50 Years of Killarney... and then some

By Richard Todd

Cliffs above George Lake

Contents

Good Morning 1

In the beginning 3

Early days in the Park 10

The Little Orange Book 12

The Driveway 14

The old Trout Lake Road 17

Bushwhacking and peak bagging 19

“Old timer” ... ? 26

A scenic route to Killarney 28

Good night 33

These reminiscences and reflections are dedicated to the staff

who have kept Killarney Park going all these years, and to the

Friends of Killarney Park of which I was privileged to be a

director for more than a decade. I’d also like to mention Tom

Buck of whom I lost track many years ago, but who led my first

trip to Killarney in 1967. I owe you a lot, Tom. Finally, and

above all, there is my companion, Alison, who lights my life

with her support and encouragement.

Richard Todd, 9 October 2017

richard@opuspocus.ca

613-862-4760

Copyright 2017 Richard Todd

Thanksgiving weekend along the La Cloche Silhouette Trail

Good morning

I discovered the park on the Thanksgiving weekend of 1967. I

was with a group from the University of Toronto. Many of us

had originally wanted to get in on a trip to Algonquin. But that

one was full. Among the 20 or so paddlers in our company, only

the leader had been to Killarney before, and only two others

had even heard of it.

We arrived at George Lake after midnight. Since it was

clear, most of us just spread out our sleeping bags near the

beach. I woke up to a crisp, bright October morning and the

sight of the white pearl La Cloche Mountains. I hadn’t imagined

that such things existed in Ontario and, judging from the buzz

among my companions, neither had they.

Our leader made a discovery of his own that first morning.

There was no one in the little shed that passed for a park office,

nor could he find an official-looking person anywhere around

the campground. There were hardly any unofficial-looking

persons around, for that matter, even though it was the

Thanksgiving weekend. We are so used to today’s high level of

use that it’s easy to imagine that “maddening crowds” have

always been the norm in Killarney Park. Yet in the early years it

was possible to spend a week in the interior and never see a

soul. The only people not with our party that we encountered in

the interior that weekend were a couple of hunters on the shore

of Muriel Lake.

The fair weather disappeared while we were doing our first

portage. As we made our soggy way ro Baie Finne, then to

1

Threenarrows Lake and back to George via Killarney Lake, we

occasionally caught glimpses between clouds and sheets of rain

of the magnificent ridges that define the park. Despite the

weather, I saw enough to fall desperately in love with the place

and, truth to tell, I’ve never got over my affair with Killarney.

Most of the summer of 1968 found me exploring the park on

foot and in a rented canoe. That year a few of the portages were

marked with cardboard posters, but most were unsigned. That,

combined with topographical maps that didn’t show portages,

made getting around more of an adventure than it seems now. I

saw a few canoeists and a number of motorboats in my travels,

but for the most part I had the impression of having the park to

myself.

Things began to change, though, and not always for the

better. In May of 1969 I discovered a new logging road, traces of

which can still be found, thrusting its way past Bell Lake and

across the north shoulder of Silver Peak above Boundary Lake

(called Kirk Lake in those days.) I never did learn where it went

from there. It was abandoned about a year later following

considerable lobbying by conservation-minded citizens.

By July of that year most of the portage trails were marked

with big, bright red wooden triangles that could be seen from a

kilometre away. The park was becoming known. And yet, in

1969 I saw just one other canoe during the Canada Day

weekend trip on Johnny, Bell, Balsam and David Lakes. Fifty

years is a big slice of an individual’s lifetime and change is

inevitable. I was 23 when I first visited Killarney. I’m 73 now. I

wonder what another half-century of change will bring?

2

In the beginning

When did beauty come to the land we call Killarney? The

quartzite hills that make it a place like no other are very, very

old, older than we can really understand. If we could look back

in time to when they first assumed something like their present

form and then watch their story, accelerated a billion-fold, it

would be like seeing a movie 2,000 times longer than The Lord

of the Rings. We would watch as hills would swell and recede

over and over, rippling the naked face of the earth like some

cosmic sea. They would writhe and splash, dance and play. For a

while they would be many times their present height. They

would never stand still.

Would all of this be beautiful if we could compress it to a

human scale, a movie lasting two years and a bit? Perhaps. At

the very least it would inspire our wonder. But if we could stop

it at one frame, perhaps at the end of our first year, and enter

into the landscape, we would find ourselves in a most

uncongenial environment. The atmosphere would contain

considerably less free oxygen than it does today and would not

sustain us for long if, indeed, we were not overcome by toxic

gases. We might vaguely recognize the lay of the land but we

would find no comfort in it, a place consisting of rock and water

and nothing else. We would probably encounter electrical

storms of a violence we cannot now imagine. Winds might sigh

or roar through mountain passes, but the land would be deaf to

them. Lakes and seas, uncontaminated by organic matter, would

be astonishingly clear and their shores would shudder with the

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impact of mountainous waves. We would be happy indeed to

step out of that landscape and let our movie resume.

Around the second day of the movie, when we had seen

quite a lot of the subtle rock colours undulating through the

endless ages, we might notice a new kind of colouration. Life on

earth would have started and our show would have only a few

months left to run. It would be days or weeks before we saw

much greening, and weeks again before animals big enough to

attract our notice appeared. The Age of Man would occupy less

than an hour of the final reel and we would see precious little of

it in the Killarney region, only ten or fifteen minutes. The saga

of world civilization would last about four minutes and the

European presence in Killarney scarcely nine or ten seconds. As

for Killarney Provincial Park, well, we’d better not blink.

Shall we assume, then, that beauty came to the area with the

arrival of the first peoples? Beauty is a concept of the kind that

we use to communicate our subjective experiences to our

fellows. As far as we can tell, we are the only animals capable of

such abstractions.

But let us not be hasty. Imagine a child of eighteen or

twenty months, one who has only recently begun speaking and

possesses a vocabulary of perhaps a hundred words. Such a child

would be incapable of framing generalizations about things like

beauty. And yet who has not seen a little girl pause in her

playing just to admire her surroundings and smile with a happy

sigh? Or a little boy awestruck by a spectacular sunset. Surely

they are experiencing beauty.

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So it might be with the higher birds and mammals. The

eagle who soars and glides above our beloved park is mainly

concerned with food, survival and propagation. But is it not

possible that, from time to time, he experiences a moment of

blessed insouciance, perhaps prompted by an updraft or another

of the good things that may happen in an eagle’s life? Perhaps

now and then he forgets his quest for prey long enough to look

about his world briefly and experience the kind of feeling that

might cause you or me to say, “Yes, this is a fine place. It is good

to be here.”

We are on firmer ground when we speak of the first peoples

to come to Killarney. Though they were remote from us in

culture, technology and virtually everything by which we gauge

societies, they were as human as you and I. The fundamentals of

their inner lives were little different from our own. Despite

what must have been an unremitting pursuit of survival, they

surely loved, laughed, told stories and reflected upon their

surroundings. Did their hearts sometimes soar at a sight of

special appeal? They must have gazed in wonder at the stellar

infinity above them, wondrously clear in the pre-industrial sky.

Could landscapes of the night, luminous beneath the moon,

have failed to set their hearts aglow now and then? Could the

greening of spring not have been beautiful in their eyes?

If people appeared on the scene only in the last minutes of

our imagined movie, nevertheless their arrival was a very long

time ago in human terms. Though today’s scholarly consensus is

that the first people arrived around ten thousand years ago,

archeologists have found artifacts mixed into some glacial till on

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Manitoulin Island. Some have conjectured that people were in

the vicinity before the last great advance of the Ice Age.

What can we know about these hypothetical folks who may

have arrived thirty thousand years ago? Very little indeed.

Perhaps some basic inferences can be drawn from the artifacts

and what knowledge we have of the natural environment of

their time, but anything else is speculation. . We cannot even

say whether they were ancestors of the indigenous peoples who

have inhabited the area since the retreat of the glaciers and

others who have been there in historical times. Some of them

may have been, but there is no particular reason to think so.

They went away and for hundreds of generations the land we

call Killarney lay uninhabited beneath thousands of metres of

ice.

After the glaciers withdrew

Whether or not there was a human presence in the region

before the last great Ice Age, there certainly was not long after

the glaciers retreated. As climatic conditions improved the

expanding populations of indigenous peoples came to occupy

territories that had been uninhabitable only a few generations

earlier. Yet it isn’t likely that they would have understood that

the icy cliffs they would sometimes encounter were migrating

northward. They might see parts of the glacier breaking off and,

with time, turning into liquid water, but they would not

interpret their observations as our scientists do all these

thousands of years later. Life is short and geology works slowly.

The glaciers were just there, where they had always been, and a

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man’s mother’s mother’s mother could tell you that they had

always been there in her day as well.

And yet a hunter might venture one day into a valley

beyond his normal range and discover abundant game.

Returning later on he would conclude that the hunting was

better than near his home base and decide to relocate his family

there. Others would follow and in time, as more lands became

available, the process would repeat itself over and over.

The first people to come to post-glacial Killarney were what

archeologists call Paleo-Indians. As the name implies, their

culture and technology were of the Old Stone Age. They

doubtless had knives, scrapers and spears, but probably had yet

to develop the bow and arrow. They would have been nomadic,

and over the millennia there would have been contact and

interbreeding between various groups. In other words, we don’t

really know who these people were except that they belonged

to one of the disparate cultures which we now call Plano and

which flourished in much of North America from about 9.000

to 6,000 BC. A number of archeological sites indicating Plano

cultures have been identified within Killarney Park.

Interestingly, the sites are considerably higher than the nearby

lake shores since in the era of their origins the waters of the

Great Lakes Basin stood higher than they do today (and covered

a much larger area.) Many of the peaks of the La Cloche hills

were islands.

Canada’s indigenous peoples had no writing so they left us

little in the way of history, at least as we conceive it. Major

events would be remembered for a generation or two and

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become increasingly imprecise and more absorbed into oral

traditions with the subsequent years and centuries. We

generally regard the resulting collective narratives as

mythology, which is fair enough as long as a myth is not

necessarily something to be considered false. Indeed, oral

traditions often have a kind of truth that transcends the facts,

figures and dates of our history books; however they leave us

without the chronology that might elucidate an article like this.

Still, we can identify a few important periods, like the span

of approximately 200 B.C. to 500 A.D. which saw people of the

Saugeen Complex occupying much of Southern Ontario and

especially the Bruce Penninsula. This complex was part of the

Hopewell Trading System (as we style it nowadays). Hopewell

trading networks were far reaching, and their valued

commodities included obsidian from the Yellowstone area,

copper from Lake Superior, and shells from the Gulf Coast, to

mention only a few. It’s generally believed that small Saugeen

bands established themselves now and then in the Killarney

area to obtain and possibly trade the hard white quartzite for

which the La Cloche Hills are so famous nowadays. It was

readily fashioned into tools and weapons.

The Saugeens are believed to have been ancestors of today’s

Odawa (or Ottawa) people.

The Hopewell Trading System seems to have faded away

about 1500 years ago. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, but

reasonable speculation has it that the peoples involved became

more nomadic, rendering commerce less practical. Speculating a

little further, we might guess that game became scarcer after the

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My first ever view of Killarney Park

introduction of the bow and arrow, requiring greater mobility

of those who depended on hunting for survival.

In the succeeding generations and centuries life seems to

have gone on in much the same pattern. We have some

evidence of various migrations and of trade in a few instances,

but attaching specifics to these things has proven elusive. The

next big tide of cultural change would occur about a thousand

years after the Hopewell era when Europeans began to arrive,

first a trickle of them, but soon a torrent. They brought with

them enticing trade items like iron pots, steel knives and

implements and alcoholic beverages. They also brought a

strange new religion, which didn’t take too well, along with

smallpox which, unfortunately, did.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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Early days in the Park

In the 60s Killarney Park was so little used that those of us who

went there governed ourselves differently than we do now. There

were no permits, no quotas, no established campsites. There was

no park map either. One had to make do with the federal

topographic sheets or with a 1:125,000 Ontario map entitled

Northern Georgian Bay Recreational Reserve. Some of the

portages were signed, but in many cases one could only study the

map identify their most likely locations, then carefully comb the

appropriate section of shoreline. Even at that, they were not heavily

used and their locations could be far from obvious. I remember

spending an hour or so looking for the path from Balsam Lake to

David.

Yet those days have a nostalgic allure. We could camp

anywhere back then, including places where we probably shouldn’t

have. One didn’t have to use official access points either. There

were passable roads going to either end of Kakakise Lake, for

example, making a day trip to Norway Lake a distinct possibility.

They also provided me and others quick access to the ridges when

we would hitchhike to the park for a few days of hiking.

Additionally, there was a network of less passable old roads in

that area, remnants from logging days no doubt, extending from

Kakakise to Johnny Lake and southeast of Norway Lake to the foot

of Northeast Hill. Traces of those roads remain, though they have

grown over with time and are of limited use to today’s hikers.

Hiking was different in many ways. There was no official

backpacking trail in the park, though a bit of the present La Cloche

Silhouette Trail follows an old road from George Lake to Baie

Fine. But most people who came to Killarney to hike merely

ascended one of the quartzite ridges, followed it for a while,

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View west from The Crack

descended when they needed water, camped at spots with

spectacular views and carried on for as long as time and inclination

allowed.

Once a friend and I climbed Gulch Hill, then separated. I

camped above a little pond just to the northeast of the eastern

summit while my friend hiked down to O.S.A. Lake and climbed a

little way up one of the hills on its north shore. In the evening we

each built a fire so we could locate one another. So still was the air

that we were able to call across the valley. We met the next day at

the eastern end of O.S.A. and bushwhacked our way to one of the

Kakakise roads.

There are rules proscribing some of the things that were once

routine, but the heady freedom we enjoyed in the old days has left

us a wealth of memories.

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The Little Orange Book

In the mid-sixties , when Killarney Provincial Park had just

come into being, there were few commercial amenities for the

would-be wilderness wanderer. In Canada there were virtually

no stores specializing in lightweight equipment and the few

publications that dealt with modern self-propelled adventuring

all came from the U.S. As for detailed, professionally produced

guidebooks to Ontario’s wealth of canoe routes, forget it.

Some local offices of the Ministry of Lands and Forests had a

few mimeographed route descriptions to give out. The Ministry

also published pamphlet-size guidebooks for the two best-

known parks, Algonquin and Quetico, and one for the newly

organized North Georgian Bay Recreational Reserve.

The last of these, published in 1966, covered parts of

Killarney Park, but also adjacent waters, some as far away as the

Naiscoot River, just north of Point-au-Baril. Some of the routes

included waters within the present park along with nearby lakes

like Tyson and Panache. There were a number of errors in the

generally useful descriptions. In 1970 the Ministry considered

printing a revised edition, but it never materialized.

It was a small guidebook by today’s standards, 32 pages

measuring about four by six inches. Its orange cover earned the

nickname, the Little Orange Book, a wry tip of the hat to

Quotations from Chairman Mao-tse-tung, known to some

young intellectuals as the Little Red Book. Like the orange

book’s much thicker successor, the Killarney Provincial Park

Canoe Guide, it contained a lot of information beyond route

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descriptions. Some of that information remains useful, but much

now seems more than a little quaint.

A list of essential equipment includes a tent of “light silk or

silkoline, large enough to accommodate your party comfortably,

with space available for duffle, but not larger than 10 x 12 feet.”

Also recommended is a 2-, 4-, 6- or 8- mess kit, which should

include soap, dishtowels, candles, toilet paper and matches. And

don’t forget your 2.5-pound axe, nor the 6-inch file and

whetstone that should go with it. In the rope department the

anonymous author recommends 25-30 feet of sash cord or heavy

clothesline for tracking your canoe, guying your tent or even

drying clothes.

A grub list for two persons, one week, included six cans of

milk, half a pound of tea, two pounds of bacon, a pound of

shortening and three loaves of bread, among other things. Of

course you should plan to supplement your staples with the fish

you would catch. To that end the text concluded with a table of

what species you could catch in certain of the region’s lakes.

Dated though this information may be now, in its day it

reflected some of the best knowledge of traditional canoe

camping available. The route descriptions, though some have

become obsolete after 50 years of changing conditions, were of

great value at the time. In short, the Little Orange Book was a

passport to Killarney Park and the greater area it covered for a

new generation of wilderness seekers.

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The Driveway

In the late 60s, when Killarney Provincial Park was very young

and road access to the park and Killarney village not much

older, a drive along Highway 637 was a definite adventure.

Once I turned off Highway 69, and especially after I’d crossed

the railway tracks, I had the feeling that I had all but arrived in

the Park. As I negotiated the endless curves (most of which

have been straightened out since then) and drove over

numerous one-lane Bailey bridges, it was hard not to get excited

as my destination came nearer and nearer. My friends and I

hardly thought of the 637 as a highway at all. We called it the

Driveway.

Sometimes I hitchhiked, and when I did the adventure

began out at the 69 where there were signs all over telling

people not to pick up riders. That was because of the nearby

Burwash Industrial Farm, a minimum-security provincial prison

from which inmates sometimes wandered off. I sometimes had

to walk an hour or two along the Driveway before I got a ride.

Of course I sometimes had to walk or wait an hour or two

before anyone even came by, so quiet was the road back then.

Not far from the tracks, the road crossed two bends in the

Wanepitei River, each with its own Bailey bridge. There were

some particularly scenic rapids there, but the realignment of the

road in 1987 put the Driveway a few hundred metres to the

west, out of sight of the white water. The original spot was a

popular destination for picknickers from Sudbury, many of

whom never ventured as far as the park.

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A bit further on was Tyson Lake where a modest marina

served cottagers and fisherman. In those pre-quota, pre-permit

days some people entered the park through Tyson by a route

now little used. A few minutes’ drive further west, the road

climbed a little and then curved, yielding a sudden,

breathtaking view of Silver Peak. That part of the road has long

since been straightened and to get a similar view now you have

to turn onto Bell Lake Road and drive for a minute or so.

More Bailey bridges crossed more rivers, including the West

Mahzenazing, where you could turn onto Johnnie Lake Road

and launch your canoe at the present access point. Or, if you

didn’t have a canoe, you could rent one from John Chapman at

Johnny Lake Lodge. Continuing on in the direction of the park

headquarters there were two dirt roads leading to either end of

Kakakise Lake. One of them could be followed on foot to

Norway Lake and beyond, almost to the foot of Silver Peak.

The George Lake headquarters was a modest affair in those

days, and the park office little more than a shed, often

unattended. Going past George, just to the west of what is now

the park boundary, there was a little store called Camper’s Mart,

run by an older couple. It closed in 1969 due to illness and, one

suspects, insufficient business. The little brown building is still

there. Killarney Outfitters would not come into being for many

years and even the nearby Texaco station and restaurant , today

long abandoned, lay well in the future.

For many years the village changed very little. Small

businesses came and went but others were remarkably durable.

Only in the last few years has the face of the village changed,

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and that not a great deal. Most notably, the converted school

bus that housed Herbert’s Fish and Chips since forever has been

replaced by a more modern and more conventional building.

Also. the Quarterdeck, the little gift shop that used to face the

village’s major intersection, is now at the edge of town where it

looks a bit orphaned.

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The old Trout Lake Road

The portage between Threenarrows and Killarney Lakes is the

longest in today’s Killarney Park, but it hasn’t always been so.

In the early years canoeists would often bypass the sometimes

impassible Artist Creek by portaging along an old road that led

directly from The Pool at the eastern end of Baie Fine to the

northwestern bay of O.S.A. Lake. It was an excellent trail, and a

pretty one. It was fairly level and, even in the early years of the

Park one had the impression that a motor vehicle with

sufficient clearance could negotiate it with little difficulty. It

was also 5 km long, so only canoeists who had experienced

repeated difficulties in Artist Creek were likely to feel much

affection toward it.

Just how old is the road? No one seems to know. It may have

been built by the Spanish River Lumber Company at The Pool.

The company was planning on logging the area around O.S.A.

Lake in 1932. Though thanks to the efforts of artist A. Y.

Jackson and others, the logging never came to pass. In any

event, it seems likely the new road was in use by 1931. Some

people I spoke with in the 60s claimed that it was much older

than that. The earliest recorded name for O.S.A. was Trout

Lake, and when I began visiting Killarney in the late 60s, at least

two people told me the name of the trail was Trout Lake Road.

One of them offered as proof the fact that Trout Lake was

renamed Whiterock in 1927. Wouldn’t that prove the road was

built before then?

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Not necessarily. Although the Ontario Geographic Names

Board did change the name in 1927, it changed it to O.S.A. (for

Ontario Society of Artists) just six years later and the Whiterock

designation never really caught on. Furthermore, when the land

around the lake was set aside in 1933, it was called the Trout

Lake Forest Reserve.

Still, there were those who insisted that the road dated back

to at least the early 1900s. One even said that it was part of a

winter route that crossed Trout and Sturgeon Lakes (the latter

we now call Killarney) and joined another logging or “tote” road

at Norway Lake. Anyone who has travelled much in the area

can attest that there are enough road remnants, some of them

now used as portage trails, to make this account plausible. Forty

years or more after it had been established, the Old Trout Lake

Road was still in good condition, but by the early 90s, much of

it was overgrown to the point where it had more or less

disappeared.

Before the park was established in 1964, and for a short

while afterward, various motor vehicles used it bringing

hunters, fishermen and others in and out. Today less than half

of the original road is incorporated into the portage system and

the rest hardly exists any more. Canoe trippers, for better or for

worse, must use the Artist Creek route.

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Bushwhacking and Peak Bagging

Without a doubt the most distinctive feature of Killarney

Provincial Park and its vicinity is the set of three quartzite

ridges, the La Cloche Hills. They spread, finger-like, westward

from the vicinity of David Lake. Between them lie most of the

clear lakes for which the park is also known. Nowadays there is

a trail that makes a grand tour of some of the hills, but until the

‘80s one could only explore them by bushwhacking.

Today bushwhacking remains worthwhile for fantastic

views and an intimacy with the landscape, not to mention the

vigorous exercise it involves. Furthermore, there are several

worthwhile destinations that are only accessible this way. And

there’s one where there is an access trail, but it isn’t as

interesting as the other approaches I’ve used in the past.

A couple of notes and cautions:

I’ve done all of these routes by map and compass. In fact

most of them I did before hand-held GPS units were available.

While such devices would certainly be useful in exploring the

hills, I can’t offer any specific observations in that regard.

Anyway, map and compass is more “sporting.”

I’ve done some of the routes solo, remaining safe and sound

in every case. If I were physically capable (I’m 73 as of this

writing) I might still do it, but I can’t exactly recommend it. An

accident that would be entirely manageable if you have

someone with you could result in a slow, painful death alone. I

went solo when I had no one to go with me and since I’ve come

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out all right over the years, I can’t say that I regret it. I can say,

though, that I owe more to dumb luck than to good sense.

In any case, I offer the information below with the

understanding that people wishing to undertake any of these

hikes must determine for themselves whether they are up to the

considerable exertion that all of them require. Another

consideration is that if you don’t pay constant attention to your

route and your surroundings you may well get lost. When you

are deep into the hills, they can all look the same.

Northeast Hill

They call it Silver Peak nowadays. I guess some people around

Killarney always called it that. Some called it Old Baldy too, but

I always liked the name I read on the topographic map,

Northeast Hill. There was something generic and remote-

sounding about the name, (a bit like K2 perhaps!) that seemed to

reflect the effort it took to climb it in the days before surveyed

hiking trails and official park maps.

In 1968 an old-timer named John Chapman told me that

there was a trail up to the fire tower that started at the north

end of Clearsilver Lake. It may have been the same trail that we

use now, but I wasn’t able to find it. My first “ascent” was later

that year with three other men. Leaving our canoes at Johnnie

Lake, we walked the portage trail to the southern end of

Clearsilver. From there we struck out at a compass heading of

240 magnetic. (It’s funny how some details stick in the mind

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even half a century later.) After we’d scrambled over the first

couple of ridges, we caught our first glimpse of Northeast Hill.

With the endless corrugation and the extreme ruggedness of

the country between us and the hill, the hike was an intense

undertaking. We went from one valley to the next, mostly by

compass. With the reward of a closer view each time we crossed

over a ridge. After four hours we found ourselves at the base of a

cliff at the bottom of the hill. A rough detour to the west and

we were on our way up.

“Up” was not simple, straightforward or anything like that.

Each time we gained 50 metres of altitude, we lost 40 right

afterward. And when we got to the summit, we found that there

were two more summits before us. We “conquered” the next

one but had to leave the last, with its enticing fire tower, for

another trip. Even at that, we had lingered too long. We had to

spend the night with just our emergency gear in a dark and

nameless valley a few hundred metres from where we’d left our

canoes.

Over the next couple of years I climbed the hill by a number

of routes, none of them very near the trail that we use now.

Two originated at Norway Lake, one from the northeast bay, the

other from the northwest. The former seemed like a good idea

at the time. The plan was that my companions and I would

climb to the ridge overlooking Norway and work our way

eastward following some contour line or other. As we learned

soon enough, it doesn’t work that way. The hike was two or

three hours longer than it needed to be though the view of the

lake was spectacular. A year or two later I solo-climbed the hill

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from the northeast bay. It was quicker and perhaps a little

easier.

Another route that I remember with pleasure began on Kirk

Lake (since renamed Boundary L., for reasons that escape me).

The topography on that side of the hill is considerably less

wrinkled than that of the other approaches. Getting to Kirk

Lake from Johnnie was a bit of an undertaking, though,

especially as we had arrived at the put-in at 03:00 and were on

the water at first light, about 05:00. We got to Kirk at about

10:00. Our plan was to set up camp, have a meal and set out for

the hill.

We got through the first two just fine and decided around

noon that we could squeeze in a nap since the late-May days

were good and long. When we awoke it was 07:00 the next

morning. At least we had a nice long day to enjoy our climb.

My favourite route has remained the “240 magnetic,” and for

some years I intended to repeat it. I never did, though, and I’ve

been physically unable to do something that hard for at least

twenty years. Age, you know.

By the way, the fire tower was taken down years ago.

Gulch Hill

At the other end of the park, more or less, stands Gulch Hill. It

overlooks the western part of O.S.A. Lake and has two summits

separated by, you guessed it, a gulch. There are at least three

ways to get to the top(s); two of them are fairly straightforward

-22-

while a third is primarily for people who want a real workout

and who have good navigational skills.

The shortest is from O. S. A. Lake. Start at around the

middle of the southwestern shore of the lake and proceed by

compass. Once again, 240 magnetic will get you close. The

problem with this route is that it takes you through thick forest

until you’re nearly at the top, meaning that you won’t be able to

see your destination until you are close to it. It also means that

going this way is a bit of a slog.

The most sensible way up, though also the longest, involves

walking the first three kilometres of the LaCloche Silhouette

Trail, then bushwhacking another two. As you proceed along

the trail, you will come to a pond on your right and then to its

outflow (often dry). A few metres after crossing the outflow,

leave the trail and head roughly northeast. You’ll find some

very pleasant open areas of smooth rock. You can navigate up

the hill largely by sight, but be sure to check your heading by

compass and note the features of the terrain to help you on your

way back.

The least sensible way up, or at least the most difficult, starts

at the summit of the unofficial portage between George and

O.S.A. Lakes. If you could head due west from there, you would

go directly to the eastern summit, but it would be difficult to

maintain a due-west course on account of the topography,

which is more challenging than it looks on the map. If I recall

correctly, the best way is to swing north of Teardrop Lake and

then southwest to the summit. This is a very rewarding route if

-23-

you’re up for it. To use an expression from the advertising

world, getting there is more than half the fun.

Peak 499

This one has no official name. I’ve dubbed it 499 since that’s the

altitude I read on the topographic map for some years. A fellow

I was with in 1971 called it Blueberry Hill for reasons that will

be clear if you climb it in late July or early August. For a

number of years more recently I did it every Thanksgiving

weekend. It’s been a while, now. Even though the park map

now says 498, making it a lesser achievement I suppose, it’s still

beyond me these days.

This hill overlooks the eastern end of O.S.A. Lake,

dominating the northern horizon, and it’s even more imposing

seen from Killarney Lake. Generally people climb this “peak”

from somewhere along the shoreline of O.S.A., but most years

I’ve landed on the Killarney L. Shore, near the 455 metre

portage and bushwhacked through the very pleasant woods

there until I judge that I’m in a good position to start the climb.

One year I so judged too early and my friends and I climbed

way up the wrong shoulder of the hill and ended up above a

deep ravine separating us from the intended route. We decided

to cut our loss and have lunch there. It was a cold, windy day so

we didn’t linger too long, but we did enjoy looking out over the

main valley past O.S.A., to Baie Fine and beyond. A beautiful

view under any circumstances, it was positively majestic as we

watched a series of small squalls forming near the western end

-24-

of the valley and sailing above and beyond us. Each one brought

a short period of precipitation and wildly shifting winds for

three or four minutes. Between them were periods of crystalline

sunshine against a deep blue sky.

Ridge walking

If you’re not intent upon bagging peaks, the possibilities for

wandering about the hills are endless. You might spend an hour

at it or all day.

The most popular and accessible area for this activity

extends from the hills overlooking the north shore of George

Lake and the country to the northwest of it. There are frequent,

sometimes constant views of the lake which can be compared to

the image on the map and help to confirm your position. There

are ridges near almost all of the canoe routes and most of them

make for good, if demanding, day-hiking. One caution, though:

When you come to a cliff that you think you can climb or

descend, don’t. Walk around it. This is especially pertinent in

the vicinity of George Lake where there are some impressive

cliffs made of brittle rock, and very slippery rock when it’s wet.

As for backpacking off-trail, there are two things to bear in

mind. First it is against park regulations and, second, there is

little to no drinkable water in most parts of the hills. Even if

you’re only up there for a few hours you should carry some with

you, especially in warm weather.

-25-

“Old timer” ... ?

One fine day in the Park office I was browsing through some

books in the Friends concession. I overheard part of a

conversation between the permit-issuing clerk and a couple

who needed some information about a route in the interior. The

clerk didn’t know the answer and I heard her say, “Why don’t

you ask Richard over there? He’s one of the old timers.”

Old timer? Me?! Granted, my present age of 73 might justify

that description, but this was 20 years ago. When I hear “old

timer” I usually think of a grizzled, snow-bearded character like

Gabby Hayes, but at the time of this incident I was far from

grizzled, and my beard was still brown. Mostly. (By the way, if

you don’t know who Gabby Hayes was, you are definitely not

an old timer.) Anyway, I was able to give the couple the

information they needed, and if hadn’t known the answer, I

suppose I could have pleaded senility.

In the park’s early years you didn’t need permits and in fact

it could be hard to find a park employee if you needed

information. But in due course permits became obligatory and

with them a better applied set of regulations. On at least one

occasion I arrived to learn that there was a fire ban in effect.

Not only that, people registering were required to show that

they had a stove in their packs. When my turn came I had to dig

in my pack for the item, even an old–timer like me. The clerk

was apologetic, but she should not have been. I hadn’t built a

fire in Killarney for years, mainly on account of the scarcity of

firewood near campsites in the interior. But she couldn’t know

-26-

George Lake in the mist

that. Besides, it might be possible that an old-timer might ignore

the fire ban, having used cooking fires for decades and feeling

that his skills would make it safe under any conditions. And

then, one time ...

Rules are for everyone.

-27-

A scenic route to Killarney

In the early 70s I quit whatever job I had in the spring and set

out to explore Killarney Park and its environs. One year a day

or two before my scheduled departure my car broke down. It

was an old machine and hardly worth the price of replacing the

engine, on top of which I didn’t have nearly enough money to

get it back on the road. Two friends, Ned and Charlie, were to

come with me, but neither of them had cars. What to do?

Pouring over my map collection, we noticed that there was

nothing between where we were, near Orillia, and Killarney

except for about 200 km of water, most of which was the

Georgian Bay. Now the Bay is serious “big water,” but it

appeared that most of our prospective route would be in the

shelter of the famous 30,000 Islands, so away we went.

Our first day’s paddle brought us to the west shore of

Beausoleil Island where we spent a pleasant night camped on a

sandy beach. The next day things became a little more difficult.

As soon as we’d cleared Beausoleil Island we found cottages

everywhere, and dozens of motor boats roaring back and forth.

One of the boats, carrying an adolescent boy and two girls of

like age, buzzed us repeatedly. With one pass its wake broke

over the side of our canoe and left us with a couple of inches of

water in the bilge. After a period of tense paddling we found a

dock where we could bail it out, but we determined to proceed

at the edge of the bay’s open water where we would encounter

less traffic. We watched for a campsite as we went along, but it

-28-

appeared that all the level shoreline was already occupied by

cottages.

We saw a few bumps on the horizon and headed toward

them. They turned out to be the Pine Islands, one of which was

cottaged. The rest were either bare or had light stands of pine

and, finding them congenial, we spent two nights on them.

They were dangerously far out, but my inexperience and a

gentle ground swell stilled the fear that we should have had.

When we left the Pines, we paddled to an area known as Sans

Souci where, once again, traffic and a nearly suburban

concentration of cottages prompted us to look elsewhere.

“Elsewhere “ turned out to be the Umbrella Islands, far out but

not so remote as the Pines and exquisitely lovely. Two nights

later we camped on Cathcart Island, a few kilometres southwest

of the entrance to Parry Sound.

Charlie had to leave us the next day so, setting out under a

gray sky early the next morning, we resolved to go ashore at one

of the road heads north of Franklin Island, a moderate day’s

paddle away. We picked our way through a long stretch of

shoals, arriving near the Jones Island Light in about an hour.

There we were confronted by the bay that lies outside of the

islands that protect Parry Sound. I estimated the distance across

to be about five kilometres, perhaps an hour’s paddle. In fact, it

is about twice that. Still, there was no wind and everything

went well until we were within 1500 metres of the safe haven

of Franklin.

We started hearing thunder, first from far off, then

approaching us with alarming speed. That might still have been

-29-

all right had the wind not come up violently from the east in

just a matter of seconds. It was blowing us out to sea, so we

executed a turn of about 150 degrees to point us into the wind.

We had to take five or six steep, curling waves almost dead

broadside, and I’m not sure that any of us expected to make it.

Having executed the turn successfully we found ourselves

not far from Franklin Island but closer to a small but high

formation called Black Rock. We chose the latter because it was

directly upwind from us and, once arrived, we hove to in its lee.

Then the sky opened and we bailed more or less continuously

for ten or fifteen minutes. Lightning struck the water several

times perhaps a kilometre or so away. It was hard to tell. I didn’t

say as much to my friends, but I was thinking, “Maybe the Fool

Killer has finally caught up with me.”

When the squall had passed we climbed onto the rock,

huddled beneath a plastic tarp and shared a bag of peanuts. Then

we got into the canoe and paddled to the road head where Ned

and I bade Charlie an emotional goodbye. We camped on a

nearby Island, waking the next morning to an exceptionally

dense fog.

Perhaps something in me wanted to give the Fool Killer a

sporting chance; we set out in the densest of fogs, navigating by

compass alone. For the next seven hours we didn’t see anything

but fog, the water and, for a few seconds, a loon who quickly

became visible about a paddle-length to our left and disappeared

just as quickly. When we finally saw land there was a fisherman

casting from the shore. He informed us that we had come to

Head Island. We had paddled blind for 37 kilometres.

-30-

We camped on some low rocks to the north of the island

and, consulting our map, learned that we were about a day’s

paddle from Byng Inlet. Ned had to be back in the city in a few

days and since Byng Inlet offered the last access to a road before

Killarney, Ned and I had to say our goodbyes the next

afternoon.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, though I wouldn’t call it

anticlimactic. Once I got over my loneliness, and that only took

a few hours, I paddled through the most wonderful scenery.

Being alone seemed to amplify the beauty of my surroundings

while the La Cloche Hills grew larger on the horizon day by

day. In five days I reached Killarney village where I took the

afternoon off and bought some snacks. Two days later I was

basking in the magnificence of Baie Fine and that evening I set

up my tent at the end of the Old Trout Lake Road. I had arrived.

-31-

Although I survived the trip and remember it fondly, there

were some lessons learned. First, three people in a canoe is

never a great idea, particularly in a sixteen-foot canoe. On the

Georgian Bay it is just plain stupid. The weather must be

respected no matter what kind of canoe you have and until you

have a reliable sense of impending conditions you should plot

your route as conservatively as possible.

I have paddled the bay many, many times over the years,

sometimes as far as Killarney. But since the early 70s I have

always started somewhere north of Parry Sound. Even at that,

there are areas where you have to be wary of private property.

A few years ago age caught up with me and I have been unable

to paddle. Nevertheless, my memories are vivid, even glowing,

and I expect that they will be with me until the end of my days.

-32-

Good night

It’s one o’clock Saturday morning at the Johnnie Lake dam.

Gerry, his brother Chris and I have just arrived from Toronto.

We had planned to sleep in the car and head out in the

morning, but the night is clear and mild. We decide to put the

canoe on the water and head to a little island near the second

narrows to camp. In these pre-permit days such things are

possible.

An owl breaks the quiet of the night briefly as we transfer

our gear from the car, but once we are making our eastward way

under the stars an almost mystical stillness prevails. None of us

speaks and, without making a conscious decision, we paddle as

quietly as we can. Then, somewhere in the nearby darkness, a

loon lets loose with a resounding, mournful call. Chris, who has

never been very far from Toronto, is more than a little startled.

“What was that?” he asks in a trembling whisper. “A man-

eating loon,” his brother replies with a snicker. But once we’ve

got over our giggles and the loon has had its say, silence prevails

again.

As we make the sharp left turn into the first narrows, things

look subtly different on account of light reflected from a rising

moon, still invisible to us. But a few minutes later, as the

channel opens up and we first see Silver Peak, we gasp almost in

unison at the pearly beauty of the light shining from the peak’s

top hundred metres. And as we paddle on, the light extends

lower until it has bathed all the foot hills in its chaste radiance,

then even the rocks and trees at the water’s edge.

-33-

Entering the big bay at the north of that channel we swing

to the east gradually, lingering amongst the wonders that

surround us. Shortly afterward we find our way to a bare islet

beneath some cliffs. This is our destination. We don’t set up a

tent as the night is clear and mild and, despite the long day

we’ve put in, we are too keyed up to go to bed right away. So we

make some hot chocolate and sip on it as we watch the shadow

of a nearby cliff steal toward us. And when it arrives it changes

the complexion of everything. We can still see bright areas of

land and lake in the distance, but thousands of stars that had

been obscured by the direct glow of the moon reemerge during

the next few minutes. And then, as we crawl into our sleeping

bags, we hear a loon again, this time further away and echoing

richly. Another loon calls from the opposite direction and is

answered.

It is as though Johnny Lake is a vast, starry-domed cathedral

resplendent with the echoing antiphony of lonely-sounding

angels and, feeling deeply blessed, we surrender ourselves to the

holy night and to deep and peaceful sleep.

-34-