Ontario EGL Hang - Bon Echo 2012 Trip Report

Greetings

So another successful hang is in the books. The weather was beautiful all weekend a little hot and sunny, cooled down nicely in the evenings. This almost doesn't really qualify as a trip report due to there only being 3 people on this trip, but a few notable things happened that make it worth while to tell about.

I met Wolvaroo and his fiance at the trail head about Noon on Friday. After a quick lunch and getting things organized we were on the trail about 20 minutes later. The temperature for Friday afternoon was around 30C with some humidity so I had to question the reason the both Wolvaroo and his fiancee choose to hike in jeans. HYOH and all. I was wearing a set of nylon zip off pant shorts and was comfortable. I did sweat buckets and got some scrapes on the legs from some overgrown sections of the trail.

At any rate, I come to find that this is the first back country trip for Wolvaroo's fiance so she just made due with the gear she had. Her backpack didn't have a hip belt, so that made life interesting for her. She also didn't take the time to break in her hiking boots so her feet were sore. I will give her credit, she was a trooper and didn't complain.

The hike in took 2 hours and 45 minutes or so. We stopped frequently as the trail was a little more rugged than the first time backpacker expected.
Setup of camp was rather straight forward and orderly as hammockers know how to do that efficiently.

Dinner time rolled around and we all pulled out our cook stoves and boiled out water. I have a full size stainless Emberlit (modded to accept tent stakes for an alcohol stove) and Wolvaroo uses an esbit stove and a military canteen cup.

After dinner was done, we hung our food bags so the critters didn't get them and soon after we all racked out and called it a day.

Saturday was a day of lollygagging at its best. This was a trip of R&R for me so I didn't do much. We spend part of the day gathering dead wood and processing it for the evening fire. On this little back country lake that I though was not accessible except for the trail we used, we saw a few boats over the course of the day that paddles/rowed around with fisherman catching some good sized fish from what I could see.

Other than these boaters we hadn't seen another sole all day long until about 6PM a pair of backpackers went speedily past our site and down to the next camp site a few hundred meters down the trail. They setup their camp and the next thing we know, one of them comes to our site and said their water treatment tables had expired and asked if we had any extra. Since we had a gravity water filter setup, we said they could fill any water containers they wanted. So they returned a short while later and filled up. We invited this pair to our site as we were going to have a fire that evening. They showed back up after they had there dinner and stayed a bit. In talking to them we find out they they rented a car, drove 4 hours to get to the trail and were only going to spend the one night. In getting to their site they made a navigational error and went the wrong way at one of the loop crossovers and didn't discover it until they hit another campsite much closer to the trail head. So they had to double back and get to their designated site. It was an adventure but they made it. They did consider just staying at the first site they ran into but as it turns out someone else had booked as we found out the next morning on our hike out.

Sunday morning rolls around and we were all up at sunrise so after breakfast, we all packed up an we were on the trail by 8AM, 2.5 hours later were at the trail head. We took a slightly longer by easier route on the way out instead of backtracking the route we took in. All in all it was a great trip. All of my DIY hammock gear worked great. The Martian Bridge hammock got its first 2 nights of trail use and it was very comfortable. My resized DIY underquilt keep my comfortable both nights (lows of 15C).

So with out further ado, here are the pictures I snapped with my cell phone camera.

http://s1054.photobucket.com/albums/...20Hang%202012/

Cheers

Brian