by Iori Miller
Photos Cheryl Stoltz and Iori Miller
In the summer of 2023, I paddled the Rideau canal from Kingston to Ottawa. I posted the trip on the Wilderness Canoe Association’s (WCA) website and invited anyone who wanted to join me. After, many of those who went on the Rideau showed an interest in paddling the Trent Severn Canal during the summer of 2024, so I organized a trip from Georgian Bay (Port Severn Lock) to Lakefield, where I presently live. When that was done, I was encouraged to finish the TS canal this summer, and so I launched a trip on the WCA website for the last week of May 2025.
You never know what a trip will look like until you are on it. Compared to most of the back country Wilderness trips that WCA members undertake, paddling Ontario’s great Canals are best described as ‘glamping’. There are nice flat grassy lawns and bathrooms!
I chose to run this year’s trip right after the opening of the Canal, the last week of May. When we looked at the weather App’s available just before the trip they predicted a week of rain. Yuck! I fully expected a few people to drop out … and I did hear rumblings of such in the last days before we were to begin. The plan was for everyone to meet in Lakefield the day before our first paddle day, shuttle most of the cars to Trenton (Bay of Quinte), and then return to camp that night at Lakefield’s Lock 26. But when I saw the weather was to be miserable, I offered the floors of my little home in Lakefield. A few people, as it turned out, had already booked a room for the first night in motels and Air BnB’s in Peterborough, but I did end up with 9 people in sleeping bags and air mattresses in my rainproof abode.
Every time I have posted a canal trip on the WCA website I’ve had people saying they’re interested because it’s something of as a bucket list trip they’ve wanted to do. I had already written a general article on Canal paddling a few years ago in Nastawgan (Tripping Ontario’s Two Great Canals, Nastawgan, Fall, 2022), but after this trip I thought it might be worth a few words about this summer’s trip as there are a few different details about it when compared to when I soloed this route back in the fall of 2022.
The Canals can be paddled any time, but they are officially open between mid-May and thanksgiving. It is important to be prepared in the shoulder seasons to experience higher than normal water flows. Coincidentally, I have now paddled this section of the Trent Severn twice during these times.
When I posted this trip in mid-winter, I thought the canal would have been open and running normally at the end of May. Initially it was, but on the morning of our second day Peterborough’s Ashburnham Lock Master suggested we quit our pursuit as they were formally closing the canal to the south. This was because they wanted to increase the water flow due to high water levels up in the lake section of the Kawarthas. Most of my group, other than myself, had lock passes and they were expecting to easily ride through each lock! I had promised glamping, right?! If we were to continue everyone would have to portage each and every lock. That not only meant portaging the remaining 18 locks in our route, but it also meant we might run into ‘unmanned’ locks with locked washrooms.
So now the gods were promising miserable weather and Parks Canada was unpromising to provide bathrooms and running water. 😟
Yet, no one quit.
The route was to be about 160 km, with one big lake to tackle. Rice lake is an east-west lake of nearly 25 km in length. It is shallow too. These parameters can lead to some pretty rough waters, depending on the weather/wind direction (normally from the west!). Fortunately for us, the weather was only miserable on the first day of our trip. When we were paddling the Lake, the weather was dead calm and easy to paddle, and the sun was actually beating on us through a clear blue sky. We actually had to seek out shade that day (that’s what weather is … most times barely predictable).
There was one thing about our trip that was unforeseen. On day 2, while paddling the Ottonobee just before Rice Lake, we came upon Wildwood Cottages and their copious variety of Kawartha Ice Cream. This was supposed to be our longest day (36 km), and this discovery helped us make it across Rice Lake to our camping destination that night. Little did we know that the very next day we would also discover Willowood Camp on the shores of Rice Lake, and their Kawartha Ice Cream helped us survive the beating sun as it baked us during our traverse of Rice Lake. This theme actually continued throughout the rest of our trip. Kawartha ice cream reservoirs appeared out of nowhere. We would paddle around the corner of a bay, and there would be that familiar and welcome Kawartha Ice Cream picture on a stick, indicating the compass direction to find our needed respite from paddling. 🍨🍦🌞🙂 It became our purpose to try out as many flavours as we could squeeze into the cones that drew our pocket books; Moose Tracks, Bordeaux Cherry, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Death by Chocolate, Dockside Cappuccino, Kawartha Candy Cane, Muskoka Mocha … I could go on, but I think the reader gets the point. We tried as many as we could. Other thanducks and geese everywhere we didn’t see a lot of wildlife, but we saw a lot of ice cream.
I will try to summarize a few of the significant details of the trip.
* We camped at locks every night but one. Parks Canada charges a paltry $5.50/night for camping and normally provides washroom facilities with that, and a promise of freshly cut ‘park-like’ grassy areas to pitch your tent on. With that you can count on the presence of Canada Geese Droppings too. It’s not a bonus feature, but it is pretty much the norm. The hefty buggers love lawn grass.
* The distance between Lock 19 (Scotts Mills in Peterborough) and Lock 18 (Hastings) is about 65 km. Too far for a day paddle. When I soloed the route first 3 years ago, I made a campsite in some Alder Bush at the side of Rice Lake. For our group, I found a place (The Old Burrison Homestead – RV Park) that was willing to host us — on the Rice Lake’s south shore, directly across from the Ottonobee River that lead us down from Peterborough. They rented a Porta-Potty for us and asked for $375. For 10 campers that was a lot more than a Lock’s camping cost, but it solved our distance problem between Lock 18 1nd 19.
* The Trent-Severn Canal is nowhere near as canoe friendly as the Rideau Canal. In the section we paddled, the take outs and put ins sometimes have a 2-to-3-foot drop from the concrete canal banks to the water. This makes it very different to load and unload a canoe when the locks are closed and one has to portage. Unlike the Rideau, there rarely are platforms provided to help paddlers load and unload.
* We shuttled our 6 cars to Trenton and stored them in a locked yard with Trent Port Marina (their long-term boat storage location) for the week we were paddling. It cost 10 people about $24 apiece for peace of mind (a few dollars were also given to the driver who shuttled drivers back to Lakefield). In conclusion, the weather was actually really good for most of the trip, we found porta-potties when needed when the Canal first shut down, and the few Lock Masters we found often called ahead and arranged to have open washrooms for us. We paid for camping every night even when there was no Lock Master to pay (we just paid later). It was a great trip after all, and the plethora of Kawartha Ice Cream🍦more than made up for all the portaging we had to do.