Maps 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. 

Our train was scheduled to depart from Sudbury Station at 9 AM. We had driven up from Peterborough the day before and stayed at my Aunt and Uncle's lakeside camp -- the same camp that has been in the family for three generations now. 

We arrived at the station early and began getting ready to board all of our canoe and gear on the train. However, the weather was not cooperating; we were doing this in a steady drizzle. I was a little nervous about leaving my vehicle for such an extended period in downtown Sudbury, not exactly the safest part of town, but the VIA worker reassured me by commenting that the Sudbury police station was just a stone's throw away. Hmmmm. 

The train departed right on schedule and we were on our way. From our seats, we could look back and get a glimpse of the cargo car where our gear was stored until the workers shut the doors. 

There was only one more stop at the ghost town of Ramsey before our destination. 

The VIA worker who had helped load our canoe and gear chatted with us for a while. He was curious because he said in his many years of working on the Budd Car, he had never any canoeists alight at Sultan before. We weren't sure if this was a good or bad thing! It surely meant we would have some amazing wilderness isolation, but...gulp! What were we getting ourselves into?! It reinforced our decision to get a shuttle past the nasty bits of the upper Wakami River. 

Our train finally arrived at the town of Sultan. On approach, the train ran parallel to the Wakami River for a bit and our decision to arrange a shuttle was further vindicated. The river there was fairly narrow and rocky. It looked challenging, to say the least. Our contact was at the rail crossing waiting for us in his vehicle with his trailer attached.  We alighted, got our canoe and gear off the train, and got everything onto and into the trailer. 

We made a quick stop to pick up our driver's girlfriend and set out on the hour-long journey to our put-in. The road conditions on the Sultan Industrial Road and the Dore Road were fine. In fact, the only difficult bit was the short approach to the river at the end of the journey. For those accessing the river there, it would help to have a vehicle with good clearance and all-wheel drive. Our driver and his friend were fantastic hosts and happily answered our questions about the area. 

After saying farewell, we got ourselves ready and were just about to put in when the clouds burst and a heavy downpour sent us scampering under the cover of trees for 10 minutes or so. 

The deluge subsided and we were just about to take off when a truck with a boat on a trailer started backing down to the river. The two young fishermen got out of the truck and talked to us for a bit. After some small chitchat, we discovered that we had some mutual acquaintances. Go figure! There we were,  putting in on a Northern Ontario canoe trip on a river that is rarely paddled, and we happened to run into someone who knows someone that we also know. I guess it's true what they say about degrees of separation. We would have chatted longer but were losing plasma from the hordes of mosquitoes. 

Once on the water, the rain stopped completely but the skies looked grim. There was a weather warning predicting heavy thunderstorms with a possibility of large-sized hail later in the day. Even though it was just after 2:30 PM, we decided it would be wise to find a campsite and hunker down for the evening to ride out the storm. 

From the InSeasonStudios video, I knew there was a decent site on Bayly Lake, so we aimed for that. There was a C1 rapid leading into Bayly Lake that we had negotiate first, however. Water levels appeared to be quite high, so I was hopeful it would be an easy run. Indeed, upon reaching it, it was a straightforward run on the left that we could simply scout from the boat. Here is a shot of it from below. 

Bayly Lake was a pretty little widening of the river that was dotted with islands. We found the site on a little peninsula on the southern shore and were able to set up camp before any further rains came.

We did so just in time because the rains did come on and off for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Thankfully, the hail stayed away. Over the night, it absolutely poured. It seemed to come in a series of weather cells that delivered some heavy rain interspersed with some moments of actual sunshine. It was very odd weather. Luckily, we managed to avoid any hail and the thunder and lightning remained fairly distant from us for the most part. At one point, we were treated to a lovely rainbow to the east.