Awenda Provincial Park

     One of my favorite Provincial parks in southern Ontario is Awenda.  It is a little bit of a drive from Guelph where I live, but it is a pleasant enough drive even on a long weekend, if I take Airport Road up to Stayner  to avoid the 400.  Wasaga beach is close and it’s good to avoid that as well during the summer to get to Awenda.  

     Myself and Peter just got a last minute reservation after refreshing our browsers many times until we found a cancellation at Awenda for the August long weekend.  Awenda is an old growth forest and quite large as you can tell when you are driving to the gatehouse.  Awenda is in the southern coast of Georgian Bay near Midland and Penetanguishene.  The trees are very large, and the campsites spaced out nicely.  It’s certainly a good place to bring a hammock, and a tarp can be easily set up as well, from all the large trees around. 

     I brought my Hennessey ultralight backpacking Hammock to  spend the night in this time.  Another good thing to have is a bike to get around, especially to the beach.  Otherwise you have to drive, and the parking lot is quite packed on a hot midsummer day.  The other option is walking to the beach which normally wouldn’t bother me but our campsite was just about as far as you can gte from the beach and would be about an hour’s walk.  Just to get to the first beach.

There are 4 beaches there, but you can only park at beach 1, the rest of the way you got to hoof it along a trail.  Beach 2 is the pet beach and 3 and 4 are a bit of a hike.  Beach 4 is actually  4.1 kms. From the parking lot.  You will see a bunch of people rolling their coolers along it or even carrying them in tandem.  I think some don’t realize how far of a hike it is, but again a bike would make easy access to beach 4.  On the long weekend, all of the beaches were pretty busy.  The beaches have nice sand on them, but the shoreline and water are quite the opposite, with small to medium size rocks, giving way to large boulders as you get out into the surf.  A dive mask, snorkel and fins is nice to have if you like swimming. 

     Inland, there’s Kettle’s Lake, a small lake good for fishing and paddling or hiking around it – you can rent canoes from the wood lot.  Another strange thing is you can pay for and get canoe rentals and ice at the woodlot, but you can only pick up wood there and have to pay for the wood at the front gate.  I’m not sure what the logic is regarding that but that’s how it works there.  One good thing is the wood seems to be dry, well seasoned and easy to burn, much improved over previous years perhaps due to the feedback from last year’s survey.  Ontario Provincial Parks are almost notorious for having crappy, water soaked wood and have been that way for many years.

     Georgian Bay itself Is very tempermental.  Sometimes it’s super flat, other times 8-10ft waves, and good for advanced kayaking.  We wanted to paddle around Giant’s tomb island offshore, which I have done before in the past.  It’s about 5km offshore, so it is advisable to have some good rescue skills and a paddle float in  order to attempt it, since the wind can pick up and whip up some huge waves by the time you need to get back.  Giant’s tomb is part provincial park as well – many powerboaters raft offshore and swim on the beaches.  In any case we just paddled from beach 1 to three- the winds were 60km/h one of the days and massive waves which can be very dangerous kayaking in without a helmet, with the barely submerged boulders.   On the plus side, I managed to pull off my first ever mandatory self rescue roll (a C to C roll) in my kayak when a wave swamped me and turned me over.  Unfortnately, I lost my Oakley sunglasses in the process (always use the sunglass bands), and they are now sitting at the bottom of georgin bay, as a gift to the water gods.  I only learned to roll this year even though I have been paddling for 4 yearsm, since the vast majority of my paddling has been on rivers and not open water with huge waves.

Other than that, Awenda offers some good hiking trails as well, and is certainly worth checking out.

Links:
Awenda Provicial Park
Friends of Awenda