Map provided courtesy of Toporama which contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. I have marked my route in blue and portages in red.  

Day 2 - Big Bob Lake to Loontail Creek Junction (19 km)

I woke up a couple of times in the night because my ankle was throbbing, but soon fell asleep again quickly. I was tired and actually had a restful sleep. When the morning did arrive, the ankle was swollen quite a bit; it looked like I had half a tennis ball stuck to the outside of my foot, but when I emerged from my hammock, I could still put my full weight on it. I decided I would proceed with my plan to do the loop. I did have 7 portages to complete along the Nipissing River that day, but none were over 200 meters in distance and I wasn't expecting any of them to be that challenging or steep. 

The sky was overcast again and by the look of the top of my bug shelter and hammock fly, it had rained a bit in the night. 

After a bowl of oatmeal and fruit, and a couple of camp coffees, I emerged from the bug tent to break camp. 

I was on the water by 8 AM. I paddled east on the calm waters of Big Bob Lake and could see the orange glow of the sun trying to find its way through the clouds. 

I cruised by the site at the east end of the lake that I avoided the previous evening and took a gander. It actually looked to be a nice site. 

I made my way to the grassy take-out of the portage to the Nipissing River through a shallow, log-choked inlet. 

I was in good spirits. My ankle seemed to be holding out, I felt rested, and the sun was desperately trying to make its presence known through the ceiling of clouds that had been covering me since the trip began. I was actually singing to myself as I proceeded down the portage. My tune came to an immediate halt upon beholding a rather large maple tree that had recently fallen completely across the portage with no apparent way around it. 

I thought about pulling out my saw, but the job looked a bit too formidable for hand-sawing, and I had a very long way to go that weekend in a short amount of time, so I decided I would try to bushwhack a way around it. 

The location where the tree had fallen was next to a small waterfall that I could barely make out to my right and it was a bit too steep to go around the tree in that direction. I walked back up the trail a bit and began breaking a route through the bush to my left. Unfortunately, the tree was a tall one and I had to bushwhack at least a good 20 meters or so until I came to the point where the tree had broken away from the trunk. There, I was able to squeeze under the fallen trunk and carve out another route back to the portage. I did place a call to Ontario Parks the following Monday to let them know about that obstacle, so hopefully someone with a chainsaw is able to get up there to do a little clearing in the near future. 

When I finally cast my first look at the Nipissing River, I knew that I was in for a bit of a slog that day. It isn't what most people would even consider a river to be. It was a narrow creek through a boggy marsh. 

Though tough at first, within the first kilometer or so, it widened out and seemed to get a little more water volume. 

The bird life there was incredible; there were so many species flying about; in particular, the red-winged blackbird population of the Upper Nipissing is indeed healthy and well. 

The river began winding back and forth as it snaked its way west in, seemingly, the most indirect way possible. That mish-mash of a trajectory would be the order of the day. 

On one particular bend, I noticed an oddly-shaped stump near the left bank. As I paddled closer, I discovered that it wasn't a stump at all, but the corpse of a very large snapping turtle that had somehow met its demise, presumably of old age. 

In a little over 30 minutes of being on the river, I made it to the first of five short portages that allow canoe trippers to bypass a series of rocky drops in the river. 

At the top of that first one, I was chastised by a huge red-tailed hawk that yelled at me repeatedly to get away from its chirping offspring nearby. I couldn't see the nest, but I could hear the eyas squeaking as its mother flew from tree to tree, screeching frantically. It seemed like a tense moment, so I quickly made my way across the portage. 

By the time I reached the end of the short 65-meter trail, I discovered what the Nipissing River mosquito situation was really about. In that short distance, every mosquito in the area was alerted to my presence. When I reached the end of the trail with my canoe pack, I desperately ripped it open and retrieved my bug shirt while slapping and swatting nearly every bit of exposed skin all at once; there were literally clouds of the b@$t@rds all over me instantaneously. I would wear that bug shirt for the vast majority of the day. 

On my return trip for the canoe, I took a shot of the rocky section of the river that the portage bypassed. Despite the report from the park staff that levels were on the high side, the river levels seemed a bit low, but then again, I have no frame of reference to compare, so maybe these were indeed high levels for the Nipissing.  

Five minutes later and I reached the top of the second portage, which was on river-right this time. 

Again, it was a short and easy carry, however, the humidity was high, and hauling my gear in and out of the boat in a bug-shirt lent for some sweaty times. 

Ten minutes later and I was at the next portage which humped over an esker-like ridge that sported a nice, little campsite with some fantastically large pines. By this time, the clouds had mostly dissipated and the sun had fully emerged.

I fished for a while at the base of the rapids there. It was nice to get a bit of rest from the in and out of the boat and with the bug hood off to soak up a few rays. 

After another quarter-hour of paddling, I spotted a large beaver dam crossing the river and saw the steep take-out to the 200-meter portage on river-right. The trail was clear and came back down to the river below another set of rocky rapids. 

After that carry, the river topography started to change a bit. The alder started to get more apparent and thicker along the shores as the river began winding and became much less linear. 

I rounded a bend and came upon a beaver dam clogging the river from bank to bank. Below the dam, the river entered yet another set of rocky, shallow rapids. I couldn't see the portage anywhere. Thinking I missed it, I turned around and went back upriver to see if I could find it. Again, I couldn't see anything, so I went back to the dam and lifted over it. I found the portage sign on river-left behind some bushes next to the rocks at the top of the rapid. It was a bit of a tricky take-out. 

The 110-meter carry led me past a shallow, rocky section of the river that would have been very difficult to wade or line down at those water levels. 

The river continued winding through the country with large alder bushes all along the shore. My map showed a campsite on river-right that I kept an eye out for. It wasn't hard to spot the sign when I came upon it, for it was dangling over the middle of the river on a fallen tree that required me to lie right down in the boat to get under it. 

I couldn't actually see the campsite through all the trees, but I guessed that it most likely wasn't useable given all the deadfall. 

Almost immediately after that site, I came upon a steel bridge of a logging road that crossed the river. 

I wish I could say that I had a lot of recollection of the following two and a half hours, the duration that it took to paddle from that bridge to the portage into Grassy Lake, but it's a bit of a blur. The river on that stretch is an insanity-inducing maze of narrow, winding, alder-choked madness where the paddler is barely able to progress twenty feet without turning the boat one way or another. As a solo paddler, it was particularly difficult not having a bowsman to draw or cross-draw to get the boat pointing in the right direction.  It required a lot of back-paddling and hard work to get the boat into the necessary position.

After a while, I began to get a little antsy. I was actually feeling claustrophobic and my sense of direction had completely vanished from the endless twists and turns. On a few occasions, it felt like the river was doing complete 360-degree turns. Was I going in circles?

About halfway through that mess, I had a scare that most definitely brought me to my senses. I broke through some alder that was completely blocking my view of what was ahead of me. As I was pulling on the alder with my hands to get my canoe through it, I heard an enormous splash ahead of me. After emerging through the leaves, I was faced with the @$$-end of an enormous bull moose not more than five feet in front of me. It jumped up onto the muddy bank and tore off into the bush in a hurry. It obviously hadn't sensed me due to the alder. I was just so grateful that it decided to bolt in the opposite direction. Had it decided to come toward me, there was no way I could have gotten out of the way. I have never been that close to a wild moose before, nor would I like to again. It was massive and the musty smell that lingered was something! Okay, canoe-tripping spirits, I came to the Nipissing River for wildlife, but jeez, did it need to be that close? Ha! 

When I saw the 240-meter portage to get into Grassy Lake, I was ecstatic that I had put that crazy section of the river behind me. It was 2:45 PM at that point. 

The trail passed through an awful little campsite that was only about a twenty-square-foot area off to the side of the middle of the portage. At the grassy put-in, I sat under a tree, filtered some more water, and made a naan-bread wrap with peanut butter and honey. My energy was much depleted and it was good to get some rest. 

It was a short paddle to get into the more open area of Grassy Lake, a welcome sight indeed after being closed in amongst the alder for hours. 

The lake is nothing more than a widening of the river and as it veered north and around a bend, I came across a cow moose and her calf about 40 feet in front of me. Again, we surprised each other. They both got out of the river, but Mama turned to get another look at me. Still a little shaken up from the earlier, far-too-close moose encounter, I called out to her to send her in the other direction in case she felt like getting protective.

That was exciting and fun. I continued my way through Grassy Lake for five or ten minutes where the river turned south and then to the east again. As I rounded that bend, there was yet another moose on the southern bank of the river across from a nice-looking campsite in a stand of pines on the northern bank. This place was a virtual moose city. 

From that point, it was about a fifteen-minute paddle to the confluence of Loontail Creek. The skies in the southeast were looking very dark and I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance. Though I seemed to be facing a bit of a headwind from the east at ground level, when I looked up at the clouds they appeared stationary so I couldn't tell if those nasty clouds were heading in my direction or not. 

The confluence was marked by a yellow sign stuck to a stump for paddlers coming out of Loontail Creek to know which direction it is to head downriver.

There was a marginal current to paddle against on Loontail Creek, but it was definitely manageable. The creek made some wide turns at that point and I was paddling harder as the thunderclaps seemed to be getting louder and nearer; the rain was holding off. 

I reached the site in about 15 minutes, which was a large grassy area at the base of a tree-laden slope of pines. To get to the take-out, there was a tiny beaver dam to traverse and I pulled up on some massive logs with a steel triangle affixed to them. It appeared to be some sort of contraption left over from the logging days and acted nicely as a little dock to pull my canoe and gear ashore. 

There were a couple of very loud thunderclaps nearby that got me in a hurry to get my gear up to the firepit. From there, I made quick work of getting the bug shelter and hammock up. 

In the end the storm missed me, so I explored the site a bit and went down to the river with a pot to scoop up water and dump it over me. I had a whole lot of Nipissing River grime on me. I would have gone for a swim, but the water was murky and there were three large leeches stuck to the bottom of my canoe when I pulled it up. No thanks. Slightly downstream from my site, I watched a beaver (it must have been training for the Olympics) swim back and forth across the creek over and over again for no apparent reason. 

The views over the wide expanses of Loontail Creek were very pretty in their own right and I enjoyed my dinner of pizza pockets (rehydrated spaghetti sauce, cheese, and sausage in a rolled-up naan bread) while looking out at this magical world. Thunderstorms and rain were happening somewhere else.