Ontario's Wabakimi park delivers wild, remote alternative to BWCA and Quetico

ARMSTRONG, ONTARIO – The canoe on my shoulders was feeling heavier as I hiked along an overgrown portage trail that grew fainter with each step — then disappeared.

What the heck?

I gingerly set the canoe down in the lush green forest, wiped sweat from my brow, and scanned the dense woods. No sign of a trail.

I backtracked my steps. Downed trees obliterated the portage. I hiked around the blowdown, found the trail, then went back for my canoe.

"The portage is over here," I said to my paddling partner, Kevin Panzer of Lakeville, who arrived carrying one of our gear packs.

We were in the middle of an 11-day trek last June in Ontario's Wabakimi Provincial Park, a sprawling wilderness twice the size of Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness about 160 miles north of Thunder Bay, Ontario — a 500-mile, 9 ½-hour drive from the Twin Cities.

This is remote country, difficult to get to and lightly visited, allowing us to travel for days on pristine lakes and rivers without seeing another soul. We never shared a lake with other campers. And we sometimes worked to find portages.

That's indeed part of the allure of Wabakimi. It's an alternative to the more heavily traveled BWCA and adjacent Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario. Consider: The million-acre BWCA gets about 150,000 visitors a year. Quetico, at 1.1 million acres, gets about 15,000 to 20,000 visitors. Wabakimi, all 2.3 million acres, gets less than 1,000 backcountry paddlers.

That means you'd better be prepared.

"You have to be self-sufficient and understand your limits," said Shannon Lawr, Wabakimi park superintendent. "We have about a half dozen lakes that are really, really big, and you have to paddle them under the right conditions."

Panzer and I are veteran wilderness paddlers with decades of experience, so we were comfortable with Wabakimi's challenges. We packed plenty of dried pasta and rice meals for dinners, which we supplemented with fried walleyes. Breakfast was oatmeal and toasted bagels. Lunch usually was peanut butter or sausage and cheese on flatbread.

We filtered our drinking water, though I've skipped that safety measure on many wilderness trips, without ill effects.

Solitude and challenges aren't the only attractions to Wabakimi.

"There's no road to the park, no access points with parking lots, like Quetico," Lawr said. Visitors can paddle waters near the towns of Armstrong on the east or Savant Lake on the west to reach the park. Visitors also can hire a local floatplane and fly into the park.

But the unique way of getting there is by train. VIA Rail Canada crosses the southern boundary of the park, and that's how I've entered on my two visits.

Panzer and I drove to Armstrong, population 1,200, and parked a few dozen feet from where the train stops on its way across Canada. There's no depot. Travelers just wait next to the tracks.

When our train arrived, we loaded our canoe and packs into the baggage car, then found a seat on a crowded passenger car. The train crosses Canada, so it's not unusual to chat to folks from Vancouver or Nova Scotia, or anywhere between.

Taking the train requires planning. It only runs three times a week, and you have to make the day and place of your pickup clear ahead of time. The train will stop in the middle of the wilderness to drop you off or pick you up.

Amazing.

But the trains notoriously run on their own time. So flexibility is important. We waited four hours for our train on our return trip. But with nowhere to be, we didn't mind.

"Flying is far more efficient," Lawr said, "but taking the train is a neat experience."

It often runs late because freight trains get priority on the tracks, he explained. But there's no more unusual way to enter a wilderness.

We mostly used jigs with plastic twister-tails but also caught fish on crankbaits.

"The fishing is so phenomenal," said Panzer, who immediately began reeling in walleyes at our first campsite at a pool below some rapids.

We released most fish, keeping a couple each day to fry golden-brown for dinner.

Don't expect a giant-sized BWCA or Quetico.

"Wabakimi is pure boreal forest — there are no white pine, just mostly black spruce and jackpine," Lawr said.

"We don't have as many portages as Quetico," Lawr said. "A lot of lakes are interconnected with white-water tributaries. Instead of paddling lake to lake to lake, it's more like lake to river to lake to river."

There's also white-water rapids to avoid or run, depending on your inclination and experience.

"The white water does add an extra level of skills that are required," Lawr said. We paddled a Kevlar canoe, so we skipped the rapids, but sometimes waded with the canoe along the calmer edges.

And there are those portages.

"We only have two to four people clearing portages," Lawr said, with rangers hired from local First Nation communities. Blazes on trees mark portages. But with little use, portages can be difficult to find.

We spent 20 minutes searching for one portage and temporarily lost one another, but otherwise, had little trouble navigating the 75 miles we traveled.

Paddling from a narrows into a small lake, we spotted a bull moose 100 yards from shore, standing in shallow water, oblivious to us. And woodland caribou roam this country, though we didn't spot any. Black bears, wolves, lynx and bald eagles also call Wabakimi home.

Wabakimi also differs from Quetico and the BWCA in that there are remote outposts and fishing lodges in the park, where motorboats are used. We encountered a couple boats on one large lake, but chose a route that avoided other fly-in lodges.

Lawr said whether the presence of motorboats bothers a paddler depends on a person's perspective.

"Is it a hindrance to see two people in a motorboat, or is it more of a hindrance to wait in line on a portage?" he asked. "If you don't want to see any motorized equipment, there are areas of the park you can target. But I'd say on a 10-day trip, you'll likely to see a motorboat."

"It's just part of the game," Panzer said.

Doug Smith is a former Star Tribune Outdoors reporter. Reach him at doug.smith23@charter.net.