Lady Evelyn Smoothwater Trip Report - Part 1/3

Lady Evelyn Smoothwater  Provincial Park - Maple Mountain - Sugar Lake loop

113km total, 5075m in 12 portages + 6.4km hike (round trip distance) to peak of Maple Mountain

I had heard many good things about Temagami but never had been there before.  It’s a far enough drive that it is mostly out for an aft-work drive to get up there which leads to it’s remoteness too.  I quite like a long paddling trip which has a good day hike in the middle of it.   Even though Lady Evelyn lake is certainly large enough to use our familiar kayaks for most if not the whole trip, we decided to rent a canoe this time.  Peter and myself wanted to get a new experience with proper canoe tripping, portaging with gear, and the different options it afforded.  Kayak portaging especially with loaded ‘yaks is a little limited on rugged terrain.

Day 0

We left Guelph around noon and headed towards Temagami.  We stopped at MEC in Barrie to pick up a few things on the way.  Weather was mixed – sunny periods interspersed with blustery, rainy periods.  We got to Temagami shortly before dusk and picked a campsite at Finlayson Point Provincial park.  It was the last operating night of Finlayson Point for the year.   It was rainy and I think there were two other groups of people there.  Most of the campground was closed off but we picked a site near the comfort station that was still open.  We went into town (if you even call it that) to get some Temagami Dry ginger ale…  Peter had known about it since he is from Kirkland lake and sold it there. So we brought it back to camp and after setting up a tarp, we proceeded to crack into a few beers and Forty Creek rye and Temagami Dry.

Day 1

We got a bit of a late-ish start.  We ate club sandwiches from the gas station diner and headed to Smoothwater Outfitters halfway between Temagami and the Mowat Landing put in.  We found Smoothwater and after a short wait, we picked up an ‘extra light’ canoe for our trip which we rented and I threw it onto my canoe carrier accessory I got recently from my Thule roof rack.  That worked perfectly.  We made our way to Mowat Landing, down a long road from Hwy 11.  There’s quite a large free parking lot on Crown Land near the public access dock on the Montreal River, and the dock wasn’t very busy at this time of year.  We spread out all our gear and made choices of what is a must have and what is a nice to have item, since we never packed for a canoe trip with portages before between us.  We chose what gear to bring and put them in dry bags inside duffel  bags,  and my canoe pack.

After organizing things, we pushed off around 2 and headed towards Lady Evelyn.  We quickly got to the take out dock at Matawapika Dam to Lady Evelyn and decided to do a test one-carry portage, with me carrying the camera bag, my duffel and the canoe, Peter carrying the canoe pack, his duffel bag and the paddles.  It worked OK.  We then paddled down the long narrow channel towards the main lake in off and on sunshine.  When we got to the main lake, the wind was significantly stronger as Lady Evelyn’s quite large and that allows the wind… and waves to pick up.  We dug hard into the wind and made it a few kms across the open water with waves sometimes splashing across the bow to a rocky island campsite where we would camp.  There was a late day rainbow and the sunset later was great, we gathered wood and made a fire.

Day 2

The wind didn’t quite relent at night, but it did calm down, and there was no rain.  We had breakfast and packed up our gear, still somewhat bit dew soaked from the night before.  We wanted to hit the water early enough to get some paddling in before the wind picked up again.  We didn’t make it far before we realized paddling would be a bit of a struggle that day.  It was windy, overcast and spitting rain again, although we were comfortable from all the paddling effort.  We powered into the wind and waves to cross the main body of water towards the Obowanga dunes, a strange formation of sand dunes deposited by the glaciers amidst the otherwise rocky topography of the Canadian Shield.  Unfortunately the weather wasn’t encouraging the exploration of the dunes we were just hugging the shore to protect from as much wind as possible towards the narrows and towards the western body of Lady Evelyn.  

 We stopped at a campsite for a quick lunch and to put on out rain pants.  The waves had been crashing over the gunwales at times and was soaking our pants.  We passed one set of canoe trippers (out of only three we would see the entire trip) on their way the eastward the other way.  We dug into the wind down the Obisaga Narrows, but when we got to the main westerly body of Lady Evelyn, there were regular white caps, large waves and we were struggling to maintain 2km/h into the wind so we stopped at an unnamed island at the mouth of the narrows.  We were hoping to wait out the wind a little but it didn’t let up… actually it got worse, so we made a camp on the island with an excellent fire pit, two tent pads and gathered a lot of firewood.  Sometime during the night the wind died off completely and it was calm again by morning, thankfully.

Links:

Lady Evelyn Smoothwater Trip Report - Part 2/3

Lady Evelyn Smoothwater Trip Report - Part 3/3

Wikipedia – Lady Evelyn Smoothwater Provincial Park

For GPS Track:

Everytrail - Lady Evelyn Smoothwater - Maple Mountain - Sugar Lake loop

Playtpus Gravityworks Filter Review

Simply brilliant -that’s the summary.

I have spent countless hours crouched down by a stream trying to avoid getting a soaker or falling in and having to guide the pump hose inlet to a clean spot while  pumping, only to have a small stream very slowly filling up my Nalgene or hydration pack.  With the Gravityworks filter, that is no longer a necessity in the backcountry.

With Gravityworks, you just have to scoop up some water in a bag, hang the bag on a tree branch or put on an elevated rock, and the system will filter while you are off around camp packing/unpacking your gearor eating.  It really is that much simpler to end up with 4 litres of filtered water.  Not to mention it is lighter than most pumps.  If all that wasn’t enough to convince you this is a good thing, it also is a very convenient dispensing system when you hang the clean bag of water up on the tree after filtering.  This thing is great.

One useful trick to know with this system is to backflush the filter when hooking up a new bag of water to be cleaned.  It helps get rid of air bubbles in the filter for quicker flow.  It is also good practice to backflush a small amount of water at the end of filtering  water to clean the filter into the dirty water bag and dump out the little bit of water every time you filter, to maintain a clean filter.  Backflushing is simple practice.  When a little bit of water is in the cleanbag, simply raise that bag higher than the dirty water bag.  Or, just roll up the clean bag like a tube of toothpaste and apply a gentle bit of pressure on it to force water back through the filter towards the dirty water – you can see air bubbles coming out and see the filter contaminants come out as well into the dirty water.

Platypus also offers many replacement parts for this system so you won’t be stuck having to buy a whole new system if you lose or puncture anything.  Platypus also offers an add-on carbon filter if you want tasteless water as well (MEC doesn’t sell it, you’ll have to find it elsewhere).

After using this filter, I am ready to give away my older pump filters.  No more crouching, pumping and scrubbing  or disassembling to turn components around to backflush/clean required any more! Seriously, this is one of the best value added pieces of outdoor gear I have upgraded to this year.

Cracked Garmin GPSmap 62s Screen Cover

While in Temagami, I was pounding down Maple Mountain from the summit, my shoelace caught a branch sticking out on the trail and bodyslammed me into the ground.  I stumbled a couple steps, landed sideways and thankfully I just hit the peaty ground hard, not any big rocks.  Also thankfully, I had a backpack full of SLR cameras which were undamaged.

A short time later I glanced at my Garmin GPSmap62s GPS which was carbined to a D-ring on my left hip.  The plastic screen cover (not screen protector) was cracked – looks like my GPS smacked a rock while I was doing my impromptu luchadore impression on Maple Mountain.  Good thing I had a screen protector on top of it which retained it’s waterproof integrity - the GPS later in the trip fell off my caribiner into the water while getting into the canoe where I retrieved it undamaged.  Otherwise there would have been shards of broken plexiglass everywhere leaving the LCD screen unprotected for the remainder of the trip.  I can still read the LCD under the cracks, and it is undamaged.  But I requested to buy a replacement screen cover... you know, a small, clear plastic part.. a part I can change myself in 5 minutes.  Garmin informs me that they cannot sell me any parts.   I can ship the thing back to them for exchange for a new one or a refurbished one for the low price of $120.    Seriously?   Give me a break.  A handheld GPS for use in the backcountry should naturally have a service part available for a replacement screen cover.  I guess they went the way of Apple products – everything  is serviceable, just as long as you return it to them, wait a month for it’s return and also pay an exorbitant amount of money.
Really, the outdoor handheld market is the only thing Garmin has potential any more to grow,  due to the proliferation of smartphones killing their automotive market and they need to step up the customer service for issues like this to retain customers.  Now I have to wait around and monitor eBay for someone to sell a disassembled one for parts or someone to offer aftermarket screen cover, since I certainly refuse to pay $120 just to fix a small $1 piece of plastic screen cover, which should be a readily available replaceable item.  Garmin's fixed price 'repair'  (more like replacement) policy doesn't make sense to me - you pay the same price whether you destroyed your unit by running over your device with your car or you have a crack in a screen cover.

Powerfilm USB+AA Solar Charger Review

I decided to get one of these for my latest canoe trip to Temagami – I was curious and thought it would hopefully kill two birds with one stone – charge my smartphone which I primarily use for occasionally listening to music, and charge AA batteries for my GPS.  It cost me around $100 from MEC.  But after using it for a week, honestly, I don’t know if this thing is more trouble than it’s worth.  Possibly it would be good for very long multi-week trips, but for anything within a week, just bring some extra batteries.

Made of ballistic nylon, this charger has a slot for two AA batteries to charge when unrolled.  It has 4 solar panels, and a USB port on one side of it.  It is somewhat light, measuring 135 grams on my scale, but the performance isn’t all that awesome, to be honest.  In ideal conditions - full sun, light falling 90 degrees to the panels, it apparently puts out .4Amps.  That means it would take over 6 hours to charge a fully discharged set of EneloopXX  AAbatteries… and again let me remind you that this is under ideal conditions which it rarely would be when traveling in the backcountry, so best hopes are to charge one set of AA batteries in an entire day.  While traveling canoeing/portaging/camping, I found myself having to fiddle with it regularlyto make sure it was exposed to the sun, that is when the sun was available.

As for operation - the charger has a small LED on one side of it.  It flashes slowly when charging, is solid when the batteries are deemed charged, and flashes quickly if it thinks there’s a battery problem. I find the LED not that visible.  It can only be seen from the one side where it’s located.  Then,  there’s the USB charging.  It requires the AA batteries be in the unit for the USB charger to work properly (and both AA batteries be at the same charge).  At first that seems strange, but I suppose it makes sense, to ensure the USB wouldn’t be powering on and off if the sun dipped behind some clouds.  The AA batteries can charge the USB device when there is not even any sun at the end of the day.

 I find several flaws in the design… firstly there is the weight of it.  I assume this product is for backpacking and backcountry use, otherwise someone would be using an auto charger or something else, but the design isn’t really optimized for weight, like most backpacker oriented products are, nowadays.  I could easily redesign it myself to take out at least half the weight (or better yet add more panels for the same weight to get much quicker charging).  There really is no need for the ballistic nylon – much lighter ripstip would do, it’s not like you are rubbing this thing up against something else while using it….  Or at least you would have to try hard to do that.  Also there’s an additional superfluous flap of nylon that really serves no purpose, other than to wrap the thing up for storage, and there’s a thick bar of plastic screwed to the top which also serves no purpose either, other than to stick the instruction label to.  The back side has an overly thick electronics housing on the back.  I find the AA socket terrible due to the fact it’s very hard to remove the batteries without resorting to finding an object to pry them out of the housing, because the spring is a high force and buries the nose of the battery almost flush with the surrounding housing.  In addition to that making it difficult to remove the batteries is the door, which only opens 90 degrees and thus makes it impossible for me to slap-remove batteries, like I do for almost all handheld devices that use batteries – my remotes, GPS, phone, etc, I take the battery cover off and slap it to instantly remove the batteries without needing to dig them out with fingernails or pry the batteries out.  In any case the 90 degree door makes it impossible to slap remove the batteries.

There’s also the waterproofness of it…. the electronic board isn’t conformal coated which it should be for outdoor use for moisture protection.  It also says it is not waterproof at all, although it should not suffer much damage unless constantly submerged with batteries in it.  Any product like this should surely be able to withstand being left outside in the rain.    Lastly, I also don’t know why it only supports AA and not AAA batteries.  Almost all popular headlamps nowadays use AAA batteries, and there’s no reason for it to not support AAA format – almost any other AA charger can support AAA charging nowadays.

I honestly wanted to like this charger at the outset and think it is useful to carry on trips, but in practice it is only marginally useful… like I said, at least for trips up to a week +, I think someone would probably be better off just carrying some extra batteries until the weight, power output, ease of battery removal, and AAA battery support is improved.  You could carry 4 extra charged AA batteries for the same weight of this charger.

Pat's Backcountry Beverages

Not quite available yet, but looks like it could be something cool to have, especially for the beer if it’s any good. Or some rye and ginger in the backcountry would be super sweet.
Pat's Backcountry Beverages

I'm stoked to try it out, I hope to get one when it is available.

C to C Roll

I finally bothered to learn a rescue roll... and edit video at the same time!

Here's a bit of a video I put together from footage I took in Georgian Bay when camping at Awenda.

Georgian Bay C-to-C Roll from Jason Fowler on Vimeo.

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