Gulch Hill Climb

Backcountry access for day trips in Killarney Provincial Park is somewhat limited, particularly in winter. The park is best suited for overnight trips that allow you to travel further from the access points. The Bell and Johnnie Lake roads are closed seasonally, which require that the hike be extended considerably just to get to the summer accesses. This extra hiking cuts into the precious daylight hours so Bell and Johnnie are best reserved for overnight trips in the winter. The western entrances to the park require crossing large expanses of ice and also require an even longer drive if coming from southern Ontario. That only leaves The Crack and George Lake. The Crack is a great hike, but I like the opportunity to get off trail and do some bushwhacking, so I usually use the George Lake access for winter day hikes.

There’s a lot of backcountry within a day’s hike of George Lake, but picking a destination can be difficult without repeating the same trip. This year I decided to try to climb Gulch Hill. Most of the peaks of Killarney are barely mountains by most definitions, but the rugged terrain makes them quite scenic, and most are reasonably easy to climb. With a peak approximately 340m above George Lake, Gulch Hill is one of tallest peaks in the southern LaCloche range, and dominates the southern shore of OSA Lake. It isn’t the prettiest hill in the ridge that separates the two lakes, but it is quite obviously the tallest.

After examining the map I decided that the best way to ascend would be to follow the Silhouette Trail to Acid Lake and then climb one of the gullies on the south face where the slope is the shallowest. My hiking partner Mike suggested that we return by descending a steeper gully and bushwhacking across a series of beaver ponds before descending the cliff to George Lake, forming a loop.

Since the drive takes four hours we left at six in the morning and made it to George Lake by around ten. I’d only had three hours sleep the night before but I was only groggy for the first few hours of the drive and was fine by the time we hit the trail. Despite weather forecasts calling for cold temperatures and clouds we were lucky enough to have blue sky from one horizon to the other and the temperature climbed so high that I had to peel most of my layers off soon after we started.

As we were getting our permits we met a father and son who were loading up their sleds to go camping for two nights and we chatted briefly about gear and the various areas of the park that we’d each visited. They had a hot tent and a wood stove, but it still can’t be easy to camp out like that. I used to think it was nuts, but winter tenting is starting to seem like an interesting way to extend the camping season.

Silhouette Hike

The western trailhead of the Silhouette Trail is accessed after a short walk through the roads of the campground that aren’t plowed in the winter. A bridge crosses the creek that drains out of the western bay, and the current had kept the water open even though the ice on the lake was solid. A good reminder to think about water flow when venturing onto the ice in the winter.

I’ve never hiked the western section of the trail so I was looking forward to a new experience. We had it easy initially, the snow had been beaten down by some previous travellers so we didn’t have to break new trail. The western section seemed a bit easier than the eastern, even though the rolling hills did serve to get us warmed up. Even far from the lakes the Killarney scenery is just spectacular. I’m always amazed by how one place can be so beautiful.

I had some problems with the bindings on my snowshoes at first so I took advantage of the easy trail to get them sorted out. I was developing a knot in the muscles of my bum and wanted to make sure it was resolved before we got into the rough stuff. I also started to develop a blister because I had the heel strap of one shoe too high, but I managed to get that sorted out as well before things got difficult.

It didn’t take us long to get around the end of George Lake, but not long after that the snowshoe tracks we’d been following stopped and turned around. We didn’t have completely fresh snow however. A set of animal footprints continued down the trail as if they were following the blazes. They were a few days old so it was hard to be sure, but we thought we identified canine pads at the bottom of the prints. It hadn’t snowed in a few days so we saw lots of animal tracks the entire trip and at various times we identified deer, wolf and even moose, but we only saw birds.

The wolf tracks continued for quite a distance, but they didn’t really make blazing trail much easier. The snow was loose and powdery so we sank in almost half a foot with each step. This really slowed us down, but we continued on past Lumsden Lake until we stopped for a snack at a small bog before proceeding on to Acid Lake.

Climbing The Hill

Acid Lake is where we left the Silhouette trail, and we followed a short side trail to a hiking campsite before starting to bushwhack up the base of Gulch Hill. Once we left the trails we saw even more tracks and areas where deer had slept. We’d try to follow the deer tracks to make the trail blazing easier where we could, but they didn’t always oblige us by going in the right direction. The brush was very dense near the base of the hill before we broke through the trees where the slope got really steep.

I was looking for a gully I’d seen on the map that would make the slope more gradual, but when we switched up so that Mike could blaze trail he just headed straight up the hill. This was tiring work and we had to stop every few meters to catch our breath, but the trees started to thin out, and soon each step would give us a better view than the last. We could see all the way to Manitoulin Island out in the bay, and eventually the further part of the south LaCloche ridge started to peek out through the hills.

The Peak

Once the slope began to level out we started to search for the peak. Gulch Hill has several peaks and I wanted to ensure that we visited the tallest. The trees were thicker at the top than on the slope so I had to consult the map frequently to verify the direction, and still I goofed and we climbed one of the ‘false’ peaks before I realized we were in the wrong spot. From there we could see in almost all directions. Muriel Lake was below us and the north LaCloche ridge was finally visible in the distance.

It was getting late so we descended rather roughly from the false peak and climbed the first of the true peaks. The next one we visited is labeled as Gulch Hill on my map, but strangely it wasn’t marked as the highest elevation so we had two more peaks to climb. The first was just a bit taller than the false peak, and offered even better views. The sunlight was also turning ominously golden. It made for great light to admire the view, but it also dashed our hopes of making it back to the car before nightfall.

The final, tallest, peak was separated from the other two by a boggy pond formed by a beaver dam. After crossing the pond climbing the peak wasn’t too difficult since the snow had been compacted by the wind and we only had to deal with the slope. There were bare patches of rock at the top and a small stand of trees. We were also surprised to discover a lone line of canine tracks crossing the peak. They were a bit large for coyote, but a bit small for wolf.

Even though it was getting late we spent some time enjoying the view from the top. We could finally see OSA and Killarney Lakes off in the distance, as well as plume of smoke from the mill far away in Espanola. The sun was really low and cast a golden light on the hills.

Return Trip

To return we followed the gully between the two peaks carved by the stream that drained the beaver pond at the top. Even though the gully made the slope more gradual we were descending fast and had to be careful as we picked our way between quartzite cliffs on either side. When we got to the bottom we were just 180 meters from where we turned off to go to Teardrop Lake last year when we approached from the other direction, but the area was completely unfamiliar.

The plan from here was to follow a series of small beaver ponds to a cliff where the water emptied into George Lake. The snow on the ponds was very light and powdery however, and we kept sinking in up to our knees. Mike was leading and suddenly he fell in up to his waist. We’d been walking on the creek and he sank right down to the water where his waterproof boot started to fill with water. The sun was setting and we still had a few kilometres to go, so hiking with a heavy boot full of water couldn’t have been any fun.

After the water and nasty snow we decided to abandon the beaver ponds and look for more solid ground. We were surrounded by hills and I directed us up one of the nearest ones to lead us in the direction of George. Mike took the lead but when he got to the top he saw that we could have gone around the hill. The resolution of my map wasn’t fine enough to show the hills we were faced with, so it took some guess work to figure out which was the easiest direction to proceed in.

We decided to follow the ridge we had just climbed until it ended and then head south towards the lake. The sun had set, it was getting dark fast, and we were finally starting to get tired. It took us a long time to walk through the deep snow to the top of the cliff leading down to George. The forest was very thick and even with our flashlights it was hard to find our way across the rolling terrain without too much unnecessary climbing.

The trees were so thick that we couldn’t even tell when we reached the top of the hill leading down to the lake but the GPSr let me know we’d arrived. Our next task was to find the gully that we were going to use to make our final descent. The cliffs on the north side of George Lake are very steep so we needed to descend in the right spot, but from where we were standing all we could see was trees in every direction. I followed the map until we started to see walls of rock on either side of us and found a tiny creek, but soon realized we were going upstream, not down.

We turned around and started following the creek downhill. Even with the creek to follow finding the right way was tricky, because the slope was still slight, the trees were very thick, and the map didn’t have enough detail to show us exactly where the gully went. We combined several techniques to navigate a safe path down the hill. We followed the creek and animal tracks while using the map to ensure that we were at 90° to the contour lines. While the map couldn’t show us the fine detail of the terrain the contour lines could guide us in the general direction.

Eventually the hill started to get steep enough that it was obvious which way we had to go, and then it started to drop very fast. We were almost at the bottom when we encountered what must be a waterfall in the summer cut into a sharp 40m cliff. The only way down was to lever ourselves through two narrow chutes and carefully slide and drop several meters to the mostly flat ground below. This was tricky for me, but even harder for Mike because I’d scraped all of the snow away when I slid down leaving him nothing to dig his feet into.

After that we followed animal tracks and the creek out of the small valley down to a campsite on the shore of the lake. We didn’t have far to go from there to return to the campground. It was a very peaceful walk on the ice with the full moon and stars overhead. The walk got a lot easier when Mike turned on his flashlight and spotted a snowshoe trail nearby going in the same direction we were. Walking in the well trodden snow was a relief after the thick powder in the woods and we got moving so fast that I needed to stop to catch my breath a few times.

When we finally got back to the car I wanted to take off my boots to dry my feet, but I had to wait until the car warmed up because my pants were frozen over them. I was glad that I didn’t have to drive, but managed to stay awake until we got back home at one thirty in the morning.

Tips

• If you do this as a day trip you’ll have to purchase a day pass from the park office for parking your vehicle. If you make the trip a part of a backcountry camping excursion to OSA Lake you’ll have to book far in advance unless you go in the shoulder seasons. OSA is one of the busiest lakes in the park.
• Another way to do this in the summer would be to follow the same route we did and camp at Acid Lake.
• If you do the trip in the winter you can rent snowshoes from The Friends Of Killarney Park at the camp office where you pick up your permit.
• Killarney almost never disappoints, but it often punishes. The scenery is unique and incredible, but a considerable amount of effort is required to make this trip. Make sure that you know how to navigate off trail because it can be quite challenging in areas even with a GPSr and a map.