The Qathet canoe route, which was previously known as the Powell Forest canoe route, is a multi-day, 57 kilometer trip out of Powell River in British Columbia. It involves paddling on small and large lakes and multiple portages. My friend and I paddled it this September.
Since the route isn’t a loop, the logistics are trickier than they are, say, for the Sayward Forest canoe loop across on Vancouver Island. On the positive side, Qathet doesn’t require registration of any kind.
My friend dropped me, the canoe and our gear at the Louis Lake Recreation site. The road is unpaved and bumpy in places, but his sedan managed. He then drove the car back to Powell River, where he parked it on the roadside next to the Shingle Mill pub, where we were planning to emerge at the end of our trip. He then took a cab back to the recreation site where I was waiting for him. Even though he had told them in advance where he was going, the driver arrived in a Tesla Model 3 and told him he couldn’t take him all the way. By then it was past 9pm and completely dark. My friend, by indulging the cab driver’s racist rants, was able to get him to drive him within two kilometers of where I was waiting for him. He then had to hike the remaining distance by the light of his headlamp. I heard him before I saw him, as he was singing Sinatra’s “I did it my way” to scare off the bears he was worried he might run into.
During our time in Qathet, we only encountered three other parties. One of them was camping on Dodd Lake and consisted of two francophone couples. We chatted with them for less than five minutes before moving on. The second group consisted of two older men who were mountain biking one of the logging roads running alongside the lake. The other one we met on a campsite on Powell Lake. We talked with them for an hour before they paddled on, while we stayed on at the campsite. We also paddled past many cabins, ranging in size from sheds to full-sized houses. Most of them swim on a platform moored to the side of the lake. Their density increased the closer we came to the town of Powell River. Almost all of the cabins appeared unoccupied.
I was surprised by the absence of other boats, travelers or cabin dwellers. The weather was sunny and warm the whole time, and the water temperature was great for swimming. My friend and I swam every single day except the first. I had assumed that “Sunshine Coast” is just a desperate attempt by the British Columbia tourist board to rebrand the name of the region where Qathet is located, but at least for us, it turned out to be accurate. Why aren’t there more visitors? We were wondering, but we didn’t mind and enjoyed the solitude.
The portages were physically demanding. My friend’s Grumman aluminum canoe, which we called Betsy, was large and heavy, and it took us two hours to carry it and our gear for 2.4 kilometers over the hill between Windsor and Goat lakes. There were several other, shorter portages too.
Betsy’s size and heavy weight proved an advantage in the last section of paddling on the open water of Powell Lake. On our penultimate day, the wind picked up and the height of the waves increased. There were even a few whitecaps. Betsy tracked and cut through the waves admirably and only took on water once, when a powerboat passed us and its wake combined with a whitecap.
This has been my most enjoyable canoe adventure to date. The perfect weather and the absence of other paddlers was a big factor. My friend and I even came up with the Enchantment Scale, which we used to quantify the level of serenity at different times during our trip. Paddling the smaller lakes along the route, we agreed the ES reached level 9, with only the occasional, distant rumbling of a logging truck preventing it from reaching the maximum of level 10.
Nehaveigur 