The Happy Camper: Camping in Quebec’s Newest National Park
Many of Ontario’s campers, padders and hikers have ignored their neighbouring province of Quebec for three major reasons: they don’t speak French, dogs are not allowed in the backcountry and Ontario has more wild areas to offer. Well, my partner Kristine and I (and our two dogs, Angel and Oliver) just came back from a 10-day camping and canoe tripping adventure in Quebec’s Abitibi-Temiscamingue region, and we can clearly state that none of those reasons are justified.
Every French Canadian we met, whether it was a park employee or a local store owner, spoke fluid English. They were friendly, helpful and rich in culture. The traditional law refusing dogs in parks has been changed; even the national and provincial parks have dog beaches.
Oliver and Angel were welcomed with open paws. And the National Park we camped at—Opemican—measures 252 kilometres in size. Lake Kipawa, where we went on our weeklong canoe trip, has 300 square kilometres of wild shoreline to discover. That adds up to a lot of wild areas to explore.
Opemican opened to the public in 2019. It runs along the border of Ontario and Quebec, where Lake Timiskaming divides the two provinces. Its neighbouring park is Temagami and is less than a five-hour drive north of Toronto.
Kristine and I stayed our first night at the main campground at Point-Opemican. There is also a more rustic campground, Rivière-Kipawa, to the north. We also camped here for two more nights after completing our canoe trip on Lake Kipawa to check out touristy spots like Fort Temiscamingue and the Grand Chutes on the Kipawa River.
Our canoe trip explored a small portion of this labyrinth of a lake. It spreads out like a spider web, and it would seriously take you a couple of weeks to circumnavigate it by canoe. There’s two access points maintained by the park: the Registration Centre in the town of Laniel or a smaller and more protected inlet at Dorval Bay. By choosing Dorval, Kristine and I were able to cut off a good chunk of open water that’s busy with motorboat traffic.
It only took us a couple of hours of paddling to reach our first camp for the night. The lake was calm, and we had no issues rounding the major point to reach what’s called the Strawberry Islands. There is, however, a short 50-metre portage that can be used to avoid the point if the lake becomes rough—and it generally does.
There are two marked campsites on the Strawberry Islands that are maintained by the National Park. You have to pre-book them prior to your trip, and I gotta say our site (no. 2) had the most well-kept outhouse I have ever seen in the backcountry.
The next few days we paddled southeast, leaving the National Park and simply searching for crown land campsites along the remote shoreline of Lake Kipawa. There’s plenty to be found, and the entire area is remote, rugged and beautiful. It represents a less busy Lake Temagami, lined with majestic old growth white pine and sheer rock cliffs. This is an absolute gem, and I will definitely be going back.
Check out my video of our trip on my KCHappyCamper YouTube channel.
Kevin makes some glaring errors of fact in this article; he writes that this is Canada’s newest national park. This is wrong. It is Québec’s newest ‘national’ park. ‘National’ is what Quèbec calls it’s provincial parks; this critical fact also escapes Kevin, and contributes to the confusion of many campers, especially international visitors. He further writes that the park opened to the public in 2019, when in fact it was established in 2013. EXPLORE mag should be more careful in fact-checking and editing it writers. Kevin Callan should be much more circumspect in his writing and research.