Environmentally Speaking

Cleaning lost canoe routes

By Mark VanKooy Mountain Equipment Co-op

BRILLIANT SUNSETS, laughing loons, sparkling water. Paddling in one of Ontario’s many provincial parks can be a wonderful experience.

Lately, though, the experience also requires a healthy dose of patience and understanding – patience while you wait in line to reach a portage trail, and understanding when you have to step over someone else’s gear and canoe at the portage head. The word seems to have gotten out about canoe tripping. Everyone is doing it.

Crowded provincial parks have driven many canoeists seeking a little solitude to look for new paddling destinations. Many of these people are finding their new destinations in old, “forgotten” canoe routes.

Find Those Lost Canoe Routes

Canoe guide author, Kevin Callan, released a book last year to help those in search of the less traveled route. In writing Lost Canoe Routes, Callan realized the position into which he was putting himself. By publishing these routes, they would no longer be “lost.” What’s more, the very solitude some people seek might also be lost.

But Callan hoped that if more canoeists started to use alternative riverine trails, it would relieve congestion on overcrowded routes, and introduce paddlers to new places to dip their paddles.

Here’s the problem: many of these routes were not just forgotten by paddlers, but had been abandoned by local and provincial ministries. Years of budget cutbacks had spread Ministry of Natural Resource staffing so thinly that they could no longer maintain all of the canoe routes that Ontario has to offer.

That’s when Callan approached us at Mountain Equipment Co-op. He wanted

to know if we would be interested in helping to maintain some of these “lost” canoe routes through our Social and Environmental Responsibility Program. We readily agreed.

Setting Do-able Goals

Not long afterwards, our store set a practical goal: clean up at least two canoe routes per year, including those listed in the Lost Canoe Routes guide, and others that were not.

The task involved: • Cleaning up old campsites • Putting in new campfire pits • Trimming and clearing portages • Even removing loads of garbage from some sites.

Where did we start? Wicksteed Lake, just north of North Bay, was our first challenge.

Over 20 campsites nestle into the hills along the endless shoreline of this beautiful lake. The entrance to Wicksteed Lake involves a simple drive to the water’s edge. This ease of access has also been the lake’s biggest enemy. Large groups of weekend campers using motor boats take everything with them, stopping just short of the kitchen sink. Unfortunately, many of them forget to take these items back out with them.

Years ago when it was popular to bury trash behind your campsite, Wicksteed Lake was a popular canoe route. Finding buried garbage from the 1970s did, however, provide some nostalgia for some of us. After visiting 22 campsites, we had eight canoes heaped to overflowing with refuse consisting of lawn chairs, bottles, cans and polyethylene tarps.

Not Wilderness Landfill Sites

Please don’t let me scare you away from visiting this beautiful lake. It may sound as though the campsites were little more than wilderness landfill sites, but they were not. At many of the lake’s campsites, we had to look hard to find any garbage; at other sites, the treasures were more obvious. (Let’s face it, if no one cleans up campsites on a lake for many years, they’re going to get messy.)

What do we hope to accomplish with the clean-ups? We anticipate folks will notice that someone has taken time to clean the sites, and do the same when

they leave. Perhaps they’ll be inspired to even pick up some refuse left behind by previous campers. We’re not trying to take over where provincial ministries leave off. What we are hoping is that everyone using a canoe route, regardless of whether or not it is “lost,” will clean up after themselves, and if they have to, the folks before them.

Right now we are making plans to head to the historic York River near Bancroft. Mountain Equipment staff are anxious to paddle down this river on a cool November weekend, leaving clean campsites and renovated portages in our wake. Can’t wait!

About the author: Mark VanKooy is Mountain Equipment Co-op’s Social and Environmental Responsibilities Coordinator. If you’d like to discuss this, or similar, programs with him, call 729-2700, or e-mail him at mvankooy@mec.ca.