The first camping trip of the season started a month earlier for me this year due to work scheduling. But I figured I was, for the most part, safely out of the major bug season. My sister, Heather, and I decided to try a park we had never been to before...Killbear Provincial Park.
It is only about a 2 hour drive from our home so we left late in the afternoon and arrived at the park at about 5:30 pm. As we drove along, we noticed that in much of the campground there were these strange little fences bordering much of the roadways. The fences were much too low to keep out deer or raccoons. Rabbits could easily jump right over them. They were only about a foot to a foot and a half high, so people could easily step right over them. We were quite curious about these tiny fences.
We decided that we would ask about these strange fences when we got a chance. When we came across a rattle snake warning sign, we figured that it might have something to do with the rattle snakes. But we didn't know exactly how they worked. Apparently Killbear Park is one of the few remaining places in Ontario that rattle snakes have been found. However, even here they are a very rare sighting and they say you can consider yourself lucky if you come across one.
In addition to rattle snake warning signs there were also bear warning signs. Made sense, with the name of the park being Killbear, that there would be bears to watch out for. Apparently they are more common down at the opposite end from where our site would be. They frequent the Lighthouse Point section of the campground.
 We had scouted around the internet before we came to see what site we might like. The park is divided up into multiple sections and most of the sites at this time of year were already spoken for. We chose site # 756 in the "Blind Bay" section. |  |
One of the first things we noticed when we got out of the car was that all around our site was a carpet of tiny baby maple trees. There were so many of them!
Our site was somewhat sloped but there was plenty of flat space.
We set up our tent at the top of the slope. It felt like we were in a castle on the hillside.
I had noticed last year that my tent leaked pretty badly when it rained so I brought with me a can of spray on waterproofing. Once the tent was up I went about spraying it with this stuff. I was horrible at it. I am sure I used way more than I needed in some spots and not enough in others. But I focused on the trouble areas and crossed my fingers that it would do the trick. They have been calling for a cold and wet summer here in Ontario this year.
Across the road from our site we noticed an unmarked path leading into the woods. We were curious about it, so after setting up our site, we decided to follow it to see where it went.
To our pleasant surprise we wound up on the shores of Georgian Bay.
At one side we had our own private, tiny little beach. This was nice because the public beach was way over on the other side of the park. It looked like the water very quickly dropped off into deeper waters.
It had been raining earlier in the day. It was pretty windy now but wasn't raining anymore.
There was a nice view on both sides of us.. We had thought about going in for a swim but decided that it was too cold. Besides, it was almost sunset and we hadn't eaten dinner yet.
We picked up a couple of sticks for cooking hot dogs with and headed back to the campsite. Our site is pretty quiet and fairly private but this could be partly because there was no one on the site directly across from us. The dining tent would shield us from the view of neighbours somewhat if some did decide to camp across from us.
It was a little chilly but the sun was shining through the tree tops and as the sun set the skies were clear and the stars started to shine. It was going to be a beautiful evening.
We started a campfire and cooked hotdogs and had some hot chocolate. Down the road we heard a young boy shout "Look! A raccoon!" But we never saw it.
We discovered that our site might be a bit too close to the comfort station. The comfort station was directly behind us through a little path and across the road. It's nice if you have kids maybe, but we could hear the humming of the power going to the building and we could see the glow of the pop vending machine outside it's door. Plus the roaring noise of the hand dryer was extremely loud. Luckily it was not as bad as the humming from the one at Mikisew park and the wind drowned out most of the noise. We were able to tune out the humming for the most part and as the evening wore on there were fewer and fewer people using the hand dryer until finally we didn't hear it any more. We sat and talked around the fire until bed time. It was a good start to the first day, but we were looking forward to exploring this campground more tomorrow.
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