Roughing it at Topaz Lake

On a summer evening in 1981, two bearded men of the woods, tired and sore from a day of backpacking and ridge climbing, sat on a bare rock in their dirty jeans and plaid flannel shirts, eating reconstituted from freeze-dried rations by a meager campfire. 

Then the girl in the bathing suit walked by. 

She was middle teen-aged in a blue one-piece Speedo, carrying a white beach towel, unscuffed white sneakers on her feet. Her ensemble was entirely inappropriate for humping a wilderness trail in bear country. That is what my friend Dave and I had been doing for the past two days, ever since we had locked up the car, heaved large packs onto our backs, and headed off on the back country hiking trail of Killarney Provincial Park in Northern Ontario.

“What… the … hell?” asked Dave as the girl passed within a dozen feet of our campsite. She paid us no heed as she passed, though I was sure she knew we were there. 

I didn’t answer Dave. I was pointing in the direction from where the bathing beauty had come. She was not alone. Just before Dave asked his question, I heard the distinct sound of giggling. Three more bathing suit-wearing girls came by, and then a few more. Maybe seven in all. None of them looked in our direction. They were focused on Topaz Lake, a beautiful blue/green gem nestled atop a ridge that cuts across Killarney like a backbone. 

There we sat, nearly motionless as our reconstituted beef stroganoff congealed on our laps, our heads slowly pivoting as the group passed. We had busted our butts to get there. The trail was tough, with lots of uneven, rocky terrain. I was out of shape and had the added stress of carrying 50 pounds on my back in a bottom-of-the-line pack from a Canadian Tire store. 

I can’t remember why we chose Killarney for our getaway. It was the last week of August 1981. The year before, Dave and I had worked at a summer camp on the mighty Moose River just south of Moosonee, near James Bay, in far northern Ontario. This year, after a summer working in the city, we both longed to get back to the bush before returning to school. We were also looking for a genuine wilderness experience, off the grid, as they say today. I’m not sure the grid existed in 1981.

Killarney fit the bill perfectly, though girls in bathing suits, now happily splashing and swimming in Topaz Lake, were an unexpected part of this “wilderness experience.” Imagine you’re standing on the bald white granite summit of a small mountain. The vista is spectacular. Green forests dotted with blue lakes and sparkling creeks, and more ridges and hills of pink and white granite in all directions. In the foreground, a single gnarled pine tree has grown out of a crack in the rock. This is Killarney.

The area had been an inspiration for several members of The Group of Seven, famous Canadian landscape painters. Commemorations of the Group are everywhere: an A.Y. Jackson Lake, an Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) Lake, an Artist Lake, and an Artist Creek. The trail we were exploring, called Le Cloche Silhouette, was named after a painting of Killarney’s Le Cloche Mountains by Franklin Carmichael.

Someone dressed for a day hike, wearing light clothing and good hiking boots, and carrying only water and energy bars, could probably make the 6 miles from the trailhead at George Lake to Topaz Lake and back before sundown. But we were in no such hurry. Along the way, we’d climb the occasional hill for the view. The hardest part was late on the second day, climbing a steep portage trail that they called The Pig. We reached the deep woods campsite exhausted, with barely enough energy left to set up our little tent, fetch water for our supper, and get a small campfire started. Then came the girls in bathing suits. 

“Well, Pathfinder?” asked Dave. 

“Well, Eagle Scout?” I responded. 

Pathfinder and Eagle Scout were our chosen nicknames for the journey. This was how we addressed each other whenever we encountered a challenge, like when we couldn’t find the trail after crossing an expanse of bare rock. It was one of those times now. It wasn’t just the incongruity of their dress, deep in this wilderness. These were the most people we’d encountered on our journey. We sat there for a while, dumbfounded. 

“Ow!” The stick Dave had thrown at me hit my shoulder and glanced my cheek. I picked up the stick and threw it back at him. 

“Ow!” said Dave when the stick struck his chest. “Good! I’m not sleeping and apparently neither are you. I’m assuming that you’re as real as I am.”

“Yes, I guess, whatever real is.” Did I mention I was majoring in philosophy?

“OK, then, but what about them?” Dave pointed down to the pool party that Topaz Lake had become. 

“Should we throw sticks at them?”

Dave pondered that one for a minute. Then he shook his head. Two bedraggled guys charging down to the lake waving sticks and shouting, “Are you real? Are you reeeeal?” would just be weird. 

“Maybe we should have a look where they came from.” 

“Yeah, they couldn’t have come far dressed like that.”

We both stood, slowly, making old man grunts as we straightened those hike-tired legs, aching hips and knees. I know they were old man grunts because it is the same sound I make today whenever I get out of a chair. There was a steep drop at the crest of the ridge where we first saw the girls. Not a cliff, exactly, but steep. It was a long way down, but walkable. A pathway wound down to a bay. 

What we saw on, and in, the bay was downright civilized. 

There were a couple large summer homes down there. One, on an island in the middle of the bay, was particularly impressive. Even more impressive than the houses were the boats — huge cabin cruisers and sailing yachts. I called it a bay rather than a lake because these boats had to have sailed in from somewhere. A particularly grand ship was parked just off shore right below us. It was then that I noticed a new smell mixed with the pleasant birch, spruce, and pine of the bush. It was the smell of money.

“Huh!” said Dave. 

“Huh!” I said in full agreement. 

“Excuse us,” said a voice from behind. 

We turned to see a group of dripping wet girls with beach towels pulled over their shoulders like capes. We stepped aside to let them pass between us, like honour guards at the throne room door taking respectful flanking positions for the royalty to enter. 

We spoke no more of the encounter that night. It was getting dark, and we had work to do, cleaning up after dinner and hoisting our packs up a tree. This really was bear country. We had seen plenty of fly-covered evidence of their presence along the trail. Hanging our packs high in a tree, at a distance from the campsite, kept them and us safer from ursine intruders (but not from one enterprising squirrel that climbed down a rope and burrowed through about three feet of tightly backed clothing to eat half an O Henry chocolate bar). Later we sullenly sat watching our dying fire, the sound of adolescent giggling still vaguely heard, or maybe just echoing in our ears.

In the days, months and years that followed, Dave and I did often reminisce about our odd wilderness encounter. Like a big fish story, the actual number of girls got bigger every year, a thundering army of half-naked hormonal teens charging down the ridge toward us. As for who they were, the prevailing theory over time has been that it was some kind of sleep-away sweet sixteen party for a girl from one of the cottages or big boats we saw in the bay. 

I wondered from time to time how they had gotten there, so deep into Killarney Park and miles away from Georgian Bay. Then came the Internet and some answers. I knew about the connection of famous Canadian painters to Killarney. The American gangsters were a surprise. 

Baie Fine is one of the world’s largest freshwater fjords. It runs from Frazer Bay, just northeast of Manitoulin Island, along the base of that rocky ridge that cuts across Killarney. Near the park boundary, the fjord becomes a narrow finger of water that ends with a sharp 90-degree bend into a kind of water cul-de-sac called The Pool. Like a root tendril of a lone jack pine, working its way into a crack in the granite of a Killarney mountain top, water-borne civilization found a way deep into the park via Baie Fine. 

Celebrities, captains of industry, and even members of the Chicago mob sailed Baie Fine over the years. Scarface himself is said to have done it. Just a few miles north of our perch at Topaz Lake there was once a cabin on Threenarrows Lake. Built for Chicago Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson. The cabin was commandeered by Al Capone to satisfy a gambling debt. 

Ralph S. Evinrude, of the outboard motor Evinrudes, owned that rustic home we saw on the island in The Pool. He and his wife, singer and Hollywood actress Frances Langford, would sail up Baie Fine in their 118-foot yacht Chanticleer to summer there. Evinrude died in 1986, and Langford in 2005, so they and Chanticleer could well have been there that evening in 1981. 

Their island summer home is still there, and to this day, Great Lakes boaters make their way up Baie Fine and anchor at The Pool for an overnight stay. You need a good-sized craft to do it. Even the smaller sailboats anchored in The Pool need to be big enough for provisions and a cabin. It is still bear country. More than once a boater has been awakened in the night to find their yacht being raided by a bear attracted by food that had been left out. Who knew they could swim? Also still today, visitors to The Pool with enough time and energy can come ashore and make the thirty-minute hike up the ridge, take in the view, and swim in Topaz Lake. 

Energy was something Pathfinder and Eagle Scout did not have on that August evening all those years ago. It is a good thing too. If the climb up The Pig had been a little shorter, or if we were in better shape, we likely would have availed ourselves of those cool turquoise waters, believing we were the only souls for miles. Those giggling girls would have found two young men, in a complete state of nature, floating in Topaz Lake. Likely an unexpected, and maybe not welcome, sweet sixteen gift.