To: paddle@MIT.EDU
Subject: Quetico Provincial Park:  Trip Report
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 21:41:38 -0400
From: James C Reardon <nemesis@MIT.EDU>

Just over the Canadian border from Minnesota's Boundary Waters, Ontario's
Quetico Provincial Park offers the same sort of flatwater solitude, only 
more of it.  Quetico is a park of a thousand lakes, and in the thousand lakes 
there are a thousand islands:  some of them are covered in blueberries, 
and some of them are covered in bugs.  I was lucky enough to spend 6 days 
paddling there (22-28 August 1999) with Meg Muckenhoupt and Scott Stuart,
excellent companions with an infectious interest in botany and wildlife.  
Below is a (long) trip report; I'd be delighted to answer questions about 
our trip from anyone interested in going to Quetico.  

Jim Reardon

      

We started paddling up Moose Lake, 20 miles east of Ely, at 10:30 am Sunday in
a rented We-no-nah Minnesota 3, a 49 lb Kevlar boat which would prove to be 
light enough to allow us to make all our portages in a single carry.  3 people
in one boat turns out to be an efficient way to tour the wilderness.

We had been seeing downed trees along the roadside since Duluth, but it was
only on the water that we began to see areas of 100m or more in length where
more than 90% of the tree-trunks were going sideways.  Birch seemed to 
be by far the most affected tree.  Things don't look so bad now, because the
sideways trees are still green, but if they have in fact been killed rather 
than just bent then next year the lakeshore will look much more brown and 
barren.  These trees were all blown over by a sudden stormfront which blew 
through around 1 pm on 4 July.  The ranger at Prarie Portage reported gusts of
90 mph during the 45-minute passage of the front.  What would you do if you 
were paddling or camping and 90 mph winds blew up out of nowhere, snapping
all the trees around you?  Head for the shore and address your thoughts to 
eternity, I suppose...

There were essentially no downed trees over the Canadian border.  Paddling
north through Inlet Bay and Bayley Bay, it was striking that the American
side was almost entirely deciduous forest, while the Canadian side was almost
entirely coniferous.  This could be the result of forest fires (but I get
ahead of my story).

We diverged from the flotilla heading for the quasi-tropical beach on the
Burke Lake portage and headed through Sunday Lake to Lake Agnes, arriving
at Louisa Falls just in time to fix dinner by dark.  Louisa Falls drops
almost 30m into Lake Agnes in two sections, the first 10m drop landing on and 
massaging your tired shoulders and back as you stand in a natural pool.

During our second day of paddling we saw our first pictograph, a pair of 
ochre canoes and some handprints, under an overhang on an island in Lake
Agnes.  The pictographs are less than 500 years old; the rocks they are on
may be more than 3 billion years old if they were part of the Canadian Shield,
which includes some of the oldest rocks on the planet; yet the pictographs
carry a greater whiff of antiquity.  We spent so much time looking for 
pictographs we ended up at an atrocious campsite just before dark on the 
birch-strewn east shore of Bird Lake.  

Curdled lakes, muddled lakes, lakes disturbed by loons.  Bird Lake's only
redeeming (?) feature was a flock of loons which took to raising a ruckus
every 10 minutes or so as we were cooking dinner and trying to get to sleep.
Leaving early the next morning, we soon left the loons behind as we passed
into a more somber region.  Passing through silent Anubis Lake under
overcast skies we saw scorched trees that indicated the desolation to our
east and south had been caused by a massive fire, which we later learned
happened in 1995 (called "burn 141", it happened just before Quetico adopted
a let-it-burn policy, and fire-fighting effort was extensively filmed; the 
film may apparently be seen at the park HQ near Atikokan).  Dead birches 
abounded; some conifers survived; little undergrowth was evident.  What would 
you do if you were out paddling on some lake and found yourself in the middle 
of a forest fire?  On an island in the middle of Anubis Lake, more than 200m 
from the nearest shore, half the trees were burned dead, and half were alive.  
We began to notice globs of what looked like green jello in the water as we 
approached the portage to the next small, unnamed lake.

Imagine a lake about 5 acres in area, surrounded by grasses and overlooked
by conifers, with a shallow, soft bottom and a near absence of green plants.
In the place of the green plants there are huge globs of what looks like green
jello, 5m or more in length.  Now mentally subtract the grasses and conifers,
so that you're left with the green globs, which are algal mats, the water,
and the Canadian shield, and you'll have as good a picture as you're going to
get of what the surface of the Earth was like during the majority of the
Precambrian era.  Who knows what the atmosphere was made of, before the 
ancestors of those algal mats put enough Oxygen into it for animals to develop.

Still, just because you owe the possiblity of your existence to algal mats
doesn't mean you have to go swimming into them, as I very nearly did while
breast-stroking around the unknown lake looking for the far end of the 
portage we couldn't find out of Anubis Lake.  Lesson learned:  don't
trust your maps to be too accurate about the portages (the portage was 
obvious, but wasn't on the same side of the outlet stream as the map said).
Had we been wise (we learned later) we would have checked our maps (dated
1992) against the map the ranger keeps, in which the current portage routes
are recorded. 

Presumably it was the ash from the adjacent fire which caused the small, 
nameless lake to become over-nutrified and give rise to the immense algal
mats.  As we entered MacVicar Bay of the much larger Kawnipi Lake, we paddled
out of the fire-damaged region, the algal mats disappeared, the birds returned,
a breeze blew up, and the sun came out.   Under full summer conditions we 
continued on through Kawnipi lake and started our return down Kahshahpiwi lake,
stopping every now and then to fail to find some pictographs.  At the entrance
to Kahshahpiwi Lake there was a single, perfect class 3 drop, there in the 
geographic center of Quetico, 3 days away from civilization.  I decided not to 
try to run it.

In Kahshahpiwi there were far fewer mosquitoes.  Early August had been wet,
and this had brought out a second crop of mosquitoes in most of the park that
we visited.  We had a wonderful bug-free campsite on an island in the 
Carin Lake section of Lake Kahshahpiwi; but still we managed only the most 
mournful and pathetic of bear-hangings.  In a triumph of will over intelligence
we did not stop until we had got the food bag hanging in midair nearly 1 foot
off of the ground, and 1 foot below and away from the nearest supports.  When
we found the food undisturbed the next morning we photographed it in our joy.  
We later learned that June and July had been hot, and had brought the blueberry
crop out early, so that all the bears were hiding, fat and lazy, far away from 
campers' food bags.  We never saw a bear, or any of the other charismatic 
megafauna of the park (moose, wolf), during our trip.  

As we headed south the next day we again began to see Bald Eagles (total
maybe 10 sighted during the trip, more abundant in the US than in Canada
for some reason).  We stopped early and had a good swim.
The next day we encountered our allotment of route-finding difficulties,
starting with a missing portage, continuing through extra portages caused
by beaver activity, and concluding with portages which matched the 
guidebook's written description but did not match the portages shown
on the map.  We finished the day with a portage into Point Lake on which the 
mud was so deep that it could no longer be considered an inconvenience, but 
rather a natural wonder; much like the apparently solid lake "bottom" we had 
found on Side Lake, into which a paddle could be inserted, with ease, its 
entire length.

We got a good early start the next day, our final day, in order to finish 
with the big water before the winds picked up.  On our way we went through the
North Bay of Basswood Lake, which is probably the quietest place I have ever 
been.  The quiet was lost when we reached land and retrieved our compainion 
mosquitoes.  We reached Prarie Portage at lunchtime.  So many things change at
the border: we exchanged the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes for the 
low-pitched whine of motorboats.  We paddled stolidly against the southwind 
and got back to Ely in time for dinner.

references:

  Quetico Provincial Park:  http://www.ontarioparks.com/quet.html
                            A Paddler's Guide to Quetico Provincial Park,
                             Robert Beymer, W.A. Fisher Co., 1997 (4th ed.).
  Boundary Waters:          http://www.bwcaw.org  
