What is the solution...

Keywords: crown land, junk, canoeing, best backcountry practices, Madawaska Valley

It's not unusual while camping on Crown Land to encounter abandoned junk. These articles are usually left by previous campers who arrive with outboards and who use the same site habitually.

Occasionally junk like a blue thread- bear tarp, is left to mark their territory to give them first dibs if, and when they return the subsequent weekend. Sites often include; foldable yard chairs, tarps, tent poles, bungees, rope, large water bottles, metal grills, and the ubiquitous shelving from abandoned refrigerators. More serious junk involves full size propane BBQs, and an assortment of poorly designed homemade experimental toilets. Derelict picnic tables are the only contributions I find of use which are usually securely chained to a tree by the owner.

The public have a tendency to treat public land differently than their own and have no hesitation with leaving garbage behind.

It could be they rationalize that the chanterelles could be of use to subsequent campers but the yard furnishings are usually broken and have little intrinsic or utilitarian value.

Needless to say, novices and rookie campers who are not familiar with Backcountry etiquette transport inappropriate domestic items abandoning them at campsites after the realization they did not contribute to their backcountry experience.

How can we educate campers that Crown Land belongs to everyone and at the same time nobody? The old adage of pack it in - packet it out seems lost to the current generation.

Photos by the author: Bark Lake September 2025

Hi everyone! I'm a long time lover of canoe tripping in Algonquin and also a software engineer. I've been planning canoe trips in Algonquin for years and have always felt like we're missing a centralized hub for this. Reddit is awesome for the community aspect but I built this site to help route plan, trip log with notes on sites, portages, photos and more, in order to have updated conditions input from the community itself. (think all trails but specifically for Algonquin canoe tripping)

The site is 100% free and has no ads, I just built it as a labour of love for the park, the community and backcountry tripping (and to make my own life easier lol). It works best on desktop fyi. This is a solo project so there will definitely be some bugs in the beginning so feel free to leave some feedback on the site (report a bug tab), it goes straight to my email. I really hope this helps some people :)

https://ouralgonquin.com

EDIT: Wow, thanks for all the engagement! We've got one public log and I've received bug reports already, so cool! Based on the comments I'll definitely start cleaning up the code and hopefully open sourcing it within the next few weeks if there's continued use and demand. For the time being I've added a 'Trip Logs' tab to discover public logs more easily and I've added the ability to export public logs as pdfs so you can save logs locally. Hopefully that shows I'm serious about keeping it open and community-owned.

EDIT2: I appreciate everyone's feedback the past couple days! There's been a lot of feature requests, requests to open source the code, and suggestions which are super cool. All of that is a lot of work, which I'd very much be open to doing if there was a wide enough user base interested in using the site longer-term. I just don't want to put in all the refactor efforts for under 10 users (about where we're at right now). All I ask is that if you are interested in this please sign up for an account and /or post a trip log so I have some indication of demand for continuing the project. If the user base grows over the past week I'll continue to work on the project and maybe add an optional mailing list to the site you can sign up to for updates so we don't have to keep coming back to the reddit post. Otherwise I've purchased the domain for a year so it'll be up as is for at least then : ) Thanks!

I stumbled across this book from another post recently that completely changed how I think about food.

We’re so used to fridges, supermarkets, and next day delivery that I honestly never stopped to think about how people actually ate before all that existed. This book is basically a collection of old recipes that were designed to last months or even years without refrigeration. The same kind of food our great grandparents (and great great grandparents) relied on.

What surprised me most wasn’t even the recipes, it was the mindset. Everything was about making food stretch, using what you had, and not relying on systems that could disappear overnight. Reading it made me realize how dependent we are now compared to even a couple generations ago.

I’ve tried a handful of the recipes so far. Some are definitely outside my normal rotation, but a few were genuinely good and oddly satisfying knowing they’d keep without power or fancy storage.

It’s less of a cookbook and more of a little history lesson disguised as one. Made me appreciate how resilient people used to be, especially when it came to food. I wanted to make this post as a bit of a shoutout to the creators for putting it together and the person who shared it here a couple months back (I couldn't find the old post to go back and comment).

Here's the website I bought the cookbook from, it's a pretty niche book so I don't think it's available on any mainstream platforms - survivalsuppers.com

We stayed in Sawmill Bay section for drive in tent camping and it was so lovely! Only rained overnight on Sun night into Mon.

The water photos are from us standing at North Beach - at sunrise and sunset. ☀️

As a note, the ferry to get to the cliff trail wasn't running yet since it was the first weekend they opened. It will be open as of the May 23-24 weekend!

Looking for gift ideas? Check this out!

https://flashinglights416.etsy.com/listing/4352909172

1st camping trip of the season. A wee bit chilly still at the fire.

Just finished up a 6 night, 88km loop on the La Cloche Silhouette trail in Killarney Provincial Park with my Amok Draumr 5.0 hammock