My regular spring tripping guys – Ryan, Rob and Judd - and I had big plans last year. We had a big multi-day adventure mapped out, with the majority of the days bringing us all over the interior of Lake Superior Provincial Park in search of brook trout and lake trout. We also planned a “long route” bringing us up HWY 144, across HWY 101 and down HWY 17 into the park.
It took no less than six hours into the first day for our trip to come to a crashing halt. We had made a stop to camp on a speckled trout lake off a system of logging roads southwest of Timmins.
We set up camp for what was to be a two-night stay. We were going to hit a couple of trout lakes that had been good to us in the past and we would then move on. My friend, Ryan, had constructed a beautiful maple wood rack for his truck to carry our two canoes for our foursome.
He even had another friend design and weld steel plates for the four main anchor points to the truck bed. It was a hell of a rack. There was just one flaw with it. It wasn’t made to withstand a tree crashing down on it.
Our campsite had some iffy-looking dead trees. There were some 70 to 80-foot poplars that made you think twice, if not more. The group decided to drop some trees and make the campsite a bit safer.
It was early evening. We all should have just left well enough alone. We didn’t.
A decision was made to bring down a pine tree at one point. It was cut with a chainsaw, but refused to topple. Another decision, more ill-fated, was made to attach a chain to the tree and give it a little persuasion from the truck.
This is the moment we screwed ourselves.
Ryan jumped in his truck and hit the throttle. The tree came down fast and hard. And why wouldn’t it? It was about 30-feet long. The tree smashed into the canoe rack. Thankfully our canoes were not on the rack at the time. The tree destroyed the rack. It snapped it like a twig and then punctured