and cooked up a feed of sausages and mini potatoes for supper.

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Again we had another long night and we were both happy to hit the pillow. The next day was my birthday and Christina had some crazy awesome plans for us. Be sure to come back and read part 2 to see what we did!