With just two weeks left before my backpacking trip in Gros Morne, NF, my partner Judy and I decided to do one final backpacking trip to make sure our gear was in order. The original plan was to do the first loop on the Highlands backpacking trail in Algonquin provincial park over 3 days and 2 nights. However, a sudden severe rainstorm warning forced us to turn this into a 2 day one night trip. Instead of doing the loop, we decided to do an out-and-back to Head Lake.
The day started with a phone call at 5:30am from our colleague Cesar. He knew that Judy and I would be heading to Algonquin that morning and decided that he wanted to join. If it were any other person, it’d be an unusual request but Cesar was known for his spontaneous decisions so we welcomed him with open arms. We ended up meeting him at a service station along highway 400 before arriving at the trailhead at 1pm.
The first part of the trail to Provoking Lake was a little steep but the trail was wide and well maintained. But we knew right away that it’d be a challenge to keep our feet dry as we were forced to rock hop over many wet sections of the trail.
After around 90 minutes of relatively easy hiking, we eventually made it to the trail heading towards our destination of Head Lake. The nature of the terrain immediately changed as it became rougher with many sections of steep trail along with boulder fields and narrow wooden bridges. One of these bridges was completely submerged in around 30cm of fast flowing water so we were forced to walk across with our bare feet. Hana the portage puppy had to be carried to prevent her from being flushed out but was fine on every other section.
A viewpoint located around halfway between Provoking Lake and Head Lake provided a nice place to take a break. To our surprise, it even had cell service.
Once we descended down to Head Lake, we still had another kilometer before we reached our campsite and it seemed to go on forever. We ended up arriving at around 7pm.
Our campsite (Head 01) had a nice view of the lake and was quite spacious but didn’t seem to have any flat areas to set up a tent. Especially three tents. I set up my Durston Tarp tent for the first time and really liked it until I crawled in the for the night. After realizing that I had set up my tent on a slight incline, I quickly realized the disadvantages of having a non free standing tarp tent. After repositioning myself in the tent, I realized that my sleeping pad had a leak and was forced to re-inflate it hourly. At one point during the night, I stepped out of my tent to try the night mode on my iPhone camera and was impressed with the results. Upon returning to my tent, I noticed Hana was missing but figured she’d be back as I fell back to sleep.
The following morning, Cesar explained that he found Hana in his sleeping bag when he returned to his tent after stepping out in the middle of the night. He thought it was a racoon or some huge rodent and freaked out. I couldn’t blame Hana since my tent was a cramped one person tarp tent while he was sleeping in a spacious 2 person tent.
The return hike was uneventful and took around 6hrs including a lunch break at the viewpoint. The terrain seemed a little dryer on the way back and the flooded bridge (which required us to carry Hana across) had no sign of flooding as the stream flowed well beneath it.
Here’s a final pic taken by a stranger at the viewpoint.
Upon returning to the parking lot, we headed into Huntsville for some Korean fried chicken before parting ways. A short but awesome 2 days in the backcountry.
