A Weekend Camping Trip to Long Lake Provincial Park

Sept 1998

A visit to a provincial park can be a nice experience, ranging from a day-trip, a weekend get-away or a multi-week stay. Alberta has a great variety of land-forms, geological regions, climatic zones, and most other geographical categorization that you might think of (well, no coastlines). There are many provincial parks, scattered around the province.

When many people think of Alberta parks, they think of the mountain parks, such as Jasper, Banff and Kananaskis. But there are plenty of other interesting spots, throughout the province. Long Lake Provincial Park, in north-eastern Alberta is one of them. So, here’s an account of a weekend visit.

The park was about a 2 hour drive north-north-east of Edmonton, via Highway 28 or 28A, then Highway 831. Both are decently paved roads, the former being mult-lane near the city. The scenery in the area is pleasant. This is rolling parkland, getting into some larger hills etc. Much of the area is under cultivation, the remainder being primarily aspen forest.

My friend (Brent) and I visited this provincial park on the weekend of Saturday, September 12, 1998 and Sunday September 13, 1998. We camped in tents on the Saturday night. The weather was perfect for mid-September; in the low to mid twenties Celsius, with mostly clear blue skies.

The park is well serviced, with concessions, boat rentals (canoes, water bicycles, small motorboats, jet-skis), bike rentals, showers, a nearby store, campsites (powered and non-powered), laundry, etc.. A 9-hole golf course is also located near the park. Also, there was a trail-riding (horseback) place near the entrance to the park. For winter visits, there is a nearby ski hill, cross-country trails and snowmobiling (which is confined to the frozen lake surface). That was the situation many years ago, and a quick review of their website indicates that this is still largely true.

The availability of canoes was one of the main reasons for choosing this particular park. That turned out to be an interesting choice, as will be related a bit further on in the story.

After arriving at the park and setting up our tents, we went for a hike. There was a trail which went along the shore of the lake for a couple of kilometers, as well as a hiking and cross-country skiing trail of about 5 km out and back that went through a hilly area, ending up on an isolated shore of the lake.

On the hike back from the lake, we came upon a doe and two fawns along the roadside. The mother was very protective and assertive, staring us down and drawing herself up to her full height, making herself look bigger. She approached us slowly, but only got about five or ten meters closer. We made sure not to approach any nearer than 50 meters or so.

After a while, the fawns took notice of the situation and crossed the road into the woods on the other side. The mother followed quickly. The entire encounter probably lasted a couple of minutes, which seemed like quite a while for a deer sighting. It was somewhat reminiscent of being attacked by a mother Ruffed Grouse at Pukaskwa National Park, on the north shore of Lake Superior, earlier in the summer. The maternal instinct was certainly aroused, on both occasions. I think a protective mother deer would be a considerably greater problem than the grouse was, though. Which is not to say that a grouse suddenly flying up into your face isn’t exciting.

We had noticed a lot of animal tracks on the hiking trail. Brent had asked me what I thought they were, as I had recently purchased a book on the subject. I had guessed a deer with some young, so it was nice to see my tracking deduction confirmed.

Being early in the fall, there were a lot of ducks around. They were very unperturbed by the presence of people and could be approached quite closely along the shoreline. In fact, some people were feeding them. One fellow remarked that they must not know that it would be duck hunting season soon. I replied “Perhaps they do know. Perhaps that’s why they like the park so much.”

We dined on campfire hotdogs and beans cooked on the little propane hiking stove. We also drank a dozen beers or so (between us), chatted and star gazed. The Milky Way was visible, and Jupiter was extremely bright. The moon was also nearly full, so the night was well lit inside the tents. There is nothing quite like a dark sky, far from the city lights.

With separate tents, we both slept well. Sharing a tent did not work out very well during our 1996 Kettle Valley biking trip, when Brent finally gave up and slept in the car. He reported that he generally has had trouble sleeping in a tent, so getting a good night’s sleep in the tent was a bit of a breakthrough for him.

The night was quite warm for September, although we both had an extra blanket as well as the sleeping bags, so we were well insulated from the cold. The great advantage of car camping as opposed to self contained long distance hiking or biking is in the extra supplies one can afford to bring along.

Brent got up early, about 7:00 a.m., and started a fire while I slept in until 8:30 or so. He used some dead-fall around the campsite, which had desiccated leaves attached. They went up nicely.

After I got up we had some coffee and another box of macaroni. I tried out the showers, which were located quite a distance from the campsites, about 2 kilometers up the road from the day area. We were informed that this was necessary to insure that the water from the showers didn’t eventually find its way into the lake, due to the drainage in the area. The shower cost a dollar (coin operated), but it gave one ample time, so that was was not an unreasonable price to pay.

After that, we packed up the camp and went to look for a canoe to rent. They had white tandem canoes, fibreglass I think. The paddles were not of as good a quality as the ones that another friend and I had used in Ontario (White Lake Provincial Park) earlier in the year, but were adequate to the task. One had a chunk out of it in the blade, appearing as if a fearsome lake creature had taken a bite out of it.

It was a nice warm day, but a bit breezy. We didn’t realize how windy it was until we had got quite a distance out on the lake. The wakes of some motorboats that were on the lake also helped to disguise the fact that the lake was getting quite choppy.

We had planned to paddle over to where we had hiked the day before, a distance of probably 2 or 3 kilometers. We were really flying along, when I looked behind myself (I was paddling stern) and noticed that the waves were starting to pile up. I suggested that we ought to head back, as it might be quite a struggle against the waves, and therefore might take quite some time.

We turned towards the middle of the lake rather than towards the shore when we made our U-turn. This was probably a mistake, as suddenly we were far out in the middle of the lake with some serious swells to contend with. The waves had whitecaps on them now, and were probably approaching a good two feet in amplitude. During the turning maneuver, when we were parallel to the waves (beam seas, the sailors say), it got a bit scary, as the waves were nearly swamping the canoe, and pitching us quite badly. But we dug in hard, and completed the turn so that we were headed directly into the waves. At that point some water was getting into the boat, but not too much.

We decided to head closer to shore, for security and to get some protection from the waves, so we began to quarter into the waves. Later reading of my canoeing book indicated that this was probably the best thing that we could have done in the situation. Brent did an admirable job of making sure that the wind and waves didn’t catch the canoe and turn us parallel to the waves, which would have been quite hazardous under the conditions. At appropriate times, I pitched in with a power stern sweep to make sure that waves didn’t overwhelm us. I wasn’t all that impressed with the quality of the personal flotation devices we had been provided with, and certainly didn’t want to test them in action, particularly in September waters, which were rather chilly.

Neither of us panicked, so with some hard paddling we managed to avoid capsizing, and eventually made some headway against the waves. Noting a reference tree on the shoreline, I calculated that we were only just holding our own during the worst of the wind and waves. When the wind and waves settled down, we made painfully slow progress, perhaps a few meters per minute.

Eventually the waves died down enough for us to get nearer to the shore, where the situation was much more manageable. After that we attempted to stay no more than twenty meters from the shore. There were no significant hazards along the shoreline, such as rocks, so this was not a problem. There were some submerged tree limbs and shore weeds to avoid, however.

After about 90 minutes we made it back to our put-in. The outbound journey had probably been no more than 15 minutes. It was a good experience, seeing how some fairly serious waves could pose problems. Brent did an excellent job of paddling bow I thought; he seemed to have a knack for it, though he hadn’t actually did any canoeing since he was a teenager. It probably helped that I had had the two days canoeing earlier in the summer with Marvin, and had some idea of what to do.

We agreed to exaggerate our plight and claim that the waves were nearly four feet high, during any future telling of the story. When Brent talked to his brother on the phone, who had some canoeing experience, he laughed at the claim. I suspected that we were overdoing it. Still, I don’t doubt that they were 18 to 24 inches at the worst of it.

It was actually rather fortunate that we didn’t have more problems with the waves, as Brent had two fingers of his left hand in a (flexible) cast, after breaking them some months before in a fall from his bike. As it turned out, the paddling was good therapy.

After our near-catastrophic canoeing episode, we got in the car, which was already loaded up, and headed for home.

All in all, it was a good trip for a quick weekend outing, and the park held some promise for a return visit (which I must do soon). It would be nice to go out there during the weekdays, when there might not be as many motorboats around. It would also be interesting to take bikes, as there were a lot of lightly trafficked country roads in the area. With the golf course and the horseback riding, it would not be difficult to spend an enjoyable week or so.

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