Paddle where Tom did

Need a quick fix of Algonquin Park but you only have a day? A trip to Canoe Lake can provide a quick remedy.

MUSKOKA SUN - I only had five hours to spare, a bottle of water and a sample package of sunscreen. But that was all I needed for a short getaway on this most famous of Algonquin’s lakes.
At the Portage Store on Canoe Lake, I was quickly outfitted with a canoe, paddle, life-jacket and emergency package (that orange container).
Normally you should make arrangements in advance. Just 14 kilometres from the park’s western boundary on Highway 69, Canoe Lake can be very busy. But I had a massive impulse to escape for a fix of serenity, the exercise of canoeing and maybe a glimpse of the ghost of Tom Thomson who mysteriously drowned here in 1917.
I have taken this paddle route before, following in the footsteps and waterways of Thomson. He stayed at the Mowat Lodge here where he painted and worked as a guide. You can visit his grave site, paddle past his fiancée Winifred Trainor’s Victorian cottage, and get an idea of the area he painted in.
If you visit Potter’s Creek you can pass the remnants of the Gilmour Lumber Mill, which closed in 1911. An ancient log bridge still stands and you can canoe underneath it.
It was late afternoon after a long holiday weekend and the park’s visitors were all heading home. Thrilled to have bagged a canoe and having transportation, I headed up the side of the lake that I was familiar with.
The Taylor Statten camps Ahmek and Wapomeo are still in operation and the buildings are very interesting to see and photograph. Taylor Statten was a veteran of the Boer War. He had been working with kids and decided to open up a children’s camp on Canoe Lake in 1921, when became the first Canadian-owned summer camp in Algonquin Park.
The late light on the buildings was spectacular. They looked like a Group of Seven painting, colours so vivid you would think they were fake: crimson reds, hunter greens graduating to brilliant lime green and tangerine orange clouds, topped with pink and mauve, rust-coloured trees, blue-black pines and skies of primary blue.
Seeing this light at its best confirmed my belief that the scene the artists saw and painted was real and not dabbled with like a modern day digitally manipulated image.
The twilight drove me nuts and I continued to paddle further up the lake and down to Potter’s Creek.
At this point you may want to paddle over to the memorial cairn for Thomson on Hayhurst Point, one of his favourite campsites. There’s a stone cairn with a bronze plaque designed by J.E.H. MacDonald and also a totem pole.
By this time the sun had set, the sky was awash in a blazing sunset but the winds had come up. It took all my strength to paddle back to the Portage Store, exhausted but ecstatic with my mini canoe adventure.

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