Day Trip: High Falls Trail - Southern Algonquin Park, July 4, 2016

There's a lot of information out there on Algonquin's hiking trails, most of which covers the interpretive trails along the Highway 60 Corridore.  We've done a good chunk of those trails, but not many of the others...come to think of it, we hadn't done any of them before now.  Our trip to Achray a few years back had been too buggy for Mum who has bad reactions to all types of bug bites so we ended up not doing any trails.

My brother, Jeremy's visit had to include some kind of trip to Algonquin.  While he wasn't all that keen on camping, a day trip with good photography opportunities was okay.

The plan was to do the High Falls Trail, near the Kingscote Lake access because neither he, nor my parents had been there before.  The trail is fairly short (about 2km each way) and we hoped it wouldn't be very busy.  We packed a picnic and headed out.

Chris and I had taken the kids to Kingscote for a few nights of camping, so we knew generally where we were going, and finding the parking area for the trail head was pretty easy.  With several pounds of camera gear weighing us down, we got started.

High Falls in Southern Algonquin

The majority of the trail is very easy.  It's flat, not many rocks or roots to trip you up, and is pretty shady.  Once you get to where the trail approaches the river though, things change.  Watch your footing for sure.

There's lots of odd rock formations to photograph, as well as the falls.  Jeremy's new model of iPhone lets you do slow motion video, then set it as your lock screen.  When he holds his finger on the screen, it plays the video.  Mine doesn't do that, but it does let me take slow motion video.

High Falls itself is lovely but stopping to take pictures ended up being very buggy, so we didn't stay as long as we would have liked.  Once back at the cars, we headed to the Kingscote Lake access and had a picnic.  There were no other cars in the parking lot, and nobody at any of the walk in sites.  It being so close to Canada Day we had expected at least some people to be around.

After lunch, we stopped at the Pine Grove Point Campground for ice cream and cold drinks.  Just a nice relaxing day in Algonquin.