Trip Report Hiking La Cloche Silhouette Trail

An incredible view of the lakes and mountains in Killarney Provincial Park.

Tent: Sierra Designs Clip Flashlight 2

Pack: Fjallraven Kajka 65L

Sleeping Bag: MEC Delphinus -9C Women’s Sleeping Bag (Too warm for summer but it was new and I wanted to try it out)

The La Cloche Silhouette Trail in Killarney Provincial Park is known as the hardest long distance hiking trail in Ontario — a reputation I am fully willing to uphold. But, if you do it right (and can handle the hills) these 80km are also one of the most stunningly beautiful hikes in the region.

The park recommends doing this trail in 7-10 days because of the difficulty. The record for this trail is an obscene 9 hours. I still don’t know how anyone managed to set that record.

We planned to tackle the trail in 5 days, but ended up hiking out a day early when our water filter failed. This ended up being OK, since the campsite we had booked for the 5th night left a lot to be desired, and my homemade oatmeal experiment was deemed a miserable failure. We happily traded our 5th night in the woods for a hotel and an extra large pizza.

The key to enjoying this trail is to get the right campsite. Book early. Book as soon as Ontario Parks will allow. We ended up booking late, and as a result, some of our campsites were a bit too far apart to be considered *fun*.

NIGHT 1: CAMPSITE H2

We knew we wouldn’t get to Killarney until late in the day, so we booked campsite just 2 couple km from the trailhead. We got on the trail around 5pm and were totally settled into our campsite by 7pm. I highly recommend this strategy - this is an all-time great campsite. Secluded, up on the rocks, easy water access, and pretty decent swimming.

NIGHT 2: CAMPSITE H20

Our first full day on the trail was not a favourite. We walked through pretty woods and trees, but saw none of the gorgeous views that make Killarney famous. We made the mistake of doing the whole trail - taking the long way down the river and across the bridge - instead of cutting across the dam. That made Campsite H20 about 5km further away than I really wanted it to be. Next time I would cut across the dam, you won’t miss out on anything except bragging rights for having completed the entire trail.

Campsite H20 was also not a favourite — the lake is a bit boggy, and we didn’t have great access for either swimming or filtering water. The sites before H20 looked better - next time I would try for one of them.

H20 is also where we started having trouble with our water filter, which was not ideal.

NIGHT 3: CAMPSITE H34

Trying to get from H20 to H34 makes for a very, very long day on the trail. The good news is that this is where you get the real Killarney views. The bad news is you have to climb up and down some serious steep and rocky sections. Gorgeous, but this is a longer day of hiking than I would really recommend.

I would definitely recommend hiking poles for this trip - two hours into this day I picked up a walking stick that I carried with me for the rest of the trip.

H34 is a very, very beautiful campsite - incredible swimming on a huge lake. We didn’t see many people on the trail that day, but we did see lots of people in canoes on the water when we finally got into camp. The only downside of this campsite is that it is quite a ways from the main trail, and downhill. Which, of course, means starting your morning with a hike straight uphill!

NIGHT 4: CAMPSITE H46

Our third full day on the trail was a much shorter day, which was definitely welcome after the two previous days! It also ended up at one of my favourite campsites. H46 is totally secluded - at least 500m from the trail. You could tell it was rarely used, because the path is completely overgrown in some areas. The actual campsite is in a really neat bit of forest with tall skinny trees growing everywhere, but the totally secluded clear blue lake was the highlight of the trip.

Unfortunately our water filter (MSR Miniworks) had pretty much failed at this point. In theory this should filter 1L of water in about a minute — but by this point it was taking about 20 minutes to fill a Nalgene bottle. This is a pump filter - so it felt like a LONG 20 minutes. We were courting dehydration all day, and grumpy about spending our entire evening trying to get enough water to cook dinner and breakfast. I’m looking forward to taking a gravity filter on our next trip.

NIGHT 5: PLANNED CAMPSITE H50

ACTUALLY: a hotel in Sudbury

The original plan was to camp at H50— only about 5KM from the campground — so that we could hike out early in the morning and make the 8 hour drive home. But the broken water filter and growing appetite for better food encouraged us to skip this campsite and drive for the closest city with pizza.

We got an early start and made it to the top of the Crack (a famous day hike) before lunchtime. It was a strange thing to be dirty, tired, grumpy, and suddenly surrounded by day hikers!

On our way down we stopped for a water break at H50 and discovered that it is a mucky, boggy lake, with no prospect of swimming. Had we stayed out that final night, we would have been pretty bored, and our water filter never would have been able to handle the gunk. It was an easy walk past that point, so we had no regrets about skipping that last night.

You will do a lot of climbing on this trail.

USEFUL INFO:

Water filter troubles aside, we probably should have carried more water on this trip. The map made it seem like there was easy water access everywhere, but in reality it was often hard to get down to the lake from the trail. I had 1.5L with me but I was wishing for a more.

Don’t mess with untested recipes on this trail! We’ve never really found a freeze dried breakfast that we like, so I figured I would make instant oatmeal from scratch. On a whim, I threw in some instant coffee thinking it would be easy to get our caffeine fix in the mornings. But I forgot to increase the sugar and milk powder ratio to offset the coffee. It tasted so terrible that we actually started dissolving marshmallows in the oatmeal to make it edible. When we ran out of marshmallows we pretty much gave up on this as breakfast, which threw off the balance of the food we had for the rest of the day hike. I also traded out our usual chocolate bars for a new kind of Clif Bar — which only added to our overall grumpiness.