Woodland Caribou 2001

Moss Hole

Just minutes before I fell into the moss hole, I had cautioned Peg about watching for moss holes (even though I had never seen or heard of such a thing). I'd somehow reasoned that there was so much thick, green moss covering the forest floor that it might just cover holes in the ground. Even now, it is a bit unnerving to think that you can just be walking along out there and step into a hole without any visible signs that it even exists. To me, it seems difficult to really assure one's safe footing when walking on the moss carpet. And I'm not convinced that the moss only covers gaps between large rocks... I guess that's the downside of the moss. On the bright side - I really liked seeing all the deep, green moss. Throughout much of our trip (except in recent burn areas), the moss carpeted much of the forest floor. For whatever reason, I found that amazingly beautiful! For me, this moss, more than anything else, really seemed to distinguish this park from Quetico Provincial Park.

Hilltop View

Throughout our canoe trip, there was a fair amount of air traffic overhead during the day. There is significantly more than Quetico. While we didn't really like the air traffic, it did give us the sense that if we needed help we could summon it. Later, we found out that some of the air traffic was due to a search for a lost canoe party.

We had good weather with only a few rain showers. The few rain showers we did get were almost all slow, drizzly rains at night; not hard downpours. There was just one morning when we canoed in the drizzle. The temperature was warmer than we normally expect for that area for that time of year. We both worked up a pretty good sweat on the portages. The warmer weather also meant that the mosquitoes were still around. They tended to be fairly pesky for just a couple of hours around dusk and dawn and gone during the daytime hours. They weren't so bad that we wanted to apply a mosquito repellant with an unpleasant smell. A good part of the warm weather was that we went swimming about every other day or so. The water is usually too cold for Peg to enjoy swimming, but not this time. This was the first trip that I took goggles and a snorkel so I could explore the underwater life. I didn't find too much underwater, but swimming was much more fun that way.

Paull Lake

This park did give us the solitude we were looking for. During the first two days, we only saw 2 different canoe parties for a total of three people - one canoe "party" was just one person in a solo canoe. For the next 7 days, we traveled 40-50 miles on major routes and never saw another person. To us, the most incredible aspect of that was that we weren't hiding out off the beaten paths. (We've used the strategy of taking little used routes before in Quetico and it has worked quite well for us.) Instead, for this trip, we were on major routes and we were camping at some of the most beautiful, established campsites we've ever been in. We kept expecting someone to come along thinking that they too wanted to stay at the best campsite on the lake. To our knowledge, we never had anyone canoe up to our campsite expecting to use it. There were many times that we felt we "owned" a very large lake since, as far as we could tell, no one else was there. The park appeared deserted to us for much of the time and that was just fine with us.

The portages were in excellent condition. We were very impressed! (We extend our compliments to the portage crews.) Claire Quewezence, the assistant park superintendent, was an exceptionally good resource for us. Prior to our trip, we emailed our itinerary to her. She made extensive, invaluable, detailed comments and sent them back to us. (Thank you Claire!)