Quetico Provincial Park

August 7 - 10, 2020

Knowing that we had three nights in Quetico Provincial Park and that the drive was only a few hours, we didn’t rush to get there. We made a slight deviation from the suggested route so that we could stop at Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park. We weren’t expecting it to also be such a cute little town!

Ten years ago, my entire family met up in Calgary to visit my younger sister’s family. My mom and our family chose to fly there, but my older sister and her family decided to drive out from just north of Toronto and camp along the way. One of the places they camped was at Kakabeka Falls (a place we’d been to as kids as well on one of our cross country road trips). On their way out, stopped for coffee at the Metropolitan Moose and from their description, I knew that if it was still there, we’d need to stop. And it was!

We visited the falls first. Because we had stayed at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park the night before, our permit allowed to enter Kakabeka Provincial Park for free. A great benefit - your Provincial Parks overnight permit is also valid as a day pass at any other Provincial Park. The falls are gorgeous and so powerful. They’re surrounded by an elaborate system of boardwalks for visitors to take in the many breathtaking views of both the falls and the canyon. We crossed over to the other side of the falls and walked as far as the visitor centre and gift shop before checking out the Riverside Campground. We weren’t planning a long stop, so didn’t have time to walk through the other two campgrounds. Many of the Riverside Sites were really pretty, with lots of trees and bushes for a good amount of privacy and likely to help dilute the noise from the highway, that runs right beside the campground. The sites closer to the entrance would be great to stay in, but once you go further in, the highway noise is quite loud. There weren’t any sites that we could see, with a river view.

Ready to pick up a few essentials, we backtracked a few minutes into town, stopping at the grocery store and LCBO, leaving the Metropolitan Moose for last. What a wonderful little cafe! It’s a log cabin type building with a gift shop, some outdoor seating and loads of charm! We picked up scones (London Fog and Peach - both delicious!) and butter tarts (without raisins - yippee!) as well as coffee. We also had the chance to meet the owners - who have owned it for 16 years - a lovely couple that were so nice to chat with! We left Kakabeka Falls with coffee, treats and warm hearts.

We found this leg of the drive to be not quite as scenic, but with virtually no traffic. We took the opportunity to talk to both Josh and Lalita for a few minutes to pass the time. We also saw a moose at the side of the road, but I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo.

By late afternoon, the sun was gone, the clouds had rolled in and it started to rain a bit as we pulled into Quetico Provincial Park. The Visitor Centre at Quetico was quite impressive and unexpected! Sadly, much of it was closed, but the gift shop was open and they not only sold the Ontario Parks stickers that I was collecting, but also ice cream!

We stopped to dump and fill up our fresh water tank and then headed to Site 100 in the Objibwa Campground (nearly running over a snake on our way!). When we checked in, we were told this was one of the best campsites in our section and they were right! We had private access to one of the beaches - the one where dogs are allowed, which was SO convenient for us. It’s also the beach where people can launch their canoes, kayaks or SUPs. It wasn’t the most private of sites, but that’s never a huge concern for us. We’ll take close to water over privacy any day.

I don’t think we were even fully set up and Chris and Daisy were down on the beach for a swim. Daisy had a terrific time jumping around in the water. After not wanting to go near the water for the first two years of her life, she’s all of a sudden become quite a water dog. It’s so fun to watch her play. We had leftovers for supper and then I headed off for a swim. The water was so refreshing - just what we needed since, despite the clouds and rain, it was fairly humid with not much of a breeze. Even though our site was right beside the water, there were lots of trees, so our view was fairly obscured by the trees.

Even with the fan on, it was a warm night! Only about 20 degrees Celsius, but with lots of humidity. It was much too warm for the duvet! We settled in to watch a new show: Dead to Me - pretty funny, but also a little far fetched!

The next morning, we noticed that our batteries were much lower than we expected them to be. While we’re not certain, we figured that the combination of not being plugged in for three days and a drive that wasn’t especially long was not a terrific strategy for recharging our batteries. We noticed that our batteries didn’t charge as much as we expected on the short drive from Pancake Bay to Agawa Bay, but both were short stays and we didn’t really give it much more thought. These were brand new batteries that we purchased right before this trip and we were told that it takes a few cycles before they hold their longest charge. This might have been a part of the problem as well. In any case, we needed to conserve our batteries and were able to charge them up a bit every so often by plugging into, and running the car for a bit of a charge. We use the batteries mostly for our fantastic fan, as well as the water pump, the radio, lights and sometimes electronics. On this particular leg, we made sure to charge our devices when we went out in the car.

Our first morning at Quetico was pretty slow. We took our time getting up, having our coffee and then eating some breakfast. There were three families camping together (and another that came for the day) close by and between them, there were 14 kids! It was a pretty nice day and they spent most of it on the small beach by us laughing and playing in the water. Chris was down at the beach with Daisy and struck up a conversation with one of the dads (his family was staying at a cottage nearby). He had four kids aged 11 to 2.

Saturday was one a pretty hot day, so the bugs weren’t too bad. We found there were more of the big horse/deer/black flies than mosquitos. And certainly the most we’d seen since our first night at Grundy Lake. They picked up on our second day, when it was a little cooler.

At around noon, we left to hike the Teaching Trail. It was a little more than 2.7 km one way and instead of backtracking on the trail, we followed the road back, walking through the Chippewa campground, where there are some really nice campsites along the water. We enjoyed the trail - it had a huge variety of different vegetation and types of trees, many that I hadn’t really seen before (that’s not hard to do - we live in the city!). Hiking at noon on a hot day isn’t easy for poor Daisy. Luckily, there were many places where she could stop to drink from the lake water along the way - a practice she’s grown so fond of that she’ll sometimes shun her water bowl! The end of the trail connected with a short trail back to the main road leading to the main beach where there were benches. We gladly took a break on one of the benches and took in the beautiful water view. After going through the Chippewa campground, we linked back up with the Teaching Trail and retraced our steps back to the end, which happened to be right beside our campsite (and another reason why we had traffic coming through our site - people got to the end of the trail and didn’t quite know where to go next!). By the time we finished the hike, I was feeling quite exhausted. This happens when I don’t plan my food intake very well and this was no exception - I was famished! Chris doesn’t seem to have this issue because while I was eating lunch, he went out for a 12 km run in the heat and humidity! He mentioned that it was a hard run when he returned.

Sights from the Teaching Trail:

For lunch, I ate the leftover fish in a wrap, with tomatoes, spinach and cucumber. When we first bought Holly, many people told us we would rarely want to cook in her because we wouldn’t want the lingering smells. Fish and bacon were high on the list of “don't cook inside” foods. But, we’re happy to say that we use our fantastic fan every time we cook and have never felt like there was any lingering smell afterwards. And we cook most of the time inside. We actually find the downside of cooking inside is that it heats up our Holly more than we’d like, not that we have lingering smells.

Just as Chris was returning from his run, the beach cleared out and we went down for a swim with Daisy. It had been packed all day and we had it all to ourselves and enjoyed a refreshing swim.

We’d never been this far north before, so we went for a short drive into the town of Atikokan, even though we knew everything would probably be closed (it was). It was a really cute place that felt like a ghost town! There were almost no people around and other than a pizza place, everything was closed. We walked through Heritage Park where the Atikokan Centennial Museum is. The park has many large artifacts (such as a huge dump truck and old time farming equipment, that I somehow didn’t manage to get a photo of?) that include signs telling the reader how they were used. It was really interesting. Atikokan used to be a mining town and isn’t located anywhere near a body of water. As we were leaving the park, the sun was just starting to set and when we passed the Main Street, the light on it was amazing. I wish I had stopped to take a photo, as the street lights lining the road and the light from the sunset made it a beautiful view.

We stopped for gas and Chris came out with hagendaas ice cream bars, which were delicious! Who can resist one on such a warm day?

The drive from Atikokan back to Quetico PP isn’t long, so we arrived just in time to see the most glorious sunset from the beach. The colours were stunning! We met a really interesting older couple who were tent camping (and from Thunder Bay), and chatted with them until the bugs started biting and we returned to Holly ready for bed. We watched two more episodes (the last two we had downloaded) of Dead to Me and will need to remember to start up with it once we return home.

We plugged Holly into the car when we arrived back at our site, just for a few minutes to give our batteries a little juice and then went to bed with the fan and just a sheet. The temperature went down quite a bit overnight and at some point we turned off the fan and even had to pull up the duvet! I needed to use the bathroom at around 3 am and decided to also go outside to see the sky, since we’re in one of the darkest areas in the province. The sky was light because of the moon, but the stars were SO bright as well. I should have taken out my tripod and played around with my camera, but I wasn’t fully awake and wanted to go back to bed and still sleep. If I had a better idea of what to do for night/starry sky photos, I would have definitely done some. My knowledge is very limited, though and getting out the camera would require a bit too much thinking in the middle of the night!

Sunny skies were on the agenda for our morning wake up. It was so nice to lay in bed with the sun streaming in. Chris made eggs for breakfast again - he doesn’t cook a lot, but he makes a delicious egg breakfast!

The clouds crept in and the rain started at about noon. Chris had some work to do, so I read my book while it thundered and rained for most of the afternoon. Later in the day, the rain subsided and we took a drive to the Visitor Center and walked along the Pickerel Point Trail, an accessible boardwalk that took us first to the pet exercise area/beach (just a small ways off the trail), and then to the day use beach. The trail was really pretty and it was a nice walk - about 2 km in total, but because it had been raining off and on, the boardwalk was wet and slippery in places. In the end, we were happy for the rainy day, as it allowed us to lounge around and not feel compelled to do a whole lot of anything! And, despite the rain, the sunset was another pretty one.

We ate leftovers for supper and used a small bit of data to remind me of the rules for cribbage. We’ve carried my cribbage board around for 3 seasons and have never played! So, I finally taught Chris how to play. Once we started, it all came back to me (my parents played often when we camped and taught me to play when I was a kid). Chris must have had a bit of beginner’s luck because he beat me in both games and nearly skunked me in one! We headed off to bed and started watching the Jeffrey Epstein Series.

On Monday morning, we both took quick showers and washed our hair, Daisy went for a short walk and I made some coffee for the car. We hitched up, put everything away and pulled out of our site at a very respectable 9:30 am for a beautiful and sunny day of driving.

Quetico Provincial Park was a nice park and for someone who loves to be on the water in kayaks, canoes or stand up paddle boards, it's an excellent place. I suspect that if we had kayaks we would have enjoyed it quite a bit more. We’re happy that we were able to spend time at Quetico, but we likely won’t go back as it’s a bit off the beaten track when going further west and a bit more remote than we prefer. Perhaps if we’d been there in a non-covid time when the weather wasn’t as rainy or if we hadn’t been worried about our batteries quite as much, we might have had a different opinion. But we stayed at so many amazing provincial parks on this trip that Quetico just wasn’t in our list of favourites, with the exception of the sunsets. Quetico sunsets were by far the prettiest and most diverse in colour that we saw in 16 days.

Next stop: Rainbow Falls Provincial Park (with a stop at Ouimet Canyon Provincial Park)

Sleeping Giant Provincial Park - Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park - Quetico Provincial Park

Towing: 245 km

Driving: 109.7 km

Batteries: 11.9

We worried for most of this stay about our batteries, since they didn’t fully charge on the drive from Sleeping Giant. When we left Quetico on Monday, they were at 11.9.  We plugged into the car a few times (leaving the car off) and twice with the car running for a short period to try to get them topped up a bit, but it was a constant worry for our three nights. Luckily, the drive to our next park was a pretty full day and as expected, our batteries charged up enough for the stay.

Fresh Water Tank: Again, I forgot to take a photo of our usage, but we used our portable fresh water and didn’t need to fill up our tank on the way out. We likely had used about 70% of the water in our fresh water tank, if I were to guess, since it wasn’t low enough to fill on the way out.

Combined Grey/Black Water Tank: We used our large bucket for our grey water from dishes mostly and we dumped it once. Luckily, we were pretty close to the vault toilets, but they were well used during our stay and I needed to keep an eye to see when they were free! We didn’t need to dump our black tank until we arrived at Rainbow Falls PP.