Heading out on the lake

I spent today using way too many Ziploc bags. The last time I packed for a backcountry trip of this length, it was pre-kids. That would have been for a trip in Temagami Wilderness park in Ontario, or along the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island, or the Bowron Lakes Canoe Circuit in north-central BC. This time, though, I'm packing food for six, not two, and the stakes are higher, because any misery or risk involves my children. Lots of Ziplocs. A really full Rubbermaid bin. Really really full.

In the bin are a lot of unmentionable chemicals which I'll mention anyway. Knorr pasta sauce, Simply Asian Teriyaki noodles and sauce, instant hot chocolate, Taco Time Fajita Seasoning, hydrogenated-oil coffee creamer (in the decaf-mocha mix), tang-like drink crystals and Quaker instant oatmeal. There's also some healthy stuff ... home-baked Canadian Trapper Bread, organic home-roasted coffee, organic dried fruit and nuts, buckwheat-and-whole-wheat pancake mix and bannock redi-mix with home-ground flour. There's a small cooler that will be coming as well, containing mostly cheese -- immense amounts of cheese!

The plan is to paddle the length of the lake along the western shore. If you have installed Google Earth, you can click on this bookmark and take a look at the lake we'll be travelling. The western shore is pristine wilderness, comprising the edge of Valhalla Provincial Park, a huge park of wild lakeshore, massive granite peaks, glaciers and dense old growth forest. We'll pitch our tents at various stops here and there along the shore as we progress down the lake and hopefully end up safe and sound in Slocan in a little under a week. Weather looks pretty good for this time of year -- night-time lows around 2 - 5 Celsius, daytime highs in the mid- to high-teens, a mix of sun, cloud and rain.

Yesterday Fiona knocked my beloved Nikon D70 digital SLR off the desk. While I cushioned its fall with a quick-thinking left foot, it's no longer functioning. It's two years and 5 days old, and I believe the warranty is 2 years. I am suffering immense grief, and will see what I can do to have it fixed after we return. I put the odds at 50:50 -- it is doing many things just fine (metering, focusing, flashing, opening the shutter) but won't close the shutter and process a captured image. So I'm using the old Canon PowerShot again, the one with duct tape holding it together, with a heady three quarters of a pixel resolution. It was a good camera in 1998, but that was eons ago in the digital world. The one really good thing about it, though, is that it fits in a Ziploc bag.