Happy Birthday to Algonquin, land of beauty, memories and adventures!

May 27, 2015August 12, 2016 / Oleksandra Budna / 3 Comments

So Algonquin Park is turning 122 today! Established in 1983, Algonquin is the oldest provincial park in Canada and it’s becoming even more beautiful and attractive with every passing year.

I couldn’t miss such an important occasion since it’s the place of so many favourite memories: our first trip into the interior, our first four-day canoe trip, our first winter camping adventure in a tent. Beautiful sunny skies, stormy weather, rainbows, fall colours, spring flowers and moose sightings, incredible sunsets and loon calls at night. We’ve visited Algonquin in all seasons, experienced it in every type of weather, explored it on foot, in a canoe and on a bike and it is always beautiful and exciting.

Lake of Two Rivers in the spring

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Easter Weekend Camping in Pinery Provincial Park

April 7, 2015October 5, 2015 / Oleksandra Budna / 10 Comments

Easter weekend camping is a relatively new tradition. This is our second year, to be exact. Last year, we started pondering over the meaning of Easter and it being the symbol of rejuvenation and rebirth. So we decided that there was no better place to celebrate it than in nature where the magic of rebirth happens every spring. Plus kids love Easter egg hunt in the actual forest even though they have long outgrown the age of believing in Easter bunny.

This year we chose Pinery Provincial Park as our camping destination for a number of reasons. There was more chance that it would be snow free compared to, say, Algonquin or Killarney. The route to Pinery conveniently lies through Waterloo where we could pick up our older son and then drop him off on the way back. We were also hoping to catch tundra swans taking a break on their way north. Finally, it is always fun to see some of our favourite parks during a different season. So far Pinery has been the destination for many enjoyable summer trips and one memorable New Year celebration. This was a chance to see it on the cusp of season change.

We left late Thursday night and with a stop at Waterloo, we arrived at the park close to one in the morning to find our yurt locked. In the hindsight, we should have called the park to warn them about our late arrival but on previous late arrivals at other parks we would find the yurt open with the key left inside or alternately locked but with the key left in an envelope near the registration office. We spent an hour driving around the park trying to locate someone to open the yurt for us, found an emergency phone, alerted the guard, woke up the ranger on duty. In short, it was quite an adventurous start to our trip.

Needless to say, we slept in the next morning. When we finally got outside, it was a nice and warm day. The park was surprisingly busy with almost all yurts occupied, and trailers and a few tents visible on the surrounding campsites.

We spent the first half of the day biking around the park. In the summer, riding the 14-kilometre Savannah trail and finishing with ice-cream is a long established tradition. But since the ice-cream counter and the store were closed for the season, our younger son proclaimed that riding the trail would be pointless. We biked along park roads instead, explored the Old Ausable River Channel, which was still frozen on one side of the bridge and completely ice-free on the other. We even saw a lonely canoeist on the water and felt quite jealous of him but canoes were chained for the season as well.

We then biked over to the beach. Lake Huron looked strikingly different from its usually cheerful summer self. Covered in ice and dusted with sand with a narrow strip of turquoise water in the distance and clouds overhead, it was eerily beautiful.

By then, the wind picked up and it was quite chilly, so we rode back to the campsite. Right on time too. Because the moment we finished cooking the soup, it started to rain and we retreated inside the yurt. With a bowl of hearty soup inside our bellies and the patter of rain on the yurt roof, we enjoyed restful time reading and napping. Once it cleared up, we ate veggie burgers around the campfire and then back inside played our favourite game, Settlers of Catan, well into the night.

Day 2 was gorgeous, all beautiful spring sunshine and blue skies. We rode over to the visitor centre to watch all sorts of birds twittering and chirping around the bird feeders.

We then hiked Cedar Trail, which is only 2.3 km long and starts right near the visitor centre. It has a great lookout platform over the channel, where we spotted an otter in the water (or at least we think it was an otter since it was pretty far away).

There is also a trail extension that leads to the beach. That day, the beach looked brighter with the sunlight against the blue sky. The ice cover alternated between sand dusted frozen waves, long stretches of white and then ice chunks as far as the eye could see. One brave, or maybe just stupid, kid actually rode a fat bike over the lake.

That day we also drove to the field behind the Lambton Museum to see tundra swans. Yes, they were still there! Because the winter was so cold, they arrived later than usual this year (so cold winters do have their bright sides). I was really excited to see them, something I wanted to do ever since I read about tundra swans on the Friends of Pinery website. It was quite a sight and a noisy one too. At night, we could hear them honking overhead while the guy at the next campsite played drums. Those were much better sounds to fall asleep to than the humming of cars back home.

On Easter Sunday, winter staged a short comeback as we woke up to a snow cover outside.

It didn’t stop us from having an Easter egg hunt. In fact, it was quite fun.

As always, we didn’t want to leave. After we packed, we decided to do another hike, this time on the Nipissing Trail, which took us to the top of the oldest and highest dune ridge and also provided great views of the park with a bit of Lake Huron in the distance.

We stopped at Denny’s Drive-in, our favourite fish and chips place at Grand Bend. We were happy to see that they were already open for 2015 season. We brought our blankets and enjoyed our meal outside.

Good-bye, Pinery, till Labour Day!

Winter in Algonquin: Camping in a Tent

March 19, 2015October 1, 2015 / Oleksandra Budna / 11 Comments

We really love winter camping with its frozen beauty, fun activities in the snow and smaller crowds (add absence of bugs for my husband and our younger son). Usually we stay in a yurt or a cabin, which still sounds extreme to some people. At the beginning of this winter though, we decided to take it to the next level and try camping in a tent. But as the winter was progressing with temperatures dropping lower and lower, we were close to giving up on the idea with the usual ‘maybe next year.’ And then this past weekend, we decided that there was no better time than now, packed all our stuff Saturday morning and headed to Algonquin Provincial Park.

Algonquin’s Mew Lake campground is open year round with seven yurts, which need to be reserved in advance online or over the phone, as well as electrical and non-electrical campsites available on the first come first serve basis. Campsite permits can be purchased at the West or East Gate from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. After four, there is a self-serve registration kiosk at the entrance to the Mew Lake Campground.

The weather didn’t look very promising on Saturday. It was grey and drizzling but at least not too cold. Luckily, there was still a lot of snow left at Algonquin, otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a winter camping. We arrived at the campground around 5. Quite a few campsites boasted all sorts of tents, some with chimneys sticking out, others just regular ones. We snatched a waterfront site with a view of the lake, frozen and beautiful.

We don’t have a winter tent and, after reading all about it, I decided we could get away with our three-season one. There was no heavy snowfall in the forecast so we didn’t have to worry whether the frame would hold. The tent has a fly that extends all the way to the ground so it provides pretty good protection from the wind. We also added a tarp on top of it for some extra protection ensuring there was a good flow of fresh air. We added a tarp under the tent as well, plus two layers of sleeping pads for additional insulation from the ground. We also brought two sets of sleeping bags for everyone for extra warmth. And we did bring our small electrical heater so it wasn’t nearly as extreme as it sounds. In the end, no one was cold, although it was a bit chilly around dawn. The hardest part was getting out of the tent in the morning but with nature calling (pun intended) and a promise of coffee it was doable.

Cooking also presented a bit of a challenge without roofed accommodations to do food prep. So anything that could be just dumped into the pot, mixed with water and cooked quickly worked best. We made our favourite minestrone soup with the soup mix from Bulk Barn: we cut the recommended dose of the mix in half to reduce the salt content and add red lentils and dehydrated vegetables from Bulk Barn as well. We also made veggie burgers the second night and cooked eggs with beans in the morning.

On Sunday, the weather improved considerably. It was sunny and crisp with a hint of spring.

We decided to hike the Bat Lake Trail since it was very close to the Mew Lake Campground. That way we didn’t have to drive anywhere. It’s a perfect trail for a winter hike with frozen waterfalls (our son called them Elsa’s castle), a beautiful lookout point and a few lakes along the way.

Along the trail, our son kept practicing his hide mode technique, which consisted of jumping sideways and disappearing into the snow banks.

Upon our return, we headed to the skating rink and played a game of shinny. It was my first hockey game, if you can call it that since I didn’t even have skates on. But it was a lot of fun nonetheless.

The highlight of the trip was the blue jays that visited our campsite.

We took our time packing Monday morning, watching the last logs burn, savouring the last moments of our trip. On the way home, we stopped at Westside Fish and Chips in Huntsville, which has become our favourite food stop whenever we go to Arrowhead or Algonquin. After a three-hour drive, we were back in snowless Toronto.

Overall, the trip was a great success and we are definitely coming back next year. All my doubts regarding dragging my family into the cold of the winter to sleep on the ground dissipated one morning when our son mused that he couldn’t understand why some people thought that staying in a hotel was better than camping. That warmed me better than the hot tea I was sipping.

The Best of 2014

December 17, 2014August 5, 2015 / Oleksandra Budna / Leave a comment

With 2014 almost done, I went through my photos and put together my top 10 camping moments of the year. It was a bit hard to rank them since it was such a great year for camping but I am pretty confident about my number 1 picks (yes, there are two of them).

10. Thanksgiving Weekend at Grundy Lake Provincial Park

Lots to be thankful for: Gorgeous fall colours, picturesque trails, great friends, roaring campfires in the evening and a hearty thanksgiving meal. What else can you wish for on a beautiful fall day?

9. Early flowers and happy moose at Algonquin

Victoria Day weekend was a bit chilly this year (temperatures were around freezing most nights). It didn’t stop us from enjoying dainty spring flowers and a great bike ride from Mew Lake to Rock Lake. We even came across a very happy-looking moose on our way back.

8. Easter at MacGregor Point Provincial Park

Since Easter is all about nature awakening and rejuvenation, we decided to head for the woods to celebrate it. It was the first time we did it and it is bound to become one of our favourite family traditions. Kids got to do an Easter egg hunt in the actual forest and we did lots of hiking even though there were still heaps of snow around.

7. Sunsets at Pinery

Sunsets at Pinery Provincial Park are always gorgeous whether you watch them on the beach or over the Old Ausable Channel.

6. Family Day weekend at Arrowhead Provincial Park

Arrowhead is often called the best kept secret in Ontario. Well, I think the secret is out as this February we had to spend over an hour in a car lineup to get to the park entrance. It’s easy to see why the park is so popular in the winter: with hiking, snowshoeing, tubing, skiing and skating around the torch-lit loop, you never run out of things to do.

5. Backpacking at Bon Echo Provincial Park

It was our first backpacking trip and in spite of hordes of mosquitoes and a sprained ankle, we are planning more and longer hiking trips.

4. Canoeing at Kawartha Highlands

Canoeing is probably my favourite outdoor activity. Remoteness, beauty, loons at night, tranquility – all of these make any canoe trip irresistible, especially in a beautiful park like Kawartha Highlands.

3. Stars at Bruce Peninsula

Bruce Peninsula is beautiful any time of the day, but at night under the star strewn skies, it is spectacular.

2. Celebrating New Year at Allegany State Park

What can be a better way to ring in the New Year than in the woods, around a campfire with your family.

1. Foggy morning paddle with my younger son

During our canoe trip this year, my younger son woke me up early so we could go for a paddle. As we cut through the thick morning fog, it felt like we were the only people in the world.

1. University send-off party for our older son

Our son going to University and moving out was the biggest family event of the year. Since camping has always been such a big part of our lives, it seemed appropriate to celebrate this big achievement while camping.

Looking forward to new adventures in 2015!

Thanksgiving Weekend Camping at Grundy Lake

October 16, 2014October 5, 2015 / Oleksandra Budna / 4 Comments

There was a lot to be thankful for this past weekend. Beautiful sunny weather. Deep blue skies and incredible fall colours. Being with family and friends. Having an opportunity to leave the city and be in nature.

We headed to Grundy Lake Provincial Park for the Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving used to be the last camping trip of the year before we started going camping in the winter. However, since we usually stay in cabins and yurts in the winter, it is still the last camping trip in a tent. That is until we pluck up the courage to try winter tenting.

We visited Grundy Lake a few times in the past but that was a few years ago and mostly in the spring and summer. I had my doubts whether it was the best choice to see fall colours since I remembered lots of pines. It turned out I had nothing to worry about. We booked a campsite at the Poplar campground. When I got out of the tent on Saturday morning, I was bathed in the golden glow of the forest around. The ground had a thick carpet of foliage; the trees were all decked up in their best colours; and beautiful leaves twirled around in the breeze. Kids had lots of fun jumping and rolling in piles of leaves and showering them over each other.

Since our son was still getting over the remains of his cold, we decided to take it easy this time. We spent a lot of time by the campfire and cooked the most delicious food: gnocchi with vegetables, veggie burgers, lentil stew, mushroom and barley soup, and roasted root vegetables (by some universal camping law food always tastes so much better on a camping trip).

We took bike rides through the forest and hit a couple of easy short trails: Swan Lake and Gut Lake. Both trails looked spectacular – smooth rocks, whispering marshes and gurgling brooks framed by interlaced green pines and multicoloured maples, birches and aspens. For more pictures of the beautiful fall forest, visit my Random Pix blog.

By another universal camping law, time always flies so much faster out in the woods. Before we knew it, it was time to go back home. On our way back, I enjoyed the beautiful fall landscape flashing by and started planning next year’s trips. Where should we go next?

A Different Side of Bon Echo: Hiking the Abes and Essens Trail

August 21, 2014July 5, 2016 / Oleksandra Budna / 8 Comments

Every year, we like to try a new outdoor activity. Last year, we went white-water rafting at Glacier National Park in Montana. The year before, we tried sea kayaking at Hopewell Rocks in New Brunswick. And before that, it was our first multi-day canoe trip through Algonquin’s Barron Canyon. This year, we decided to go on an overnight backpacking trip. We’ve done a fair share of hiking but all of the trails were short and could be finished in one day.

For our overnight adventure, we picked the Abes and Essens Lake Trail in Bon Echo Provincial Park. It seemed like a good opportunity to experience a different side of Bon Echo. We camped at this park before but stayed at one of the campgrounds close to Mazinaw Lake and those tend to get overcrowded, especially on weekends.

The trail is only 17 km long and can certainly be covered in a day but also has five campsites along the way for those who’d like to camp overnight. We booked site #530 on Little Rock Lake. Our plan was to cover most of the trail on the first day. That way we wouldn’t have to rush packing the next morning and still have plenty of time to finish the trail and drive back to Toronto.

We arrived in Bon Echo late on Friday and stayed the first night on one of the sites at the Hardwood Hills campground. In all our years of front-country camping, we have never been anywhere this quiet. That was probably why we slept in. Even our younger son, who usually wakes sometime between six and seven, slept until 11. So if you are looking for peace and quiet but without all the work of back-country camping you should check it out. Plus the campsites are pretty big and private, especially further away from the comfort station.

The next morning, we packed up our tent, made our favourite Power Breakfast to keep us going, picked up our permit from the office and set out on a trail around 1:30. We started at the trail end, which is a bit down the road from the trail parking lot. The Abes and Essens Lake Trail has three loops: 4, 9 and 17 km. At the beginning we met quite a few people finishing the first loop. As we passed the first fork, the number of people dropped significantly. We met lovely campers at site 526 and there were a bunch of tents set up on site 527. Once we got to loop three, we stopped for lunch and some rest.

The scenery wasn’t breathtaking but it was pretty with small lakes, rocky shores and beautiful flowers. As for the terrain, there were some ups and downs but overall the trail was not difficult. We had to take off our shoes to cross the stream leading into Abes. There were a few rocks you could use to skip across but we didn’t want to risk getting all our stuff wet.

There were two more sites on Abes Lake, both occupied and looking pretty big. Once we got past Abes, the trail became really overgrown and that’s where I tumbled over and hurt my ankle. Even as I was falling down, two thoughts shot through my mind: What if I broke something? How are we getting out of here? Once the pain became less intense, we figured it wasn’t a fracture after all and since the only way to get out of there was to keep walking we had to move on. My husband piled up my backpack on top of his own, my kids found me a nice stick and I just hopped along.

The chunk of the trail between Abes and Little Rock Lake was probably the worst part of our trip. And not only because I was hurting and slow. It was really overgrown and at times hard to see the trail. Mosquitoes were ruthless and after a while our younger son, who is a human mosquito magnet, got really cranky. So after two hours of mosquitoes buzzing, my ankle throbbing and my son complaining, an orange campsite sign was a welcome sight. Since it was already almost seven and my foot didn’t look too bad, we decided to stick to our original plan and camp there.

Site 530 is the only one on the lake and since no one seems to be hiking along loop three, not a single person passed our site during our stay there. As I was lying on the rocky shore with my foot stuck into the lake, breathing in the solitude and tranquility, I realized that’s what happiness felt like. There were clouds of dragon flies and damselflies swooshing above and it made our son very happy since they eat mosquitoes. The way he put it: this is a blessing and it’s beautiful too.

Just to recap the rest of our stay. The site had a beautiful view of the lake but hardly any space for a tent. After some turning this way and that, we managed to squeeze it onto a tiny piece of soil between the rocks. On our way out, further down the trail, we did find more space that could be used for a tent and someone had obvious done that before. After the tent was up, we made a minestrone soup but added too much lentils and dried vegetables so it turned into a minestrone stew. Our kids proclaimed it the best meal ever. The next day, while my husband and kids were packing, I was soaking up vitamin D, cooling my ankle in the lake and making friends with minnows and tadpoles.

It took us two hours to finish the trail. We stopped at Mazinaw Lake for a swim to wash off dirt and sweat, grabbed some ice-cream in Cloyne, dropped off kids at home and headed to an emergency room.