trip planning- Wabakimi

October 21, 2026

The Thunder Bay 36 fire canceled my plans of paddling in Canada this summer but someone may benefit from me sharing my planning process so here goes...

I’ve come to realize that I’ve been spoiled on my trips up north. Rob Haslam’s excellent maps, his experience with the area and the efforts of Rob, a few of his buddies and the Geraldton High School Outers club working to maintain the portages have made my first couple of NW Ontario trips very hassle-free.

Make no mistake, I appreciate their efforts and I encourage anyone who is interested in doing these trips to go and help keep the routes open but the wanderlust that got me into canoe tripping also drives me to seek even more remote routes and those are unlikely to have maintained portages. In fact, due to logging, fires and storms, some of the portages may not even exist any more as the boreal forest quickly removes most traces of human activity.

This is particularly true of an extended version of the Marshall Lake loop which Rob has encouraged me to do. The Kapikotongwa River gets very few visitors above Stewart Lake and even fewer below. In fact, the only YouTuber that I’ve seen try the larger loop could not find one of the portages. He & his wife wound up bush-whacking their way through and she injured her knee (spoiler alert) making it impossible for them to finish the whole loop.

The concerning part of that, from my standpoint, is that Jon & Erin have a lot more experience seeking hard-to-find portages than I will probably ever have so I figured that I may need a warm-up and a place to practice.

All of that led me back to the idea of Wabakimi Provincial Park and the crown land that surrounds it. My understanding is that most of the area is lightly traveled but more so than the lower part of the Kap so I’ll have to hunt for portages a little more than I’ve been (and might even have to work to clear some), but I suspect that it won’t have the degree of difficulty that the lower Kap may present.

It does, however, present a very different problem in that Rob doesn’t have maps for the area so planning is more of a challenge. Here’s how I went about solving that issue:

I could only find two primary sources of maps for the Wabakimi area unless you go through an outfitter but, even then, I am of the understanding that all of the mapping was actually done by Friends of Wabakimi (FOW) so all maps have, essentially, the same information.

To test this theory, I looked into buying maps from one outfitter who claims to have “the most complete maps available” but I was told that he only provides maps to those using his outfitting services and, because I wasn’t looking to be fully outfitted by him, I wasn’t in need of enough support to be worth his time (yep, he actually said that).

No worries there, I’ll just DIY it like I do everything else.

Now, because some First Nations people still use the Canadian VIA rail system to access their villages, the trains will stop wherever you wish. They also haul canoes (but are limited to 6 per train so reserve your tickets early).

Just give them a mile marker and pay the fare for the next stop on the line and they’ll throw you and all of your gear out in the middle of the forest; no problem.

I started on Google Earth and followed the rail line (note the line of towns South of the Park) West from Armstrong and noticed that Chivelston Lake sat right along the rail line but outside of the park boundaries. That’s perfect for me because crown land camping is far cheaper than camping within the park and (as the outfitter correctly deduced), I’m pretty frugal unless someone can demonstrate actual value (which, in my opinion, he did not).

The fact that I could find little information about Chivelston Lake online leads me to believe that this may be the road less traveled and, therefore, right up my alley.

Note: this screenshot is from Caltopo which shows the rail line

I looked it up on paddleplanner.com and started mapping out a route that would take me to the Palisade River then east to see the Wendell Beckwith cabins. I found that there are many pictographs on Cliff Lake, an old airplane crash site on Wash Lake and that the Pikitigushi River would lead me back to the rail line for a train-in / train-out trip that should cover about 250 miles, involve very little human contact and provide a reasonably thorough tour of what the park has to offer.

The FOW website directed me to wabakimimaps.com where I provided Laurence with my planned route and he sent me maps tailored to my needs. (He's retired now and has taken down his website but tells me his maps are still available through FOW)

Those maps are reasonably detailed given the scale but it kinda freaked me out to see the outline of the water on a plain white sheet of paper and the scale is such that I had 2-3 days of travel on the first map alone. (maybe not a bad thing and I'm planning on taking these maps along when I launch but…)

I liked that, on paddleplanner, I can map out the route but I noticed that there were differences between the two as to where portages were located (both are merely approximations & I'll have to find them) as well as where campsites could be found.

Paddleplanner also shows the park boundaries so I can get the permits right and so I know where I can fly a drone (I'm not sure I'm taking one but it's possible... I'm considering filming the trip & posting it to YouTube but that's a ton of extra work and, perhaps, extra days in the field because of all the back-tracking)

I really do like that the PP site gives estimated travel times and can be set to single or double carries and that paddling speed is adjustable. The maps are printable w/ paid subscription (which I paid because I was convinced there was value) but there is no way to modify them to add additional information (or, at least, none that I could find)

Rob told me that he used Garmin BaseCamp for the maps he's given me and it, apparently, works if you already have the maps but Garmin stopped supporting it nearly a decade ago. I could download the program but couldn't get maps. It did, however, get me thinking...

I carry an inReach and can mark waypoints, etc on it from the computer, my phone or the inReach itself. The map can also be displayed on the inReach (Explorer model so it's larger and has a screen) or on my smartphone via the Earthmate app.

I jumped on Garmin Explore (their computer-based version of the Earthmate app- no idea why they need 3 names but...). I added some additional display screens to the laptop so I could easily compare and started marking portage locations and campsites from both the wabakimi.com maps and paddleplanner. I could also zoom Garmin Explore and compare to Google Earth images so I believe that I now have the route mapped out very well on the inReach.

The clusters with numbers indicate multiple items in too-close proximity for the elevation (scale of the map) and I marked campsites and portage locations from both sources as they were not always the same (if I can't find one, maybe I can find the other?).

I also exaggerated the lines to the left or right depending on whether I expect the portage to be on river right or river left. By doing that, I could quickly would know which side of the river I should search first for the takeout.

Campsites shown only on paddleplanner or on both paddleplenner & FOW maps were designated as CC & a number using the same number as shown on paddleplanner. (CC for "Chivelston Camp").

Campsites are not numbered on the FOW maps so those shown only on FOW were simply marked "FOW".

While I was at it, I mapped out a few escape routes in case I was running behind or was in danger of missing the train as well as a couple of options that might be more user friendly at various water levels. (The yellow in the NW corner will take me through McCrae Lake and can be used at lower water levels to avoid some very swampy portages between Velos and Takeoff Lakes, while the yellow line out the north end of the route will take me down the Grayson River at higher water levels.

The yellow lines through the center of the map are escape routes which can be used if I find that I've bitten off more than I can chew, I'm going to miss the train or I need to bail out early for some other reason that is not time-sensitive enough to justify the expense of having a float plane extraction.

I could just go with this and I feel pretty sure that the wabakimi.com maps and the electronics would be sufficient. I do not like to trust electronics that much, however, so I'll use my local printer to print all of this info onto waterproof paper as I've done for Rob's maps.

I found that I could export data from the inReach so I opened up CalTopo and imported that data. My export options were KML or GPX and I chose KML to start. It transferred the map OK but left a lot of extraneous pins all over the place, most notably where I attempted to follow the portage shape.

I couldn't find a way to get rid of the pins so I scrapped the map and started over, importing the data as a GPX file.

This worked better except that the portage lines for the last 2/3 of the trip are useless as they somehow got scattered randomly over the entire area.

(I've no idea why)

I wound up deleting all of the portage lines before downloading them, figuring that I'd add them in later by duplicating the process by which I'd added them onto the inReach map.

Caltopo allows you to download 5 maps at a time so I played around a little to determine what scale I thought was appropriate for the amount of information on each and downloaded them (as PDF files) in 5 map sets.

I left just enough overlap that I thought I could transition from one map to the next without difficulty and there were a couple of places where one of the maps was an enlargement of a very busy area.

These PDFs were then opened using Microsoft Edge (it has a free PDF editor) and I was able to draw in the portage lines and add notes from all online sources that I could find including every YouTube video that touched any part of my route (there are many).

I also added notes according to the input of a few FOW volunteers that were familiar with parts of the route, anything I could glean from the trip reports on myccr and canoetripping.net, and correspondence with David Jackson and Peter Albinger.

(If you’re unfamiliar with either of these, check out ramblin’boy here. The website is extremely well done and he and his brother have detailed some spectacular trips.

David & his wife Leah have also done some truly amazing trips. I'd be hesitant to try to duplicate some of the things they've done but he was graciously helpful and I trust his location information even though I'll take his judgement about "difficulty" with a grain of salt... he & his wife are both a lot tougher than I am.)

Also particularly helpful were John of FOW (jdeerfoot on canoetripping) who had recent information on the Harris / Savant Lake section, Ben (recped on canoetripping and Mr recped on YouTube) who provided a lot of information on the Harris Lake through Velos Lake section and Mark (aka dogbrain on canoetripping and YouTube) who is responsible for both the McCrae Lake option around Redmond Lake and the Grayson River option in the North.

In short, the canoeing community online is extremely friendly and helpful and this is what I came up with:

This last one shows the final look of the map section I'd shown earlier.

Portages were drawn in using Micrsoft Edge to edit the PDFs and portages were numbered as "CPxx" for "Chivelston Port" in the same way that Rob had numbered the ports on his maps.

This allows me to save notes for each portage and my intention is to update the maps with accurate GPS coordinates upon my return.

Actually, looking at these now, I see that I have some more editing to do before I leave (the estimated portage distance is missing for CP82 & CP83 in the above map which makes me wonder how many other edits need to be made?)

That's OK, I love going over maps and it will give me something to do this winter while I dream of warmer weather and finally making this trip a reality in 2027.

Cheers.

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