“Love many, trust a few, and always paddle your own canoe” — Billy Two Rivers, Canadian Mohawk Chief,

Picture a Canadian canoe. It’s there in your head, isn’t it? Wide at the middle with simple seats across its open belly, tapering into two pointed, upturned ends. Now picture yourself sitting inside one, holding the end of a single-blade paddle and stroking through the still waters of a pristine Canadian lake. Because, really, what could be better than canoeing in the country that invented them?

Canoeing is huge in Canada and one of the last truly egalitarian activities: everyone from toddlers and teenagers to grandparents and their huskies regularly goes on canoeing day trips, weekends or multi-day adventures. All this probably has something to do with the fact that Canada is tailor-made for canoes.

“It is possible to cross Canada by water making no portage longer than 13 miles [20 kilometres],” writes Robert Twigger in Voyageur, his book about travelling more than 3200 kilometres across Canada in a 6.8-metre (21-foot) birchbark canoe. “The route is very circuitous, but it shows how much water there is in the place.”

And nowhere in Canada is more suited to canoeing than Ontario, where you’ll find the world’s largest network of “canoe routes”: almost 100,000 paddle-worthy kilometres. To fine-tune it even further, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario’s oldest and largest wilderness park, is a paddlers’ paradise. It has 2000 lakes and 2000 kilometres of canoe trails throughout its vast, pine-forested interior, and most of the park is off-limits to cars, motorboats and even float-planes. There are beautiful hiking trails through the park, too, but canoeing is clearly the way to travel. Besides, it’s the Canadian version of bushwalking — on water.

Black bears and sled dogs

Our three-day trip in Algonquin mixed a bit of traditional canoeing — which involves paddling considerable distances each day and staying at a different campsite each night — with the canoe version of car-camping (paddling to a nice campsite then day-tripping in the canoes from there). Three days was short enough to not be too daunting, this being my first ever canoe trip, but long enough to get us into the park’s aptly named Wilderness Zone, far from busy thoroughfares that promised to be popular on this last long weekend of the northern summer.

There were three of us — my partner Craig, our guide Jen and me — in two canoes. Joining us was Jen’s “paddling partner”, Maya, an Alaskan husky/malamute, who arrived in her own lifejacket, made by Outward Hound, because she can’t swim — because she’s a sled dog.

“Maya and I have a deal,” Jen told us. “I paddle her around in the summer; she pulls me around in the winter.” It added another dimension to the trip, hearing about the dogsledding expeditions Jen runs through Algonquin in winter. “It’s pretty weird to be swimming and paddling in a lake and thinking that in six months this lake will be frozen solid, hard enough to dogsled or even drive on.”

At our put-in point on the aptly named Canoe Lake, the pebbly beach was so congested with canoes and people bustling about, there was almost no room for water at the water’s edge. We’d already packed all our gear — tents, sleeping bags, other assorted camping essentials, food and clothes — into two alarmingly large “packsacks” (oversized rucksacks with harnesses) and an anti-bear food barrel. So loading the canoe was as simple as putting these three things into the two canoes.