50 Days on the Water

In the summer before Grade 11, four Greenwood students took on an ambitious challenge that would test everything they have learned on OE trips: a 50-day canoe trip. Eva Pestrin, Eton Carrington, Tim Mulligan, and Gabriel Loubert were all campers at Camp Wapomeo and Camp Ahmek, brother and sister camps in Algonquin Park.

The 50-day trip is the longest and most ambitious offered by the camps. Before they head out on the river, the campers work with camp staff to plan out their trip. Because of this, each trip goes on a unique route.

Eva’s trip started in the French River. From there, they paddled through Georgian Bay on towards Killarney. Their original plan had been to travel on to Biscotasing and paddle to Temagami, but wildfires in the area meant they needed a fast change of plans. They instead took a shuttle to Kipawa, paddling the Ottawa river to return to Algonquin.

50 days is a long time to camp and canoe, but for Eva, the hardest part was coming home!

“When you are out somewhere where the only information about the world around you is what you can observe, you become very intuitive,” Eva said. “You look at tiny little things and what they might mean, like how the dampness of the ground in the morning communicates what the weather will be like. Coming out of [a setting] where you have been observing every little thing and to be put in an extremely stimulating city can be very overwhelming.”

For Eva, the experience was definitely a positive one. It gave her space from her ordinary life, and a chance to think differently. The best thing about the trip for her was that it gave her “a general feeling of simplicity. It was just nice not to have my mind racing about a million things that had to be done; it was nice to just be able to be one hundred percent focused on the present.”