Some camping... FINALLY!

We finally had a “free” weekend with nice weather forecasted and minimal smoke, so this past weekend we headed out for some much needed camping. Living in the NWT in the summer has just made us itch to get out with our canoe and explore some of the backcountry (hello, free camping!). And we finally have all of our camping gear and canoe in the north! We have had lots of visitors since we moved up our stuff, a smoke-filled weekend, a forecasted rainy weekend, and other projects that had limited our camping attempts to date. So we were eager and excited for this trip - and Hidden Lake did not disappoint!

Researching some of the canoe routes in the area, we came across Hidden Lake. We also knew some friends who had just gone camping there and posted some photos to Facebook. The

that we found online also confirmed with us that we must do the trip to Hidden Lake.

Hidden Lake is only about 40 minutes out of town down the Ingraham Trail. On Friday, as soon as Rashaad was done work, we grabbed a bite to eat and hit the road. We pulled into the Hidden Lake Territorial Park parking lot just after 6PM. Although a territorial park (the same as a provincial park, to all your southerners), Hidden Lake is basically a ‘non-operating park’. There is an outhouse at the parking lot, but other than that, there is nothing but wilderness. Not even any designated backcountry camping sites - anywhere in the territory! Some territorial parks have your typical car camping campgrounds, but not this one.

We set off on our journey to Hidden Lake, which would require paddling across 3 lakes and hiking 3 portages before reaching the shores of Hidden Lake. The first paddling segment was short, just a straight shot across a skinny arm of a much larger Prelude Lake. The portage is only about 100m or so here, just long enough to pass a small set of rapids.

From there, it was a bit of a windier paddle across a bigger, unnamed lake to a 200-300m portage, which was through dense forest. This meant the mosquitos were out and about. They were quite bad. They reminded us of a horribly mosquito-y hike in the backcountry at Bon Echo Provincial Park in Ontario back a few Mays ago. This portage was a continuous uphill, but not that hard.

We then had another rather short paddle across another unnamed lake, to a very mucky entrance to the final portage. Yes, Vanessa’s hiking boot got sucked right under the mud. This portage was the longest - apparently close to 700m - but it didn’t feel very long. It is a steep uphill, with some stairs to start off. This required us to split up the portage by taking our backpacks up first and coming back for the canoe. Once at the top it was pretty flat for most of this portage and we were able to continue with our packs and canoe simultaneously. There was one other steep step up before we reached the shores of Hidden Lake.

The entrance and bay leading to the lake is very shallow. Rashaad spotted a “big” (for us southerners, small for the north though) pike in shallow bay area. The water at Hidden Lake is ridiculously clear and blue! We headed out into a smaller area of Hidden Lake (the lake is actually quite large, irregularly shaped, and has lots of bays) to explore some of the islands and try to find a nice spot to camp. We ended up on an island that had clearly be camped at many a time. Campers can easily spot out the good places to set up, regardless of designated sites or not! We had the whole island to ourselves, how nice! We setup camp, sat around for a bit, and then headed to bed. In the daylight, of course.

On Saturday morning after a nice breakfast, we headed out for a paddle around the smaller bay area of the lake that we were in while the water was still calm. We scoped out some other good camping spots for future trips (we will definitely be back!) before heading back to our island. The rest of the day was meant for relaxing. We sat in the sun, ate, swam, watched a forest fire plume of smoke, etc. After all of that sun, we were exhausted and headed to bed quite early! It is really interesting to not have it get dark while camping in a tent. We awoke many times in the middle of the night only to ever see the sky look overcast - that’s as dark as it got! It’s also weird to not have a campfire. We are so used to this, and while there is no official fire ban in place in the park, we decided to caution not having one due to the extreme drought we are in and all of the fires burning in the territory. We didn’t want to take any chances. It also got very windy Saturday night and this persisted into Sunday morning.

We made our final breakfast in the wind and decided we would pack up right after. It was not enjoyable to be hanging out in the middle of a lake on such a windy day. We knew the paddle back would be more work in the wind and waves of the lake, so we figured we would get a head start and take our time. The paddles and portages on the way back were not as hard as we had envisioned. The wind was the worst on Hidden Lake, thankfully. We arrived back at the car sometime just after 11AM and packed up and headed home. It is also very strange to us to be home after a camping adventure so quickly. We are used to the 4+ hour drives we had to go anywhere with good backcountry camping in Ontario! We were saddened to drive back into Yellowknife knowing we left blue skies and clean air (although extremely windy) back at Hidden Lake to approach grey, smoke-filled skies over Yellowknife. ENR fire crews were performing a burnout operation on the fire plume we had watched from afar all day on Saturday. With the wind blowing all of the smoke directly into town. It’s smokey here now… Again.

As we cleaned up and unpacked, we couldn’t help but plan our next camping trip in 2 weeks, we hope! It’s time to explore more of the territorial parks before the snow falls. Ha!