I’d only planned one portage for the sixth day of our trip. The portage from Murray to Nellie Lake is known as “The Notch” and it’s one of the prettiest little slices of hell in the park. Starting from the crystal clear azure waters of Nellie Lake It winds down between two massive mounds of white quartzite to Murray Lake. There are several picture perfect meadows with spectacular views of the white hills. There’s a pristine stony creek that meanders back and forth across a gravel bed, joining several ponds that each display a unique landscape, and even two waterfalls.
It’s also the steepest portage in the park. The last time I was here I marvelled at the scenery as I descended down the steep trail. I also questioned the sanity of anyone portaging in the opposite direction, going uphill. Today Xander and I were going to be those people of questionable sanity. I must admit, I was a bit scared of this hike, which is one of the reasons that it was the only thing we had scheduled for the day. A short day would also give us a half day to enjoy Nellie Lake and recover from the ordeal. And once we’d made it to the top we’d have completed the hardest part of the trip. Sure there would be some long and difficult portages ahead of us, but It was literally all downhill from here.
There are two sections of the trail that are incredibly steep, separated by a relatively flat section. The steepest isn’t far from Murray, and the other is closer to Nellie. Even though it’s only 1420m long I decided to break the portage into three sections. For the first my goal was just to get to the top of the first steep section, and then take a ‘break’ by going back and getting the pack. When I got to the worst of the hill I paced myself, but the trail is like a ladder, and no matter how slow I went I had to lift myself quite high with each step. I was soon breathing hard and I could feel the burn in my muscles.
The mercy of this tough section is that it’s short. It didn’t seem short, but it was a relief when I was able to put the canoe down and head back for the second load. We met a father and his young son coming the other way, and it was fun to see them react to the nastiest portion at the end that we’d just climbed.
The second leg is almost completely flat, but there are a few streams to cross. There is a section where the trail forks and one branch climbs some rocks while the other meanders across a grassy meadow next to the creek. Naturally I missed the easy trail on the way in with the pack, but it’s easy to spot in the other direction so I took advantage of it for the return trip. The food bag was mercifully lighter by this point, which helped a lot.
I’d dumped the canoe at the base of the larger of the two waterfalls. It’s a very pretty spot if you step off the trail to the creek to take in the view. Which is a great thing to do instead of shouldering your pack or canoe and continuing on up the trail, but eventually there’s nothing for it but to push on. This section didn’t feel as steep as the initial hill to me, but Xander felt it was worse. It is rougher ground and requires a lot of attention to where you place your feet.
When I finally caught up to Xander at the far end I was elated. We’d finished our toughest portage, it was still relatively early in the day, and we weren’t completely exhausted. To celebrate we left our gear and headed back down the portage a bit to where a side trail climbs the mountain on the west side of the trail. We climbed up to get a better view of this spectacular spot. I was reluctant to go very far because I was aware of our unattended food bag tempting critters at the shore of the lake, so we didn’t go all the way to the top, but it’s a very rewarding scramble with some great views. We took a different path back down and made a very unexpected discovery – someone had left two swimming flippers on the ground halfway up the mountain. We weren’t really equipped to take them out, but we did carry them down to the end of the portage in the hopes that someone on a shorter trip could get rid of them.
We chose the first campsite on Nellie Lake. Being between the three portages it gets more traffic, but it’s a very pretty spot. In order to get an early start we’d had lunch for breakfast, so after setting up camp I made some chocolate bannock for the breakfast we skipped. There was a very bold chipmunk at this campsite, and when we refused to give him a treat or let him try the bannock batter he perched nearby and chirped incessantly at us. He got his revenge a bit later; when the frying pan cooled off enough he managed to grab a piece of bannock and drag it onto the ground.
It was so hot that I went for another swim. Not only was this a good excuse to wash the sweat off of my body, it was fun to play in the oddly clear waters of Nellie Lake. I tried some underwater photography and explored the water near our campsite. The last time I tried to swim in Nellie Lake it was cold and windy, which made it uncomfortable to get all the way in the water, so this was a real treat.
We took it easy for the rest of the day. We were sitting around the fire and I was trying to take some time lapse photos of the stars when we started to comment on the bright lights on the horizon. We’d been seeing bright lights on all of the clear nights and were debating on whether they originated from Sudbury or Espanola. We had been slightly disappointed that the sky wasn’t darker this far into the park. But these lights couldn’t be the glow from a city because they stretched from the horizon and went straight up.
We were trying to figure out if they were indeed the aurora borealis or not when they obliged us by moving. At first the movement was slow, but it was evident that there was no point source over the horizon. Just when we’d decided that the lights were going to give us a nice, but quiet show they started to move more quickly. The thin beams spread out into great sheets, and then the whole sky started to flash. Eventually we could see large beams directly above us shining down. To my eye the lights were always white, but in my pictures they turned out green.
We crawled into our sleeping bags after a great show in the sky, and for some reason I got phobic hanging there next to the lake. I kept hearing small animals running around and my imagination kept running away with me. I knew it couldn’t be a bear, but I couldn’t figure out what would be running around so much in our campsite at that time of night. I read my book for a while and eventually drifted off into a fitful sleep.