Fire the Weather Girl – Cornwall, VMUTS, Thessalon and Neys, Sept 3rd-7th 2018

One of the things I was looking forward to – like, clapping-my-hands-with-glee kind of looking forward to – on this return trip from PEI was riding in Algonquin Park. As students living in Guelph, my roommates and I used to canoe and camp in the rock-and-water Algonquin wilderness, and back then, horses were not allowed in the park. The Ontario Trail Riders Association – not least my friends Brenda and Geoff Pantling, who recently put my horsie and me up both at their cottage and at their farm on our way through Ontario in July – pushed long and hard for access to the trails, and they and a handful of other strong-minded, dedicated fellow trail riders made it happen. So I was pumped about the idea of spending a few days camping and riding there.

By chance, a query on the Ontario Trail Riders Association Facebook page alerted me that the trail leading out of the horse camp at Algonquin was in bad shape, with mud and sinkholes that were making it dangerous for horses to cross.  A Labour Day weekend ride there had been canceled, and riders were aborting their stays.

My enthusiasm was crushed.

Still keen to ride in Northeastern Ontario, I explored the option of riding the Voyageur Multi-User Trail System, or VMUTS, just out of Mattawa. I had little information regarding the camp or the trails, even from the VMUTS folks themselves, which made me leery of putting all my camping eggs in a basket that might be entirely inappropriate for horses.

Someone at VMUTS suggested I contact nearby Ladybug Stables, and so I did, and Olivia-Daisy, who runs Ladybug and rides the VMUTS trails fairly regularly, was able to provide me with the information I lacked regarding amenities and access. Despite the place not being particularly equestrian-oriented, we were a go.

I’d spent the previous two nights at my Dad’s place in Cornwall, where he’d cooked me up a bunch of Lancaster perch for dinner my first night. We tag-teamed on the second night to cook a Bajan dinner of flying fish and coo coo. Dad always does some cheffing for Spy as well, a fact seared into Spy’s brain, so as were driving into town from Ferme Joual-Vair, about eight blocks from Dad’s, my dog started to bounce around in his co-pilot’s seat: WE ARE APPROACHING THE MAN WHO SERVES BEEF!

He parked himself in the kitchen 24/7, on the off chance there might be a Random Beef Event.

Was wondering where my dog was at midnight. Found him parked on the kitchen floor, waiting for the beef to happen.

 

The temperature in Cornwall had settled itself in at 32C for days, and the humidity was 93%. When Pai and Spy and I left town late Wednesday morning, me having stuffed my fridge and freezer with Lancaster perch and a pile of my Dad’s fish cakes, the high for the day was forecast at 34C.

We rolled in to the empty campground at VMUTs at around 5pm, where the temperature was in the high twenties, and, after a quick camp set-up, headed out on the trail for some reconnaissance before the next day’s ride. I had checked the weather forecast, and it looked like rain was unlikely, so, given that I was only heading out for 45-60 minutes, I left my oilskin slicker behind. Rookie mistake. At about 20 minutes into our ride, it started to sprinkle. And then it started to rain. And then it bucketed down in earnest.

 

Rainy day riding at VMUTS

 

One thing about living in BC is, you learn to just do shit in the rain. I don’t love being wet and cold, but being wet when it’s a sauna outside isn’t the end of the world. And so, once it became apparent that my attempt to keep us dry by parking under a tree was a fail, we carried on with our ride. It was still spattering rain when we got back to camp, and it never really let up. I cooked inside, which I rarely do (“cooked” being loosely applied, since it was so warm out I didn’t light up the stove, but made myself a salad), and threw a blanket on Princess.

Camping in the woods on your own is peaceful, but can also be unsettling if your animals get weirded out. I took Spy for a short walk in the morning, and he saw dead people. Or some other dreadful thing that I couldn’t see, something that required Level Four Barking, and also some Level Five Growling. The deer and bears at home on Vancouver Island do not merit that kind of language, so I’m not sure what was out there. Reassuringly, the horse didn’t give a good goddam what was in the woods and just kept eating. She was possibly the one of the three of us who was most likely to consider herself to be breakfast, so her nonchalance was a positive.

We hit the trails by 0900. Mattawa is ATV Central – you see them roaring around the downtown and the highways just about as much as you see them on the trails – and we met quite a few ATVers on our ride, all of them friendly and chatty and helpful in giving trail info. By the time we’d visited Kearney Lake and found a peek-a-boo lookout, it was four and a half hours later that we arrived back in camp.

 

View from Birdseye Lookout #2

 

At Kearney Lake.

 

I could imagine how pretty the VMUTS trails might be in a couple of weeks when the leaves were in their full fall pageantry, but right now, the trails basically consisted of ho-hum logging roads through much of a muchness of forest: nice for a day ride, but not somewhere to linger. Though it had gotten late to be setting out, we were outta deh. VMUTS was dead to me.

My camping goal for the night was Cedar Rails Ranch in Thessalon/Wharncliffe, a 4 ½ hour drive away. We’d stayed there on our way out, and I knew it would offer a big secure round pen with plenty of grass: a quick in and out, and a nice spot for my horsie to wander and eat. We arrived after sunset, and I cooked in the dark. (“Cooking” this time being accurately applied).

So here’s the thing. Apparently, I am not at all good at gleaning the details that matter in a weather report. (See rain issue above). Thessalon had zero chance of rain overnight. Good, right? Right? So was it that I just not look at the lows for the night, or had I erroneously assumed that Wharncliffe’s weather would be the same as Thessalon’s, 20-ish km south and on the lake? I do not know. In my head, it was going to be 15 degrees and clear overnight. So I did not blanket my horse. At sunrise, after admiring and photographing my beautiful horsie, I noticed she was shivering. Hard. Her teeth were pretty much chattering. I grabbed my truck keys and checked the temperature: 2 degrees C. Ermagawd. I apologized to her profusely (as if she cared: If she could understand what I was saying, she would definitely be cussing me out, calling me names, and telling me to shut up and get that blanket on), and got her warmed up.

 

Pai looking beautiful, before I realized she was actually freezing.

 

The next day was a driving day, to Neys, another place we’d stayed on the way east. I toyed with the idea of carrying on an hour further to Rainbow Falls Provincial Park at Rossport, where we’d stayed in 2012 and which is situated on the shores of Lake Superior, but it had been a long day on the road and the dog hadn’t had a walk, and I so I kissed my vision of enjoying a glass of Sauvignon Blanc while watching the sun set over the big lake, and chose to be sensible and stop sooner rather than later.

I feel like it is particularly Canadian to arrive at a campground and have the owner casually mention, “Oh, by the way, there was a bear back there about an hour ago,” and for your response to be, “Oh, okay.”

We had the whole group camping area to ourselves again. And good thing I’d chosen to set up camp at a reasonable time of the afternoon: it gave me a chance to sort out the feed that had gotten unexpectedly rained on despite my precautions, and had split its bag on the rooftop carrier, as well as fiddle with my electric fencer, which had inexplicably stopped working, as well as deal with The Oyster Situation.

The Oyster Situation: I had bought a 100-count box of Malpeque oysters just before leaving the cottage, and had dropped off a bunch to Bernard at Ferme du Joual-Vair, and had given some more to my Dad in Cornwall. That still left me with about four dozen oysters, which were lovingly stored in my camper fridge, waiting for some opportune moments here and there to enjoy them on the half shell (like, say, on the shores of Lake Superior, with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc…) What with the 34C degree weather, my fridge had been having a little trouble keeping up, and so I had cranked it to its highest setting. And then it stopped being 34C out. And so the fridge froze things that weren’t in the freezer. Which included most of the oysters.

I discovered their frosty selves when I was rooting through my fridge. I don’t know enough about storing oysters to know whether they survive freezing (are they like that weird species of frog that can be rock-solid frozen, and happily come back to the land of the living once it thaws?), and had no interwebz to find out. The safest course seemed to be to shuck’em and cook’em.

So that’s what I did.

A fest of PEI-ness: Malpeque oysters, and Upstreet beer out of a Moth Lane glass.

 

There are worse ways to spend a sunny evening in Northern Ontario.

So, this time, I really did check the weather, or at least, the weather for Marathon, which is just a ten minutes or so up the road. It claimed it would be 8 degrees and clear. I blanketed the horse anyway. When I woke up in the morning and gave the horse her meds in the semi-darkness at 6:30 a.m., it seemed a little chilly. A half hour later, when I got up for realz, and it was light enough to see, I was horrified to see frost on the grass and on my camp stove and on my truck. I checked the temperature on my truck’s gauge: -1C.

I had not bothered to bring in my herb garden, since it was going to be EIGHT DEGREES ABOVE FREEZING. Sniff. Sniff. Buh-bye, basil, was nice knowin ya

So if I were the boss of me, this weather girl would definitely be looking for another job.