02-Sep-2006 -- It was our second take on 49 N 83 W. We did our first attempt in mid-April this year (2006), together with Igor Ivanov, Kirill Zhegulev and Evgeny Karpov. Snow in Southern Ontario was long gone and we were foolish not to take snowshoes. The confluence turned out to be just 1.6 km from the access road, but we arrived to drop-off location too late in the day. The start was at 5 pm (just 2 hours before sunset), and after one hour and 800 m we got our feet totally wet from above-the-ankle undersnow water. Snow depth started to become a problem as well - it reached half a meter and kept increasing as we continued into the woods. We had to turn back. But even though it was a failure, this attempt contributed significantly to our success the second time.

Going to this confluence in summer was much easier. This time there were only two of us, so we did not drive all the way to the confluence by car - that would be tiresome and risky (this trip is more than 1000 km one-way). We started on the 1st of September like this: Victor took a bus from Toronto to Kapuskasing and Artem drove from Ottawa to North Bay and got on the same bus there. It took us about 16 hours to reach our base of operations.

We were at Kapuskasing at 1.30 am, 2nd of September. The motel where we made a reservation was closed even though we notified them in advance about our arrival, so we had to cross the town on foot to check into more expensive hotel where reception was still working.

In the morning we headed to the Avis office where we booked a car and found out that Garmin maps put it to the wrong place: 106-B Governement road East. Funny enough there was a small house with number 106-B, but it did not look anything like Avis office. The actual office was a couple of kilometres from that place: 106 Government road West.

Rental SUVs were sold out at that location long ago (it was a long weekend in Canada) so we got Pontiac Grand Prix, which is not what you call an offroad-worthy vehicle. We drove approximately an hour from Kapuskasing to the confluence using our GPS tracks from the spring visit. The gravel access road was very dusty. We left a car on the road shoulder and headed into the forest.

We walked used the same cutting as in spring (we discovered it on Google maps), and went to the east for 700 metres or so, then turned south and, after some time, turned to the east and started the hardest, though rather short, bushwacking segment through the very dense forest on our way to the confluence.

Luckily, the confluence itself is on a nice small clearing in a dense mixed forest. We've got all zeroes with high accuracy readings on our GPS receivers rather fast and did all the required photos, and then some close-ups of black goosebery - the plant we had seen for the first time.

The weather was great: sunny and no wind. Funny enough, Southern and South-Eastern Ontario got their fair share of rainfall that weekend. We used pretty much the same track to go back. Jumped into the car and headed to Kapuskasing for a lunch. And after the lunch we headed to 50 N 85 W.