Best is pretty subjective, and it's hard to get quiet without going deeper in the park (portaging), but your best bet would be driving to the north which is quieter than anything along Highway 60. There are a couple islands on Cedar and Kiosk Lake you can try for.

Or you can go to Tims Lake in the west, you can do quite a bit of exploring through the Tim River into Rosebary and even a bit further with very minimal portaging. Not sure if you want to do river travel if you've got a young one with you though.

Wanting quiet and island campsites without portaging is a pretty difficult set of criteria. Are you willing to portage at all? If so how many and what lengths? Even tackling a few portages will open up your options. 

Couple island sites on Rain (Rain lake access) if your fortunate enough to get them otherwise Rain is a nice relatively quite lake with many nice sites. Does have motor access though.  Jubilee is a beautiful lake as well only a couple short portages over. No island sites though. If using Magnetawan or Rain access I recommend Algonquin Basecamp as an outfitter.

If the little one is reeallllllly little it might not be so enjoyable getting the little one up the hill on the Rain-Hot portage. 

Sorry forgot to ask -- does anyone know much about Rock --- > Louisa ---->  Pondweed?  How is the Rock/Louisa portage? 

Rock/Pen portage look easier but assume it gets busy.

Also, when you're at a site but want to move on and see other lakes/sites, how do you know if there are any sites available where you want to go?  Assume there is little to no cell service so I suppose you check that just before leaving? Thanks!

Thanks Steve E.  That's an interesting point about the vacate time.  A lot of the sites I've visited advise to get up early to get the best sites.  But if people are potentially there until 2 you could either have to take a site that you don't like or keep yourself occupied. 

I guess you could take another paddle out just before 2 to see if anyone has gone...

Last edited by papabear (7/11/2020 9:07 am)

The Rock - Louisa portage is about as tame as a 3 km portage gets. Flat and good footing throughout, you can cross it surprisingly fast. 

papabear wrote:

Also, when you're at a site but want to move on and see other lakes/sites, how do you know if there are any sites available where you want to go?  Assume there is little to no cell service so I suppose you check that just before leaving? Thanks!

You need to get your permits before you start your trip, you're not supposed to spontaneously decide where you are camping. So everything Steve said is true about first come first serve, arriving early to find a good site, etc., but you know that there will be a site available for you because you have a permit. You can't just decide mid trip you want to move on and camp on other lakes (unless you have a permit).

So you can either plan a route, for example:

Rock (start) > Pen (permit) > Welcome (permit) > Louisa (permit) > Rock (leave)

...or you can basecamp and day trip to other lakes without actually camping on them, for example:

Rock (start) > Louisa (permit x3 nights) > Rock (leave), while day tripping to check out surrounding lakes but always coming back to Louisa where you have your permits.


edit: just to add about the 2pm conversation, it's really uncommon that people stay at the site that long. Usually either i) up and out early because they are moving to another lake or finishing their trip, or ii) staying another night and not leaving at all. It's possible that sites get vacated close to 2pm but it's a lot more common for people to leave between 9am-11am.

Last edited by trippythings (7/11/2020 12:57 pm)

Yeah it's a common discussion "should Algonquin let you reserve specific sites or not", there are good arguments on both sides.

But that's why I added that extra bit of info about 2pm, it's really unlikely to be in that situation. By the time it takes for you to travel to the lake, odds are groups will already have vacated their sites. Of course there are exceptions, but it's really rare that you'll need to paddle around waiting for a spot to open.

Also, most lakes have 'buffer sites', for example Louisa has 23 campsites but only reserves 17 (if I remember correctly). This helps ensure that there's something available for you. Not every lake has these 'buffer sites' but large lakes like Louisa pretty much always will.

As far as I know the park has never explicitly explained their logic with these buffer sites, but here are a few scenarios I can think of:
- In an emergency situation where you're supposed to camp on Lake A but you're forced to camp on Lake B, buffer sites help make sure that it doesn't affect another groups reservation.
- Sometimes people just don't follow the rules and will camp off permit, so this is a bit of insurance against that
- If you arrive at a lake late in the evening, and it's a large lake with lots of campsites, you might not have time to scout 20 sites to find the 1 vacant waiting for you, so buffer sites helps in those situations as well