Quetico's Hunter Island

• Posted on May 6, 2008 at 8:47 AM
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According to park regulars the ultimate canoe trip in Quetico is Hunter’s Island. After a quick glance at the map, however, it’s hard to grasp why exactly this would be such a critical part of the park to explore. The route, for the most part, is made up of large, windy lakes; it passes through some of the busiest access points; the trip itself measures over 200 miles and takes at least twelve days to complete; and in physical terms it’s not even a real island, just a land mass which splits the two historically significant fur trade waterway routes: Kaministiquia and Grand Portage. The only real reason behind me giving it a try in the first place was that one of my regular canoemates, Andy Baxter, is one of those “park regulars.” He continually praised Hunter’s Island as a definitive canoe trip and just wouldn’t allow me to ignore it as a possible canoe route when I was writing my for my guide book for Quetico and Beyond (released in 2007). So we chose a couple of weeks in June to paddle the loop and I must confess, after completing the route, Andy was right. The Hunter’s Island trip definitely is an essential Quetico canoe trip. It’s not perfect; our trip did manage to have a few shortcomings: an early June timeline made for one of the buggiest trips of my life; wind was also a huge issue on some of the larger lakes; we met up with unimaginable crowds of canoeists along the border lakes; and, even at the end of the trip I still couldn’t grasp the “island” idea. What I did find, however, was that we paddled and portaged past so many natural and historical treasures, all of which typify what Quetico is really all about, that I’d have to say that Hunter’s Island truly is a gem for canoeists, and if you ever thought of charactering yourself as a “park regulars” you better put this route on your to-do list.

I've included one of a numnber of video clips from the Hunter's Island portion of our 27 days in total we spent paddling Quetico in June of 2006. Enjoy. It was a blast filming Andy's silly character.