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. 

Day 5 - Fat Man's Falls to Lady Evelyn Lake (23 km)

I was awoken the next morning by a long-haired dude in a baseball cap staring at me. It was a little disconcerting, but I guess this is what one gets when one hangs his hammock a few feet away from a portage.  It was only shortly after 6 am, yet this pair of young men were on the water and moving. They were not the campers staying at the Bridal Veil site, so that meant that they had camped further upriver. They must have got up and broken camp in the pre-dawn darkness. Sheesh! I prefer a slightly later start to my days. 

By 8 am, two other parties had followed suit. I guess Dad and I were the lazy, late risers. We were fine with that label though and were happy to tackle Temagami at our own pace. Dave and Gwyneth were on the same page as us. It might have had something to do with the late-night campfire session.

We broke camp and then scouted the infamous Fat Man's Squeeze with its crazy vertical descent to the base of the falls. It certainly was something. To bypass this waterfall, there are two options. The first is the short portage through Fat Man's Squeeze, which is less than 100m but requires one to take one's boat through a narrow crevice and then basically scramble down a cliff to the pool at the bottom of the falls. The second option is a little longer, but goes up the rise, over the site that Dave and Gwyneth were on, and down a slightly less dramatic descent to the river to roughly the same spot on the river as the former. Dave and Gywneth were ready to depart slightly ahead of us, so we watched them tackle the Squeeze. They did a good job, but it required both of them to negotiate their heavier canoe down the steep slope at the bottom. 

On our way back for our gear, we spent a bit of time admiring the falls and taking a few shots of this beautiful gorge through which the river passed. 

When we eventually made our way to the bottom with all of our gear and finally got out on the river, we paused again for more photo opportunities.

That was the last of the large waterfalls that we would see on the trip, so we lingered a little longer than normal to take it all in. When we did proceed downstream, we were only in the boat a few minutes before we got out to portage for 300 meters past a rocky Class II called The Gap. On the portage, I told myself that I would return someday to do this river run again but in a proper whitewater boat.

There were two more portages to finish our trip down the Lady Evelyn. In higher water, we would have run both of them, even in my dainty Kevlar canoe, but after scouting them, they looked a little bony. We did get through each of them with a combination of lining and wading. It was lovely to not have to carry. It was a nice, quiet paddle to start the day. The sun was shining and the scenery on the river was fantastic. No lactic acid was required. 

The river eventually veered east and we moved from river to lake topography. We spotted the take-out to the two-miler and I secretly muttered a prayer of thanks to the Temagami god of the wind for the conditions on the first day of the trip, allowing us to put in at Mowat's Landing. Had the wind been up that day, we would have had to take this infamous portage, which is about 4km long and consists of 1000 meters of bog bashing, another 1000 meters of steep ascent and descent, and a final 1000 meters of marshy wade to get out into open water. Talk about dodging a bullet! 

We moved into the south end of Willow Island Lake and enjoyed paddling next to the large cliffs marking the shoreline. 

Again, we were fortunate to have only light winds on this day and found the open water easy to negotiate as we paddled north on Willow Island Lake. We stopped at an island site about halfway up the lake at 1 pm to take a quick swim to cool off and make a couple of peanut butter and honey wraps. A couple of motorized fishing boats were on the lake which told us we were heading back into cottage and fishing lodge country once again. 

We continued north and turned west into a back bay to access the two portages from Willow Island into the south end of Lady Evelyn. Again, Jeff's Map listed these two portages as 410m and 285m respectively, but they felt longer. Hap has them each listed as 500m and 450m. They were bony but easy compared to the ones on the river. Between them was an unnamed lake containing a campsite, which looked fine. I remarked at the time that if the fishing were good on this lake, it would be a great spot to camp, having the entire lake to oneself. We didn't pause to investigate the fishing opportunities though. We wanted to get as close as possible to the portage to the Sugar Lakes area, knowing we had yet to paddle the wide expanses of the south end of Lady Evelyn Lake. 

We emerged from these portages into a pretty, narrow channel called Peanut Butter and Banana Bay. We laughed at this and renamed it for ourselves Peanut Butter and Honey Bay since that had been our lunch staple for the majority of the trip thus far. We turned north again, paddling through a narrow channel between a large island and the mainland. Once through this, we came out into the vast open space of this lake. The wind was at our backs, so we were grateful. We passed a vacant site that looked nice at the north end of Brother Island, but we wanted to press on with our current conditions and get a large chunk of this open, windy space behind us. 

We came upon an interesting sandbar that connected two small islands situated between the larger Midway and Wipper Islands in the centre of the lake. A small fishing boat was beached there and three guys were cooking up their catch and some corn on the cob. We recognized two of them as the pair that we had met while climbing Maple Mountain a few days earlier. They said that they would be departing once they had eaten. The sandbar beach was pretty enticing, and we had fantastic views of this amazing lake all around us, but the site was filthy. Garbage was everywhere. We hung around for 20 minutes or so, debating whether we should camp there for the night or not when a floatplane landed and also beached on the sandbar.   

Dad chatted with the pilot for a bit and learned that a bunch of pilots were planning to land and camp there for the evening. I guess with the sandbar access, it was one of the few places a plane can land and a pilot can access the shore without swimming. Not wanting to get into an argument with a bunch of pilots about who was on the site first, we decided to move on. We were a little concerned, though. It was already 5 pm and we knew from the map that we only had one other possibility for a site in the vicinity before the portage into the Sugar Lakes. We just hoped that the site would be vacant and nice. 

As we paddled away, another floatplane came in for a landing. We were happy we had decided to leave and at that moment we understood why the site was in such an awful state-- pilot party site. 

The wind picked up slightly as we crossed the main bay of this large lake, but was manageable. We paddled northeast and then around the north shore of South Island. Our map showed a campsite straight ahead on the eastern shore of this bay, but we couldn't see a sign to mark it. We spotted a nice rock face and an open area directly in front of us and thought that might be the site. We were correct and eventually saw the sign hiding behind some leaves when we arrived at the shore. 

The site was fantastic, and better yet, vacant. It was large, open, and had plenty of tent pads. It was already 6 pm when we arrived, so we quickly set up camp, swam to wash off the grime of the day, got a fire going, and got our dehydrated spaghetti sauce and noodles boiled. It was a nice dinner over a large firepit facing the lake. For a moment after dinner, the weather was looking grim. The clouds spit some raindrops at us for a while and we even heard a rumble of thunder in the distance, however, the area to the north of us got the brunt of it. The wind soon blew it behind us and then we were blessed with a lovely evening next to a roaring fire and enjoyed the sublime views over this large, northern Ontario lake as the sun went down.