Wanderung 7

Ogling Ottawa and Ontario's Outstanding Outdoors

September 2004

September 8 - Hike in Lake Superior Provincial Park and drive to Sault St. Marie, Ontario

As my old and apocryphal Grand Pappy used to say, "Some days you bite the bear, some days the bear bites you." This was one of those days. We decided to try the Peat Mountain trail, an 11-kilometer hike from the Rabbit Blanket Lake campground that was described as "strenuous" and taking 3-5 hours, which turned out to be right on the money.

As soon as we left the campground area we encountered pretty much a continuous carpet of roots and rocks that forced us to concentrate very hard on our footing rather than watching the scenery pass by. Then we started climbing from 1100 feet to ultimately 1722 feet, and the steep slopes combined with wet, muddy conditions were very challenging indeed, but in exchange for that we had great views from the top of Peat Mountain. Looking back we could see Rabbit Blanket Lake and a river that meandered from it through a verdant valley toward Lake Superior. Looking forward we could see Foam Lake nestled among the heavily forested mountains, which was the way our trail headed, and far out over the trees we could see a distant bay of Lake Superior.

We descended to the shore of Foam Lake, which was quite pretty, but we had by that time been slogging up hill and down dale for 2 solid hours and had only managed to walk about 5 kilometers! That's about half our normal rate; we were already getting tired and we weren't even at the turnaround point so I began to get concerned. Fortunately we did turn around shortly after Foam Lake and took a much more level route to loop back and rejoin the main trail. Along the way we saw that some of the logs put in by the park service as steps had grooves cut in them, apparently by a chainsaw, for better traction. But we also found where the trail crew had immortalized themselves by carving in "Adam", "Mike", and "Hillary" into logs in place of the normal crisscross pattern. Who says Canadians haven't got a sense of humor, eh?

It was a good thing we didn't have to climb back over that mountain, because both of us had legs that were approaching the "jelly leg" state where you lose fine motor control over the leg muscles. Normally, that's just an inconvenience, but if you are coming down a steep slope and trying not to fall or twist an ankle, it can be a real problem. As it was, we both fell once on this walk, but fortunately with no injuries. Monika plopped down into some rather thick mud and I slid over sideways onto a bed of ferns, which was about as soft as the mud and a whole lot cleaner! But we enjoyed the little things, like a few leaves already turning red and the big fungi on the side of a tree.


 

All in all we enjoyed this walk and the views from the top of the mountain were grand, but it was a bodacious amount of strenuous exercise. The difficult footing for at least 1/2 of the distance plus the steep, slippery slopes that caused us problems both going up and coming down made us give it a rating of a 4+ on the usual 1-5 Volksmarching scale. That's pretty near the "5" end which signifies a big rock scramble up and down the slopes, so if you ever take this walk be sure you are in very good condition. We were in fairly good condition and it took us 3.5 hours for the whole walk, 2 hours out and 1.5 hours back. You should also definitely wear boots, preferably the high top kind that will help keep mud out; we both stepped in mud deep enough to cover our boots and it was deep enough to even try to pull off my shoe when I yanked my foot back out! Since the chance of injury is so high and not that many people are in this neck of the woods, you should definitely walk with a companion, carry water and emergency supplies. Our backup plan for problems was normally to use our cell phone, but we were so far out that we couldn't even get "analog roam" (as in "Home, Home on the Range, Where the Deer and the Analog Roam.").

Despite our fatigue, we hitched up the trailer and were on our way south in 15 minutes flat, which I think shows that we are getting faster at the connect and disconnect process. The drive south through Lake Superior Provincial Park was a never ending vista of densely wooded low mountains, bays into Lake Superior, and small lakes. Most of it appeared to be a beautifully unspoiled wilderness.

We made one stop at Agawa Bay to look at the petroglyphs that Native Americans (called "First Nation" folks up here) had painted with ochre and bear fat. The petroglyphs are right at the water's edge and the walk down and back was quite steep, but I wanted to see the place where we had ended our Canada trip in 1993, so we forced our aching muscles into yet another hike. At the bottom, the paintings can only be seen from a narrow rock shelf that slants off right into Lake Superior, and since the waves are lapping right onto the rock shelf the footing is, shall we say, treacherous at best. For some reason the park service has removed the posts and guide wire that helped us stay on the ledge on our last visit, with the predictable result that some people have been swept right off the shelf and drowned, as the informational plaques cheerfully informed us.


 

I wondered what bureaucrat was responsible for that decision, particularly when I too started to slide off into Lake Superior at the farthest end of the shelf. I had walked through a low part of the shelf were waves were lapping over the edge and apparently the rubber on my boots was, as they put it, "Slippery When Wet!" Actually, I was too busy trying to find a handhold to think right then although I do remember a fleeting thought about ruining Monika's camera if I went in the lake. I did manage to arrest my slide by using the method taught for arresting a slide down a glacier or ice field, which is going into a hands and feet crouch and digging in with the ice ax. I didn't have the ice ax, of course, but I did the best I could with 9 fingernails and it was enough stop the slide. Then I very carefully edged over to a spot with less of a slope where I could take a breather and let my boots dry off a bit. The batteries in the camera chose that moment to die, so I also had to juggle out 4 new AA cells and insert them while trying not to make a false move off my small perch. But in the end I got the pictures and the lake didn't get me, so all was well. After rejoining Monika, we trudged back up the trail to the car, made some peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwiches for lunch, and resumed our drive south.

As we passed by the lakes in the park we noticed they all had name tags. We were particularly amused by one set of three lakes named "Dad", "Mom", and, of course "Baby" for the smallest one. Monika kept the camera ready in case we saw a moose, but to no avail although she did get some very nice pictures of the Lake Superior shoreline that way. After we left the park the shore of Lake Superior was still virtually deserted for the next 100 miles or so until we started to approach the Sault St. Marie area. At one point we were following a logging truck and I heard something go "pop", but Monika suggested that we had just run over some fragments of bark that were showering on us from that truck, and that seemed plausible so I didn't pull over and check, which was a big mistake.

We only found out about the mistake, of course, when we had pulled into the campground and Monika noticed one of the tires was really low, as in almost flat. It may sound funny, but I was happy that it had popped near a reasonable city like Sault St. Marie rather than out in the back of beyond. Besides, we were already in a nice, shady campsite and I could take my time about changing it without worrying about being run over by tractor trailer rigs. I used the 2-ton floor jack that I had remembered to stuff under one of the seats in the dinette area, and that was a lot more stable than the bottle jack I had used beside the road in Montana when the last tire blew (Wanderung 6). So all in all, changing the trailer tire this time was a piece of cake compared to the last time.

Tires are, however, more expensive in Canada than in the U.S., and they only had a mounted version with the rim available at Canadian Tire. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I forked over the credit card to pay $175 Canadian for the tire and the rim. Sigh. Still, I now had a second rim that we could mount another tire on and have two complete spares ready for our planned trip to Alaska. Of course, I was getting rather tired of tires blowing out on the trailer and would have to consider if I was just being terribly unlucky or if this was still a failure due to my overstressing the tires somehow during Wanderung 6. If so, I probably could expect the other two tires to go sometime in the future and that was a depressing thought. I was also curious why trailer tires were so much more expensive than automobile tires. Was it lack of competition or just a very much smaller market? At least now I could understand why Merlin had mounted a car tire on one of his rims as a spare for his trailer; it must have seemed like a great idea with these huge price differences.

Since both of us were hungry but too tired to cook, we stopped off at Arby's on the way back to camp for dinner. That gave us the evening for just putting up our aching feet, having a glass of wine, and relaxing with the computers a bit. We hit the sack early as we judged that we would have to leave by 7 a.m. to get to the train station for the Algoma Scenic Railway train trip on time.

Copyright 2005 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Map
Prolog
September 2004
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Epilog

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