We started each day with hot coffee and oatmeal. I was happy we had the bear barrel, as we encountered a bear just 100 metres from the parking lot where we left our car! The BearVault worked great, and had just enough space for four days worth of food for the two of us. There are no bear boxes at the backcountry sites in Killarney, and there are bears around, so we borrowed our friend’s BearVault 550 (thank you Martin!). H38: water access was steep, but other than that it was a great site with two decent (a little “rooty” and sloped) tent sites.H33: good site for a group and with a lovely tent spot close to the water.H20: do not recommend, as the only tent site was sloped and in a stream in heavy rains.H5: nice tent site for one, would have been hard to put more than one tent.**Update: as of 2020 Killarney backcountry sites are now available for booking through the Ontario Parks online reservation system** To help with this process, I created this spreadsheet to more easily calculate the distances between sites. This meant that I had to call and ask for every available site on the loop in my date range (and my date range was large because of limited site availability!), and then off the phone figure out the optimal permutation of sites given the availability. Route planning was tricky, particularly because Killarney’s backcountry sites are not available for online bookings. Despite knowing this, we booked ourselves in for 4 nights on the trail, figuring that with the cold weather we would prefer to boogie. The park suggests planning for 7-10 days to complete the 80km loop, and online reading had informed me that while possible in less, more days was highly recommended for an enjoyable time. However, the sun eventually came out, and with it our spirits lifted and we remembered why we enjoy backcountry hiking. Heavy rainfall early in the hike made for a couple challenging days and moments of questioning why we thought this was a good way to celebrate our anniversary. Over five days in the middle of October we covered 80km on the La Cloche Silhouette Trail, a loop trail that goes up and over Killarney’s many peaks and around its numerous pristine lakes. To celebrate our one year anniversary Tim and I headed into the backcountry in Killarney Provincial Park, Ontario.
0 kommentar(er)
