We weren’t overly ambitious this trip, we didn’t know what the portages would be like with all of the snow so we didn’t plan to travel more than a few hours per day. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing , after all the whole point is to relax right? Our plan was to head down the Barron River through ‘The Cascades’ and on to High Falls Lake. Our original plan was to paddle to the south end of High Falls lake and try to bushwhack our way to the famous High Falls Rock Slide. We decided last minute to ditch that idea and head straight for Opalescent Lake where we spent the night.

When planning for this trip Tyler told me I was completely in charge of our route. Little did he know; out of all the distance we were covering in 3 days, half of it was portaging and the other half canoeing, although we weren’t covering a substantial distance it’s still not typical for a ‘canoe trip’! Luckily all of the portages were easy to navigate and fairly straight forward. We reached the end of the 640m portage from Ooze lake to Opalescent early in the afternoon.

Because we arrived at our destination a few hours before sun-down we took this opportunity to explore all of the campsites. We did this even though I knew exactly what site I wanted. As a matter of fact, I think anyone who has ever been to this lake knows exactly what site I’m talking about, but we’ll get to that later…

Tyler checking out an impressive site on Opalescent Lake.

After doing some exploring around the lake for probably close to an hour we made our way over to our home for the night, the famous Flintstone’s Site! This site has the most amazing fire pit and seating area I have ever seen at any interior camp site. Ever. The rock couch can potentially sit 12 people comfortably, it was almost a waste with only the two of us occupying it, but I think we were probably the only people canoe tripping in the area anyways.

We spent most of the afternoon collecting a small amount of firewood and relaxing with some sort of warm beverage or soup to try and stay warm. The temperature hovered around 2 degrees Celsius all day. Thankfully there wasn’t much wind at any point on this trip, but the steady drizzle sure made it feel cold! For a short period the drizzle escalated to a light rain, so we took the hint and setup our tents and tarp.  When the rain once again returned to a light drizzle we started a fire so we could get supper going. Tyler had brought along some frozen sausages which had some venison in them that he harvested in the fall hunt of 2015. He offered me one of them which I couldn’t refuse, I then repeatedly told him when he harvests his deer in 2016 I want to buy some sausages from him! They were delicious! (So Tyler, if you’re reading this… haha) For supper I had a Lipton SideKick with some pulled pork that I had leftover from supper 2 nights earlier at home. Although I would have preferred something grilled on the fire it was good nonetheless. My dog Zeus got lucky and had quite the feast of leftovers…

Taken from one of the many awesome campsites on Opalescent Lake.

We retired to our tents fairly early this night, probably around 9:30, which I guess isn’t that early considering it was completely dark before 5:30. The sun setting so early is one of the only downsides of late fall camping in my opinion. A good headlamp or flashlight is definitely a necessity!

Unfortunately to my dismay I awoke suddenly at around 3am to the sound of my dog Zeus vomiting in my tent!  (Good thing we didn’t share tents, eh Tyler?)

<–Part 1 | Part 3–>