The Walleye Magazine

Canoe Tripping: A Love Story

How I Spend My Summer Vacations

Story by Bonnie Schiedel, Photos by Darren Elder

Igrew up on a small lake in southern Ontario and learned to paddle a wide, wallowing plastic canoe. Backcountry canoe camping was not on my radar. However, my university boyfriend Darren (now my husband) had completed the Outers outdoor rec program at Atikokan High School, which culminated in a 12-day canoe trip deep into Quetico Provincial Park in grade 12. That didn’t make him an expert, but it did make him want to see that side of Quetico again. So, in the summer of ’94, we borrowed and scavenged gear and set out for a five-day trip. It coincided with a heat wave where it was 36°C by 10 am, and on our second morning we spotted a massive plume of forest fire smoke. End of trip. Undaunted, the next summer we completed a five-day trip—and we were hooked.

We learned a lot in those early years. At first we wore jeans (dumb) and usually put our life jackets under our seats (really dumb). We ate a lot of crummy instant noodles and cereal bars. Gradually, by thinking things through, talking to other trippers, and reading those new-fangled online forums, we figured out how to be safe and comfortable out there in the vast expanse of billion-year-old rock and pristine lakes. In the late 90s, we scraped together the funds to buy a 17.5-foot Prospector from

Atikokan’s Souris River Canoes, still our sweet ride today. We gave each other paddles and life jackets for birthdays, and used wedding money to invest in the compact, lightweight gear that backcountry camping requires. A Christmas gift of a food dehydrator from one set of parents means that we can preserve deluxe meals at home and just add boiling water at a campsite. One of my hands-down favourite buys is a cookbook called A Fork in the Trail by Laurie Ann March, with recipes for Moroccan chicken stew, feta and quinoa soup, and chili.

It’s a mix of satisfaction and thrill to set out on a trip and know that everything our little family needs to be sheltered and safe and fed is packed into our yellow canoe. Our daughter did her first overnight canoe trip when she was four, and we’ve done a couple trips a year since then. Many of those trips are what I call “backcountry lite”: one portage, paddle for a couple hours, set up camp on an island or two for five days, where we while away our time swimming, fishing, reading in our hammocks (yes, that’s hammocks, plural), making up games with sticks and rocks, and taking day trips to that nice bay over there. We do get more ambitious about once a year on a seven-day trip with more portages and a little more distance covered. On one epically rainy trip, I gave my daughter a little pep talk about how the next day, our final one of the trip, would be challenging, but we could do it. “We’re tough northern girls,” I said, a phrase that has come up more than once since then. I love knowing that’s part of her childhood soundtrack.

When we lived in Ignace for 10 years we camped on that area’s sandy beaches, and did another very cool canoe trip to the Slate Islands a few years ago, but it’s the Quetico magic that holds my heart. It’s where every campsite has incredible views and air that smells so, so good, where you can paddle into a secluded bay and see a mama moose feeding her baby, or you can float alongside a sheer rock cliff and see the rusty red pictographs that someone else in a canoe painted long ago. Last August, frazzled by months of pandemic living and still raw from the unexpected death of my dad in July, we escaped to Quetico once again and were rewarded with a string of perfect weather days and a weird absence of biting bugs. Before we left home I poured one of my dad’s bottles of wine into a plastic flask, and every night I toasted his memory in the quiet, golden evening light. Canoe tripping can be hard—hammocks and Moroccan chicken notwithstanding—but it’s profoundly restorative too. I can’t wait to get out again this summer.

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2021-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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