Day 4 - Little Parisien Rapids to Owl's Head Rock - 18 kms

Map provided courtesy of Toporama which contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

I slept like a log that night. I must have because I didn't notice how much the temperature had dropped. I was snug as a bug in my hammock cocoon.

When I poked my head out of my cocoon, I couldn't see far; fog had enveloped the area.

It didn't last long though. By 9 am, the sun was high enough to begin burning the mist off. It lent quite an eerie feeling to the river landscape. It's these "in-between moments" that are so beautiful on a canoe trip!

We knew we didn't have any portages that day, so we took our time in the morning breaking camp and didn't get back on the water until mid-morning. I snapped a quick shot of our island home as we departed.

An island forced the river into two channels, each with a set of rapids -- Little Parisien Rapids on the north channel and Devil Chute on the southern one. Since it was on the same side as our campsite put-in, we tried paddling to Little Parisien first but ground to a halt because the rapids all but disappeared in the low water. It was pretty to see, though.

So, we backtracked to the east of our island campsite and ran Devil Chute, which was little more than a swift in the low-water conditions.

By 11 am we were paddling past Deadhog Point.

The last bit of discernible moving water in the 5 Mile Rapids section of the French River was Crooked Rapids. Again, with the low water levels, we barely even knew that we were at them as we paddled through. We had to move aside for a motorboat after doing so. Sigh...we were back in motorboat country.

The French River can get windy as it becomes a tunnel between the large open expanses of Georgian Bay and Lake Nipissing, but on that particular morning, we had a wonderful calm and a mirror-like water surface. These conditions, mixed with the rocky topography of the northern riverbank, made for some spectacular scenery.

We spent the next hour and a half working our way east.

About 30 minutes past Crooked Rapids, a rescue helicopter flew in behind us and circled above us several times. This went on for about 15 minutes. He got low in the sky and fairly close to us on a couple of these passes. It was curious. I wasn't sure if they were engaged in some sort of training exercise or if they were actually on a search and rescue task. It seemed like they were concentrating on us, and for the life of me, I couldn't understand why. At one point, I checked my Zoleo device to see if the emergency button had been triggered by mistake somehow, but it couldn't have been as there was a protective lever over it. It kept circling to the south of us and back again, so perhaps they got a call from a canoe party on the Pickerel River and were confusing us for them? We just kept paddling and eventually, it flew away.

We arrived at Cross Island just before 1 pm. We paddled to the west end of the island where a large white cross has been erected by the local Knights of Columbus to commemorate Jesuit missionaries who were allegedly martyred there by a raiding Mohawk party in the 17th century. There are records of other Jesuits who were martyred around the same time when the 5 Nations Iroquois and Mohawk people moved into Huronia in 1649 to eliminate the Wendat and vis a vis the Jesuits who had contact with them, but there doesn't seem to be any details on this specific Cross Island incident -- at least none that my rudimentary internet research could find, anyway.

We had a lunch wrap at the site and sat for a while. We had had incredibly hot temperatures on the first two days of the trip and that fourth day was, perhaps, the hottest of them all. There was a nice rock ledge next to the spot where we beached our canoes and we enjoyed jumping off the ledge into the deep drop off below to cool off. I felt refreshed and replenished as I turned to get a last look at Cross Island before continuing east.

45 minutes later we reached the Haystack Islands. The southernmost island is an impressive mound of rock jutting out from the middle of the river.

A half-hour after that, we were approaching Owl's Head Rock Island, where an industrious property owner managed to perch an impressive collection of cabins on the rocks at this unlikely location.

We could see the power lines downriver past the island and according to Kevin Callan's report, the sites near there weren't great. Worse still, he mentioned that the hum from the power lines could be heard there; for our last night of the trip, we wanted to stay upriver of that.

I was aware of a campsite located on the north shore just past Owl's Head. We went there and discovered a nice spacious site in a grove of pines high on the rocky bank. It even had a small beach below the rocks. Though it was still only mid-afternoon, we decided to make camp there and relax for the rest of the day on our last night of the trip.

One odd thing about the site was the weird bushcraft construction projects that previous campers left behind.

We set up camp and swam on the beach to wash the paddling sweat off. It was still only mid-afternoon, so we relaxed in our respective tents with a nap and a little reading for a while.

It was our last night of the trip and we talked a lot about life, our families, music (Scott is a musician), and anything else that old friends talk about as we consumed our dehydrated meals next to a roaring campfire. Again, we enjoyed the beautiful colours as the sun went down.

Eighteen Mile Island Loop