Outaouais Winter Camping Adventure

Alex and I have tried winter camping once before, with a pretty moderate amount of success. We spent one night in my ice shelter on the Saguenay Fjord. While we did make it through the night that time, it started raining and I got dangerously cold. We actually ended up squeezing into a dry bag to stay warm. That was a couple years ago, and last weekend we felt ready enough to give an overnight stay a second attempt.

There has been this lake on my mind for many seasons now. It's about 2.5hrs away from home and 5km (all uphill) from the nearest road. We decided to make it the destination for our second attempt at winter camping.

Ready for adventure!

We woke up at 8:00, and got to our parking spot by noon. The hike to the secret lake started with a short bushwhack down to a lake we would have to cross to continue on our path. The bushwhack was a bit tight in places but it was all downhill and the snow was packed enough to make for an easy descent.

A bit of bushwhacking.

Once we hit the lake crossing, we quickly realized that we were going to be in for a lot of work because of the weight of our pack and sled. We are not backpackers so we didn't exactly have lightweight gear lol. Indeed, we were bringing my ice shelter, 20lbs of propane, a full cot, sleeping gear, etc. Despite this, we made it across the lake with relatively few issues.

Lake crossing to the trailhead.

The real tough part lay ahead, about 3km of old logging road all uphill to the lake. Travel was slow with the weight of our gear pulling us back. We even ended up sharing the weight of the sled and switching between carrying the pack, on top of taking breaks every 100m or so.

We needed breaks every 5min or so...

Alex with the full extent of our kit

It ended up taking almost 3hrs to reach the lake. Not actually that long, but I promise it feels a lot longer when you're slowly slogging straight uphill with what felt like over 100lbs of gear. It was a huge relief to put our feet on flat, solid ice!

Alex took a break on the ice while I started scouting out the lake for a place to set up camp. We settled for a sheltered spot by some trees that wasn't too far from our access point. Alex was getting chilled after resting so we made short work of setting up the shelter.

Camp is set up!

We ended the day with a classy 3 course meal of canned soup, steak, and Uncle Ben's rice. We then set up our sleeping gear, got in bed, and realized it was only 6:30! Apparently winter makes for long nights when you're camping haha. We did eventually fall asleep after setting alarms throughout the night to check on ourselves in case of CO; extra protection on top of our CO detector.

The next morning we rose to a beautiful fresh snowfall! It had blanketed the trail as well as our shelter which now featured some crazy condensation icicles.

The morning after... check out that condensation!

We also rose to some good and bad news. The good news was that we had burned about half our propane so the sled would be lighter, the bad news was that the fresh snow made travel even more difficult. I realized this within 1 minute after packing up camp as we made our way back to the access point. We had a short amount (800m) of uphill to do before starting the long descent to our car, but the snow made it take a full hour! Partway up, I heard a snowmobile in the distance. Moments later, I heard it again but much closer and told Alex to jump out of the trail when I realized what was happening. We made it just before they flew by! It was a close encounter but I was overjoyed when I realized they had packed down our trail. The rest of they way out was quite pleasant but we were still happy once we got back to the car and headed home :)