Pensive Lake Wilderness Tour

This past long weekend I headed out on the Pensive Lake Wilderness Tour with Daniel, a bunch of his friends and Kelly and her friend Jill - total of eight paddlers split between three canoes and two kayaks.

This had been a week in the planning, and all started to fall apart on Thursday night when people began to bail, leading to the invitation of other, and then even more so on Friday night when two key people were forced to bail at the utter last minute. Still, we forged on and met out at Tibbett Lake early Saturday morning! 

The first day of the trip was a scorcher, probably close to 26c out. Definitely was in the 20s when we left that morning at 8! We set off from Tibbett Lake and crossed Goop Lake (waist high goop at the shore) on to Upper Terry Lake where we stopped for a snack break and a swim - best idea ever. It was sooo nice and this is really where we actually all interacted and met each other in the group - Blair, Daniel, Garish, Jill, Jocelyn, Julian and Kelly - and swam in the unbelievably warm water! It was also after this stop that I realised my paddling partner had never steered a canoe before, and wouldn't let me.
We continued along with a bunch of tiny portages on to Saunders Lake where we stopped for lunch. Almost as bad as Garish portaging bottles of wine in!
This was a really long and narrow lake, and I dont know if Julian was genuinely offering to let me kayak, or if he was trying to commandeer the canoe to get some straight paddling on the go. Either way, he offered to let me try his kayak after. Super exciting. I had only kayaked once before - sea kayaking at field school in Fleur de Lys. Jocelyne said I looked like a natural, it was so fast, and I really enjoyed it. Sort of confirmed my desire to rent a kayak in the future! The only trade off was that I had to then portage the kayak, which he had full of beer.

The rest of the portages from here onto the Ross River were small, or we skipped completely with lining up the little portions. It was like wading in bath water while we went up river. 

We made it to Ross Lake after 28km of paddling/portaging and found ourselves a little island where we set camp. We spent the night swimming, dining and enjoying wine. Daniel and I smartly brought it in platypus/wine bags, though Kelly didn't agree, she thought bringing wine to begin with was a ridiculously useless thing to portage. Meh. Watched the sun set and headed for bed. 

The next morning started off with a swim and it was another glorious day! Jocelyne paddled with me and we decided all we wanted to do was float with our feet in the water! That didn't fly, and we held the group up quite a bit (but not really, we had all day!)

We portaged over to Pensive Lake - one unbelievably hard, the other super easy because it was the winter road.

Once on Pensive I kayaked for a bit, we stopped for a break in the sun. Daniel and Garish caught some fish and we all relaxed. Here the winds picked up and we ended up paddling into the wind for the remainder of the lake. HARD WORK!

We camped at the head of the Cameron River on Sunday night and became engulfed in smoke! It looked pretty cool. We camped at a place where I am certain is a potential archaeological site. Mind you we didn't see anything on the surface like tent rings... but it's location and the fact that it was cleared just jumped at me. That night we enjoyed gin and tea courtesy of Jocelyne, which made for a late night. A litte too late for Jill and Kelly, I got up at 9:30 to see them setting off down the river. We were down to six. 

Our group didn't set off until around noon, and with them gone, meant I had to paddle with Garish still, who wasn't letting me steer yet. This is where I got worried. The rest of the day was white water. Him never steering before, let alone doing white water in a canoe, and me never doing white water before. We made for the worst couple ever and got stuck in the first major rapids. This scared me for the remaining ones after we had to be rescued by Daniel and Julian, lost our paddle and almost the canoe. Unfortunately the experience didn't deter Garish even though I was only using half of an extra kayak paddle, I had to plead with him to portage other rapids, which I only won out on one set. I was so scared he would not line up and we'd get stuck/flip again. 

But we made it out alive, our casualty list was my paddle, knee pad/chair, camera and Garish's phone and packsack which had its straps cut so Daniel could lighten the canoe to get it out. 

It was a fantastic weekend, so much sun, amazing weather, and just to be out in the city was magnificent! We paddled/portaged of 60km and I can't wait until Daniel plans the next trip :D