>Murtle Lake – Day Five

>I’m finally back to tell you about day five!

It had rained all night and the rain continued off and on until early afternoon. Because of that and the fact that we knew today was a shorter paddle, we decided to give ourselves a bit of a later start. We were back on the water at about 11, and canoed for about an hour. It was the one day we had to have our rain gear on for the trip – which was way less than we were expecting!

The wind started to pick up a bit, but it was going in the right direction for us, so we decided to stop and rig up a sail for the canoe.

Wouldn’t you know that it stayed windy for the entire time we were making the sail, but as soon as we got back on the water, the wind died down. We kept it up for quite a while, hoping the wind would pick up again, but that didn’t happen, so eventually we took it down (it was a bit hard for Martin to steer, and for us to keep our paddling coordinated with the sail in the way).

We got to the same campsite as the first night at about 2:30. After debating if we should just go home this afternoon already, we decided to set up camp again, and just spent another relaxing afternoon here. The sky actually cleared in the evening again, and we enjoyed our last night on the lake.

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There’s not a whole lot to say about Day 6, so I’ll just include it here. We were up early, because we wanted to get the portage over and done with. At first we tried to carry the canoe while we carried our packs with all our gear, but that didn’t go so well, so we still ended up doing it in two trips. The handle system we had figured out on Day 3 worked pretty good, but it was still awkward. We added some straps to it and placed those over our “outside” shoulder – that distributed the weight a bit better, and we managed to do quite well after that. It still took us about 2 hours to get everything back to the truck.

When we were hiking on Day 2, we had gotten pretty excited about what kind of “real” food we were going to eat on our way home. We had decided on eating at Triple-O’s for lunch/supper in Kamploops and then having icecream at DQ in Merritt. We had totally looked forward to this, and we were not disappointed! The burgers and ice cream tasted so good!

We arrived home by late afternoon, cleaned everything up, and had a good sleep in a “real bed”!!

>Murtle Lake – Day Four

>This is what we woke up to on Thursday morning!!! We were so excited for this beautiful day!

The lake was calm pretty all the way back down the whole north arm – we had a little bit of wind, but not much. Here are a few more pictures of this beautiful lake! It was so calm the reflections were amazing! Pictures really don’t do it justice.

We decided to head into the west arm and see how far we would get. It had started to cloud over, and we had to paddle against a pretty strong wind down here, but it was kind of fun to be in the waves! We thought we got around half-way down the west arm… only to find out the next day that if we had gone for about another hour, we would have made it all the way to the end! Oh well. In case you’re curious, if you look at the map in the last post, we got to the campground with the #5 nearest to the left side of the map. We figured out that on average, we paddled about 4-5km/hour – we had paddled about 25km that day! Needless to say, we were pretty ready to set up camp and rest.

It was a nice campground and nice evening, although still a bit cold. After supper (tuna casserole) Martin decided to go for a swim – but since it was kind of cold, and the lake stayed shallow here for a long way out, it ended up being more of a “dunking” and straight back out! There was no way he could convince me to get out there. I had a hard enough time warming up when I was dry!!

And just a random note to end this off:

The sound of loons calling is an amazing sound! We loved to sit and listen to them call back and forth to each other!

>Murtle Lake – Day Three

>Today, after a good sleep and a good breakfast of scrambled eggs and bannock, we started canoeing at about 10:00. It was quite a warm morning, and the lake and mountains around us were beautiful!

We stopped for lunch at one of the campsites and sat on a rock by the lake to eat lunch. It was beautiful to see the sun shining on the water – I tried to get a picture of it, but I couldn’t really capture it as well as I wanted to. Since fruit leathers were a staple for us, Martin decided he should do an ad for them. That’s what that picture is about

We made it to the far end of the north arm by 1:30. After setting up camp, we tried to find an easier way to carry the canoe – knowing that Saturday morning we’d have to do that portage all over again. We managed to find some nice small pieces of drift wood that we tied to the yoke that would function as handles. It seemed to work pretty good. After that, we just read for a while. It was a nice (although cool) afternoon. The evening was as usual – eating supper (Fettecini Alfredo with chicken), and then sitting by the campfire again before we headed off to bed.

I know I’ve said it already, but we were amazed at the scenery in the north arm of the lake. We had Murtle mountain right in our “backyard” and many other beautiful mountain peaks around us. There were also quite a few waterfalls – a nice sound to fall asleep to!

Even though it’s a bit hard to see, I thought I would include a map of the lake. The numbers at the campsites indicate how many tent sites there are. The first night we were at the “6″ site at the bottom right. The second night we were at the “6″ site part way up the north arm (by the two red hiking trails on the map). The third night we were at the “4″ site at the very end of the north arm.

>Murtle Lake – Day Two

>Tuesday was a cloudy, cool day. We woke up early, had pancakes for breakfast, packed up, and were canoeing by 9:45. We got to our next campsite (the one we had planned to get to the first day) at around 11:00 – a shorter ride than we thought it would be. This campsite was our favorite of all of them. It was near the lake, and also had a nice stream running right beside it.

We set up camp, ate lunch, and then went hiking up Wavy Alpine Trail. In Martin’s words (he keeps a daily journal on these kinds of trips), “This trail was a grind. Similar to Elk Mountain only longer.” But we got some great views at the crest. You could go further up to the peak, but we didn’t have time, so we headed back. We actually didn’t stay up there long… just took some pictures and headed back – it was SOOO cold up there! It started raining a bit on our way down, but thankfully that didn’t last long.

We had to canoe about 5 minutes between the campsite and the trailhead, so for the way back I decided that I wanted to learn how to steer the canoe. I’m not so good at that. The 5 minute canoe ride was a lot longer as I zig-zagged our way back. Martin laughed at me pretty much the whole time, but it was fun to try.

We had shepherd’s pie for supper and a nice warm campfire… and the sky totally cleared during the evening. So nice!

>Murtle Lake – Day One

>We woke up to a clear blue sky – awesome weather to start out this part of the trip! Packing up and driving to Murtle Lake went just as planned (although the gravel road was a lot worse than we expected – the picture doesn’t really show it). We reached the parking lot at 12:00 – and quickly got ready to head down the 2.5km portage to the lake.

Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse at that point. The cart that we had been so excited about failed us . Martin had tested it at home pulling the canoe over rocks and bumps and all kinds of things – and everything was fine. The only thing we didn’t do, was test it when it was full of our gear. We expected that the PVC glue would hold. We were wrong. We took about five steps with the loaded canoe on the cart and one of the glue joints gave… we had a collapsed cart. Figuring we could fix it and carry on, we spent a long 2 hours making several unsuccessful attempts to fix it.

At that point, we decided to just walk everything in. First our gear, then the canoe. That was another long (and awkward) 2 hours. The canoe is HEAVY! And the portage trail was not level as the brochure said. In hindsight, we should have just gone back down to Blue River right away (1 hour on a gravel road) and rented a cart. But we didn’t. Oh well. We finally got the canoe in the lake at 5:15.

We paddled about 15 minutes to the first campsite we saw, and decided to just stop there so we could set up camp and make supper while it was still light. It was a bit of a disappointing start to the trip, but we did our best to not let it get us down. We did have a beautiful day – and this was a beautiful place!

>Long weekend at Clearwater KOA

>We had planned to start our canoe trip on Monday (Labour Day), but we didn’t want to spend too much of Monday driving (Murtle Lake is about 6 hours from here), so we decided to spend the long weekend in Clearwater.

We left Friday afternoon in the pouring rain. And I mean pouring. It finally cleared up in Merritt, and the drive from there to Kamloops was nice. As we left Kamloops, we hit a bit of a wind storm… bad enough to knock the canoe off the foam blocks. Totally scared us, but the canoe did stay on the roof. We couldn’t find the foam blocks anymore, but we found a 2×4 laying on the side of the road, so we covered that with Martin’s rain pants to protect the truck from more scratches, cinched the canoe down again, and carried on. The rest of the drive was uneventful.

Saturday we had an awesome day – the best part being the trip to Helmcken Falls. It was amazing! The trail actually took you to the very edge of the canyon with no fences or anything. Not a good place to take little kids – but very neat for us! It’s hard to get the sense of how high these falls are on a picture, but we had to try!

Sunday we went to a little community baptist church, where we heard a message on James 2. The pastor there had been a youth pastor for 14 years prior to coming to this church, so it was good to talk to him about that for a while. We really enjoyed being there.

The Clearwater KOA is a really nice campground. We enjoyed our time here and would come back to this campground again!

By now we were super excited for the next part of our trip… it’ll be fun to share it with you!