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Boondocking the Icefields Parkway with a cassette on board

Camping in Canada · Alberta & British Columbia

There is a stretch of Highway 93 between Lake Louise and Jasper where the mountains stop being scenery and start being terrain. The road climbs, the shoulders narrow, the cell signal quits somewhere north of Bow Summit and doesn't come back for a long while, and the gaps between anything resembling a service station stretch out to something that makes you recalculate. People drive it in five hours. People who camp it take four days, and the difference between those two trips is almost entirely in what got packed.

The parkway is not wilderness. It is paved, patrolled, busy in July, and there is a hostel or a lodge often enough that nobody is going to die of poor planning. But it behaves like wilderness in the specific ways that matter to a self-contained vehicle, and that catches people out because everything about it looks so managed. Water is not always where you want it. Dump stations cluster at the two ends and at a couple of the larger campgrounds. Which means your gray and black capacity, not your fuel range, quietly becomes the thing that sets the rhythm of the trip.

The tank math nobody does until the second night

A cassette system is a genuinely good thing in this context, and I say that as somebody who spent years with a fixed black tank and thought the cassette was the compromise. You can carry a spare. You can walk a full one to a dump point without moving the vehicle off a good site. On a road where the pull-outs and the small campgrounds are the entire reason you came, not having to break camp to service the toilet turns out to be worth more than any amount of tank capacity.

What catches people out is the interval, not the volume. Two adults using a cassette conservatively will get several days out of it without thinking about it much. Two adults plus a teenager, plus one rainy afternoon where everybody stays inside reading and drinking tea, and suddenly you are looking at something closer to two. Add the fact that you rinse more in cold weather — because nothing dries, because the room smells faintly damp, because you are compensating — and the interval shortens again.

Carry the second cassette. It costs you a cupboard and it buys you a whole extra section of road.

The other habit worth building before you leave the highway is a hard rule about what goes in. Nothing that isn't liquid or paper rated for the system. Wet wipes — including, especially, the ones printed with the word flushable — turn a cassette into a job that involves a hose, a stick, and the rest of your afternoon. At a serviced campground that is an indignity. On a mountain corridor where the next dump point is fifty-five miles away and it is four in the afternoon, it is a change of plans.

Fresh water deserves the same forward thinking. Fill at the southern end before you turn onto the parkway, and top up at every legitimate opportunity rather than every time you get low. Do not be tempted by the streams. Glacial meltwater along that corridor carries rock flour — finely ground silt that stays in suspension, gives the lakes that unreal color, and will find its way into a pump strainer and an aerator with remarkable efficiency. It is beautiful in a lake and unhelpful in a plumbing system.

What cold actually does to a bathroom

Even in August the parkway drops toward freezing overnight at elevation. In September it goes below without asking. That has two consequences inside the coach, and only one of them is obvious.

The obvious one is condensation. Every surface that isn't warm ends up damp by morning — windows, walls, the inside of a cupboard on the shaded side, and the bathroom, which is the smallest room with the coldest exterior wall and the door shut most of the day. A bowl that has lost its factory gloss holds that dampness in a way you can smell by the third morning, usually in the afternoon when the coach warms up and everything trapped in the surface volatilises at once. People blame the cassette. It is often the bowl.

The less obvious one is chemistry. Additives thicken and behave less predictably as the temperature drops, and the dosing that worked in July does something different in October. This is one of the quieter reasons that ventilation has been steadily displacing the additive approach among people who camp cold: a fan pulling air down out of the bowl and out of the vehicle does not care what the thermometer says.

A porcelain surface earns its place here for an unglamorous reason — it dries. Water beads and runs off a vitrified glaze instead of sitting in a micro-textured film, so the bowl goes from wet to dry without leaving anything behind for the smell to live in. In a vehicle where the bathroom is also the wet locker, the drying room, the closet and occasionally the place the dog waits out a thunderstorm, that matters considerably more than it would in a house.

Leave the bathroom door hooked open when you're not using it. In most layouts that single habit does more for the humidity problem than anything you can buy, because it lets the room share the coach's heat instead of sitting five degrees colder than everything else and collecting the moisture the rest of the vehicle produces.

Where to actually stop

Parks Canada runs a string of campgrounds along the parkway, most of them small, several of them first-come, and a few with no services of any kind. That last category is the good stuff. If you are genuinely self-contained, a site with a fire ring and a bear-proof locker in a stand of subalpine fir beats a serviced pad in a paved loop every time, and it will be quieter, cheaper and closer to whatever you drove there to look at.

Check the current season's opening dates and reservation rules before you commit to a plan. That is not boilerplate. Openings shift year to year, sites close for construction and for wildlife closures with very little notice, and the single most common way to end a good day badly on that road is to arrive at a full or closed campground at dusk and have to drive an extra fifty-five miles through a valley full of elk. Have a fallback in mind for every night, and be willing to stop earlier than planned when a good site appears.

Random roadside camping is not permitted along the parkway. It is a national park, it is enforced, and the wildlife reasoning behind it is sound rather than bureaucratic. Plan the nights.

Driving it, and the parts that surprise people

The parkway is better understood as a long series of moderate grades than as a couple of dramatic passes. It is the sustained climbing that heats engines and transmissions, and the descents on the Jasper side that reward a low gear and patience. If you find yourself riding the brakes on a long downhill you are in the wrong gear, and the fix is free.

Altitude does small things to a vehicle that add up. Engines lose a little power, which mostly means you plan to be slower rather than doing anything about it. Absorption fridges get fussy — they dislike heat, they dislike being off level, and they are less efficient the higher you go, so a coach parked in afternoon sun on a slope at six thousand feet may quietly stop keeping the milk cold. Park level. Park in shade when you can. Check the fridge before you assume it's fine.

Weather is the other thing to hold loosely. Snow at elevation in August is unusual but entirely possible, afternoon thunderstorms build fast over the icefields, and the wind through the open sections near the Columbia Icefield can make a high-sided vehicle genuinely unpleasant to drive. Do the exposed sections in the morning. The light is better anyway, and the parking lots are half empty.

If you're towing a boat

A small aluminum boat behind a motorhome is entirely manageable on this road. A wide, tall trailer on a windy afternoon is a different experience, and one worth timing for early in the day. Trailer brakes want adjusting for the load you are actually pulling rather than the setting from last season, and the trailer spare is statistically the tire most likely to be flat and least likely to have been checked.

Read the regulations for the specific lake before you launch anything. Motor restrictions vary along the corridor, invasive species inspection requirements apply and are enforced, and clean-drain-dry between water bodies is not optional. What doesn't vary is the temperature. The lakes along the parkway are cold enough that immersion is a safety matter rather than a comfort one. Nobody swims twice.

Wildlife, briefly and seriously

Bear-aware food storage is not a suggestion in the mountain parks and the rules exist because habituated bears get destroyed. Everything with a smell goes in the vehicle or the locker — not the tow vehicle's bed, not a cooler under the awning, not a bag of garbage hung off the ladder because you'll deal with it in the morning. Cook away from the door where you can. Take the garbage to the bin every evening rather than accumulating it.

Elk on the road at dusk in the Jasper valleys are a real hazard for a heavy vehicle, and they move in groups, which means the one you saw is not the one that will step out. Stop driving before the light goes. This is easier if you have already decided where you're sleeping.

The trip that actually works

Four nights, moving north, short driving days. Fill fresh water and empty everything at the southern end before you turn onto the parkway, because that is the last easy service for a while. Keep the second cassette staged and swap it early rather than at capacity — a cassette serviced as routine on a dry morning is a thirty-second job; the same cassette serviced when it's full, at night, in the rain, is the reason somebody suggests a hotel next year.

Take the hikes in the morning when the light is behind you and the lots are empty. Sit out the middle of the day. Set up in daylight, every night, without exception. Eat properly, because a trip where everybody lives on gas station food is a trip that gets cut short by two days and nobody quite knows why.

None of that is clever. It is just the version of this road where you spend your attention on the mountains instead of on logistics — which was, presumably, the entire point of going.

Not sure which insert fits your coach? Email a photo of your cassette to info@twusch.com and we'll tell you which one you need.

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Lake Superior in shoulder season: cold mornings, warm coach

Camping in Canada · Ontario

The north shore of Superior does something to the camping calendar. By late September the bugs are finished, the campgrounds have emptied, the water is still holding summer heat while the air has given up on it entirely, and the whole coast turns into the version of itself that the postcards never show. Fog in the morning that burns off by ten. Absurd light in the evening. Nobody at the trailhead, and the good site by the water available on a Friday.

It is also the point in the year where a recreational vehicle quietly stops being a way to sleep outside and becomes a small building you are responsible for heating.

That transition is the whole subject of this piece, because it is where most shoulder-season trips go slightly wrong — not dramatically, not dangerously, just damply, in a way that has people packing up a day early and blaming the weather.

The coast, and why it rewards a slow driver

Between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay the highway threads between the lake and the Canadian Shield: Lake Superior Provincial Park, the long empty runs, Neys, Pukaskwa further off the road, headlands where you can pull off and watch weather build across open water that behaves like an ocean because functionally it is one. Superior generates its own conditions. It has fetch, it has depth, it has a temperature gradient with the land in autumn, and the result is that the forecast for the town you slept in is not the forecast for the point you're standing on.

Fuel and services thin out on that stretch in a way that surprises people used to southern Ontario. The distances between towns are real, and in shoulder season some of what's open in July isn't. Fill the tank at two-thirds rather than at a quarter. It is a boring habit and it is the correct one.

The provincial park campgrounds along the run start closing through October, and several of the ones that stay open drop to reduced services — which in practice means the water is off and the dump station is shut for the season. Ontario Parks publishes current operating dates and they are not decoration. Check before you go, then check again a week out, because the frost decides some of it.

Self-contained is the entire game

If services are closed, everything depends on how long you can go without them. You want a full fresh tank leaving the last open town, the ability to run several days between dumps, and a definite idea of where the nearest open sani-station is rather than a vague sense that there'll be something.

This is exactly the season where carrying a second cassette converts a two-day radius into a five-day one. It is also the season where the discipline of servicing on a schedule matters most, because the alternative is doing it at capacity, in the dark, in the low forties Fahrenheit, in a wind coming off the lake. Do it in the afternoon while you're already outside and already cold. Never let it become an evening decision.

What the cold actually threatens

The freeze risk on a cassette system is different from a fixed-tank system, and mostly friendlier. The cassette lives inside the heated envelope of the vehicle, so as long as the furnace is running overnight you're unlikely to have a problem in the toilet itself. The genuinely vulnerable parts are the fresh water lines, the pump, the exterior shower if you have one, and anything routed through an unheated bay.

Know where your lines run before you need to know. In a lot of coaches there is one length of pipe in a bad place, and the owner finds out about it once.

A cold bathroom in a humid coach is a condensation trap. Airflow fixes it. Chemicals don't.

The mistake people make in shoulder season is heating the living space to comfortable and assuming the bathroom came along. In most layouts it didn't. It is the smallest room, it has the coldest exterior wall, and its door is closed most of the day — so it sits several degrees below the rest of the coach and collects moisture that the rest of the vehicle produced. Hook the door open when you're not using it. Run the fan or crack the vent whenever anybody showers, and for ten minutes afterward, not for the length of the shower.

And accept that in this season the bathroom is the room that takes the abuse. It is where the wet layer comes off, where the waders end up, where the net gets rinsed, and where the dog gets towelled. That is not a design failure; it is the only room with a drain and a door. It does mean the surfaces in there need to be the easiest thing in the coach to actually clean.

The fishing, honestly

Superior in fall means salmon and trout moving toward tributaries, and shore anglers standing in cold water at river mouths at first light with their hands in their sleeves. It can be extraordinary. It can also be four hours of nothing while the wind comes up and the fog rolls back in, and you should go north with both outcomes priced in.

Regulations vary by zone and by species and they change between seasons. Read the current Ontario fishing regulations summary for the specific zone before you tie anything on — the autumn rules around tributaries are precisely the ones that catch visiting anglers out. If you're a non-resident, sort licensing before you leave home rather than in a gas station at six in the morning with no signal.

Small-boat work on Superior in October deserves respect that most inland anglers do not automatically bring to it. The lake builds real sea state with little warning, the water is cold enough to be incapacitating within minutes, and the marine forecast for that coast should be read as an instruction rather than a suggestion. Plenty of excellent fishing happens from shore. On a bad day, take the hint — the fish are resident and you are not.

Coming home damp

The unavoidable feature of a cold-weather trip is that everything comes back inside wet, and stays wet. Boots. Waders. A jacket that was only meant to be shower-proof. A landing net. Two towels and a dog. In a small coach that load has to go somewhere, and it goes into the bathroom.

Which is the real argument for a hard, non-porous bowl on this kind of trip — not hygiene theater, just that a glazed surface takes a rinse and a wipe and is genuinely finished, while a bowl that has been worn rough by years of brush and cleaner holds a film you will still be able to smell faintly in November. Summer weekenders never notice the difference. People who camp in the shoulder seasons notice it in the first week.

Keep the cleaners mild while you're at it. Aggressive products are hard on the toilet's rubber seals, and a weeping blade seal in October is a far bigger problem than a dull-looking bowl in July.

Why it's worth being cold

Because the coast is empty. Because the light between five and seven in the evening on a Superior headland in October does something that no amount of July sunshine manages. Because the campground host is glad to see you, the sites are all available, and you can hear the lake instead of somebody's generator.

Go for a week. Move slowly, stop early, keep the coach dry, and take the fog mornings as an excuse to sit with coffee rather than as lost time. That is the trip working correctly.

Waking a coach up for a cold trip

Most people winterize once and de-winterize once, and treat everything in between as summer. A shoulder-season trip sits awkwardly across that line: you are not running antifreeze through the system, but you are camping in conditions that will find any weakness in it.

Before you leave, run the pump up to pressure and walk the vehicle with a flashlight looking for weeping fittings. Do it in the driveway where a leak is an annoyance rather than at a closed campground where it is the end of the trip. Check the furnace properly — not that it lights, but that it cycles, that the return vents aren't blocked by whatever got stored in front of them, and that the propane regulator isn't due for attention. A furnace that quits at two in the morning on the Superior coast in October is a genuine problem, not a discomfort.

Check the toilet's seals while you're at it. The blade seal is a wear item, cold is hard on it, and a seal that drags or weeps is much easier to replace at home than to diagnose in a campground with the water shut off. Same for the bowl seal and the flush mechanism. Five minutes now.

And carry more propane than the trip needs. Heating a coach through cold nights burns through it faster than anybody's mental model, and the refill options along that coast in late season are fewer than the map suggests.

What to actually do with the days

Superior in shoulder season is a hiking coast as much as a fishing one, and the trails are at their best exactly when the campgrounds empty. The Shield country behind the highway gives you granite, blueberry barrens gone red, and views out over water that looks like the north Atlantic. Nothing is crowded. Very little is signposted with the enthusiasm of a summer operation.

The beaches are the surprise. Superior's shoreline is largely cobble and sand pushed around by a lake with real energy, and in October you can walk miles of it without seeing anybody. The water is clear enough to be deceptive about depth and cold enough that wading past your knees is a decision rather than a stroll.

Pick two or three anchor days — a long hike, a river mouth at first light, a town with a bakery — and leave the rest loose. The weather will reorder your plan anyway, and a trip built around three fixed things and four flexible ones survives that. A trip with seven fixed things does not.

Ten fitments across the Thetford range, from the C2/C3/C4 to the Aqua Magic R. Find yours →

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Fishing the Bow River out of a camper

Fishing · Alberta

The Bow below Calgary has a reputation that is, for once, deserved. A regulated tailwater running through and past a city of well over a million people, full of large, well-fed and thoroughly educated trout. It is not a secret, it is not easy, and the combination of those two facts is exactly why people plan trips around it rather than dropping in on the way somewhere else.

What it also is, from a camping perspective, is awkward. The best access is close to town. The good camping is not. You end up commuting, and how you handle that commute determines whether you fish five days or three.

Basing yourself sensibly

The obvious move is to park somewhere southeast of the city and drive to the water, which works fine if you accept that you'll be doing forty minutes each way in the dark, twice a day, for the length of the trip. That's survivable for a long weekend and grinding over a week.

The less obvious move is to treat the river as a two-base trip. A few nights within reach of the upper reaches, then move down and fish the lower water from a second base. You end up fishing two genuinely different rivers — different character, different insects, different water — without either drive becoming punitive. It costs you one travel afternoon and it buys back several hours a day.

Provincial and municipal campgrounds in the region fill fast through summer, and the private ones near the highway are functional rather than lovely; you're paying for a level pad and a shower, not a view. If you're self-contained you have more options than the reservation systems suggest, but not unlimited ones. Alberta's rules on random camping differ between public land, provincial parks and grazing leases, and enforcement is real. Look up the specific area you have in mind rather than assuming that a wide gravel pull-out is an invitation.

Why a camper genuinely beats a hotel here

Trout fishing has two productive windows and both of them are inconvenient. You want to be on the water before the light, and back on it for the last hour of it. In between there is a long flat stretch where the fish are unimpressed and you need somewhere to be that isn't a truck cab in a parking lot.

A coach parked within reach of the access gives you a kitchen, a bed and a bathroom during exactly that dead middle. Which sounds like a comfort argument and is actually a fishing argument, because the anglers who go home at two in the afternoon are the ones who miss the evening entirely.

The advantage isn't comfort. It's that you can stay for the evening rise without having to decide to.

The bathroom part of that is not a throwaway. Anybody who has fished a full day in waders knows the particular misery of a hot afternoon, a small enclosed room, and a bowl that stopped being able to look clean two seasons ago. It is a small thing, and small things are what decide whether somebody is willing to do a fifth day or starts talking about heading back.

Practicalities that matter more than fly selection

Flows on a regulated river move with upstream releases, and the Bow can go from ideal to unfishable inside a day when the system is managing water. Watch the flow data before you commit to a float, and watch it again the morning of. A rise of a few inches changes where the fish sit and turns a good wade into a bad idea.

Wind is the other constant. The funnel coming down off the mountains can shut down a dry fly afternoon completely, and there is no tactic that beats it — only patience, a heavier rod, or a different reach with a bank at your back. Plan for it rather than being personally offended by it.

Licensing is straightforward and available online; get it before you arrive. Regulations on the Bow include gear and retention rules that differ by section and change between seasons, so read the current Alberta guide for the exact reach you intend to fish. I'm deliberately not printing numbers here that could be wrong by the time you read this, and neither should anybody else writing about it.

If you have never fished it, book one guided float somewhere in the middle of the trip. A competent local rower will teach you more about that river in eight hours than a week of guessing will, and the money comes back on the days either side.

The daily rhythm that works

Up before light, coffee in the coach, on the water for the first hour. Fish until the sun is high and the takes stop. Back for a real lunch and either sleep or tie — both are more productive than driving somewhere. Out again by late afternoon, fish through the evening, and eat dinner at nine like a European.

That schedule only works if the coach is set up for it. Which means keeping a hard boundary between wet gear and living space: a dedicated bin or a hanging spot for waders that isn't the bathroom floor, boots outside under the step, and a routine of rinsing everything before it comes in. Do it for the first two days and it becomes automatic. Skip it and by Wednesday the vehicle smells like a boat.

Clean fish away from the site, at a designated station if there is one. Never in the coach, never at the picnic table, and never leave a cooler of frames in the sun beside the vehicle. Which brings me to the part visitors underestimate.

Wildlife, this close to a city

The riverside brush along the Bow holds more wildlife than people expect a short drive from downtown Calgary, and bear-aware food storage applies well outside the mountain parks. Deer, coyotes and the occasional bear all use the river corridor as a highway, because it's continuous cover through developed land. Keep the coach clean, keep fish in a cooler inside rather than hanging off the bumper, and take garbage to a bin daily.

None of that is onerous. It's just the difference between camping near a river and hosting.

The version I'd actually recommend

Five nights. Two bases, with the move on the middle day. One guided float. Mornings and evenings on the water, afternoons horizontal. Eat properly — a trip where everybody lives on gas station food is a trip that ends early for reasons nobody can name.

And take the extra cassette. You'll be running the coach hard, with wet gear coming in and out and four people using one small bathroom around two fishing windows a day. The last thing you want on the one evening the fish are up is a service errand.

Two rivers in one, and how to read which one you're on

The reach through and immediately below the city fishes like an urban tailwater: consistent flows, heavy insect life fed by a system that never really shuts down, fish that have seen a great deal of terminal tackle and have opinions about it. It rewards precision — accurate drifts, light tippet where you can get away with it, and the discipline to change flies rather than to keep casting the one you have confidence in.

Further down, the character loosens. The river braids more, the banks are agricultural, the pressure drops off and the fish behave a little more like fish. The trade-off is access: there is less of it, what exists is more spread out, and getting to good water often means walking further than you planned in waders.

Neither reach is better. They ask for different things, and a week that includes both teaches you considerably more than a week hammering the reach nearest the campground.

Floating versus wading

The Bow is a boat river in the sense that a drift boat or raft opens up water no wading angler will reach, and it is a wading river in the sense that plenty of the best fish get caught by people standing in it. If you are bringing your own boat, know the access points, know the take-out before you launch, and be conservative about what a rising flow does to a day that looked easy at breakfast.

Wading it demands respect for a river that is larger and pushier than it looks from the bank. Wading staff, a belt cinched properly, and a rule about not crossing anything you would not be willing to cross back. Cold water plus a strong push plus a slick cobble bottom is how competent people get into trouble on a nice afternoon.

If you are towing a boat behind the coach, the two-base plan gets more attractive rather than less. Setting up once and launching from the same ramp for three days beats hitching and unhitching daily, and it means the trailer spends its time parked rather than accumulating gravel from the access roads.

The part nobody plans for

Weather in southern Alberta in shoulder season can hand you seventy degrees and sun on Tuesday and wet snow on Wednesday. Not a storm — just a front doing what fronts do at that latitude and altitude. Pack for both. Carry the furnace-on layers even in September, and have an indoor plan for a day, because there will probably be one.

The upside is that the same volatility empties the river. A cold, gray, unpleasant morning after a front is frequently the best fishing of the week, and you'll have it to yourself, because everybody else looked out the window and made a reasonable decision.

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Bowron Lake by canoe: what happens to the RV while you're gone

Boats · British Columbia

The Bowron Lake circuit is a closed loop of lakes, rivers and portages in the Cariboo Mountains that you paddle in one direction and finish where you started. It takes most parties something like a week. It is quota-controlled, reservation-based, and the registration process exists because the alternative would be a traffic jam on a wilderness lake.

All of which means that for six or seven days, your vehicle sits in a parking lot while you're out of contact. That is the part of the trip nobody plans for, and it's worth planning for.

Leaving a coach unattended for a week

Three things go wrong. Batteries die, animals get in, and the interior turns into a terrarium.

The battery problem is the easiest to solve and the most commonly ignored. Parasitic draw from propane detectors, radio memory and inverter standby will flatten a house battery in a week even with nothing running. If you have solar, make sure it's actually connected and not shaded by the trees you parked under for shade. If you don't, kill the main disconnect and accept that the fridge is off — which means empty it, properly, before you leave.

Animals are a local knowledge issue. Rodents get into anything with a food smell, and they are astonishingly good at finding an entry through a wiring penetration. Take every crumb out. Bear-proof means bear-proof, and a soft-sided vehicle in a wilderness trailhead lot is not a food storage container in any meaningful sense.

Empty the cassette before you paddle. Not after. Seven warm days is a lesson you only need once.

That third one deserves the emphasis. A cassette left with anything in it, in a closed vehicle, through a week of summer heat, is a homecoming you will remember for the wrong reasons. Dump it, rinse it, and leave it dry with the blade closed and a little ventilation in the room. This is also the moment where a vitrified bowl earns its money, because you can leave a porcelain surface genuinely clean and dry in a way that a scratched plastic one won't allow no matter how long you scrub.

The paddling itself

The circuit is not technically difficult in the whitewater sense, but it is committing. The portages at the start are long enough that portage wheels are standard practice rather than a luxury, and how much you brought becomes a physical fact very quickly. Weather on the big lakes can hold you on a beach for a day; the correct response is to have a day of slack in the plan rather than to paddle a whitecapped lake in a loaded canoe.

Reservations and the current quota, fee and season details come from BC Parks, and they change. Book early — the circuit is popular and the window is short. Bear caches, designated campsites and a mandatory orientation are part of the system, and following it is not optional.

The transition day

The best-designed version of this trip has a buffer night at the end. You come off the water tired, wet and probably a little smug, and the last thing you want is to immediately drive a mountain road. Sleep in the lot or at the nearby campground, deal with the vehicle systems in daylight, run the water pump and check for leaks, refill fresh, and reinstate the toilet properly before you need it at 2 a.m.

Then drive out slowly. The gravel access road has ended more trips than the lakes have.

Made in Germany by a porcelain manufactory with over a hundred years of experience. Shipped from our warehouses in Alberta.

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A week of walleye on Lake of the Woods

Fishing · Ontario & Manitoba

Lake of the Woods is less a lake than an archipelago that happens to be surrounded by water. Thousands of islands, three jurisdictions touching it, a shoreline length that nobody agrees on, and a walleye fishery that has been the reason for family trips for four generations.

It is also a place where a week feels short, because the fish move and you spend the first two days finding them.

Trailer camp, boat fish

The efficient setup here is a trailer or motorhome at a campground with a launch, and a boat you can leave in the water or on the trailer depending on the wind forecast. The lake is big enough that where you camp determines which third of it you can realistically fish, so pick the base around the water you want rather than around the amenities.

Sioux Narrows, Nestor Falls and the Kenora area all have camping and access; the Manitoba side and the Minnesota side each have their own character and their own rules. Cross-border anglers should sort out licensing and customs questions before departure, not at the ramp. If you're bringing a boat across an international line, know the requirements for that specific crossing — they are not the same everywhere and the answers change.

Seven days of living out of a small vehicle

The thing that makes or breaks a week-long fishing trip is not tackle. It's whether the vehicle can absorb the mess. Fish get cleaned. Rain happens. Somebody spills a minnow bucket. Kids track sand into everything, and by day four the coach either still functions as a place to rest or it has become a damp storage unit you sleep in.

The bathroom is where a week-long trip is won or lost, and nobody puts that in the brochure.

Practical version: clean fish away from the site, at the designated station if there is one, and never in the coach. Keep a dedicated bin for wet gear so it doesn't end up on the bathroom floor. Run the fan when anybody showers, because in a small vehicle the humidity from one shower will settle everywhere else.

And service the toilet on a schedule rather than on demand. A cassette emptied every second morning as routine is a thirty-second job. A cassette emptied when it's full, at night, in the rain, after a long day on the water, is the thing that makes somebody suggest a cabin next year.

Fishing notes, kept general on purpose

Walleye on a structure-rich lake like this means reef edges, points and current breaks, and the depth changes through the season as the water warms. Early in the year they're shallow and findable. By high summer you're working deeper structure and probably running further. Jigs and live bait, or trolling crankbaits along a break, will cover most situations.

Retention rules, size limits and bait restrictions vary by zone and change between seasons. I'm not going to print numbers that might be stale — read the current regulations summary for the zone you're in, including the specific rules about transporting live bait, which catch a lot of visiting anglers out.

Weather is the actual planner

Open water on a lake this size builds a chop that will make a sixteen-foot boat unpleasant and a longer run genuinely unwise. The islands are your friend — most days you can find a protected side to fish. Learn where you can hide before you need to, and don't cross open water late in the day just because the fishing was good on the far side.

The upside of a trailer over a remote cabin is exactly this flexibility. Bad wind day? Fish the sheltered water near the base, come in for lunch, and sleep in your own bed. That's not roughing it, and it's not supposed to be.

Not sure which model fits your toilet? Send a photo to info@twusch.com.

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Towing a boat behind a motorhome across the Rockies

Boats · Alberta & British Columbia

A boat behind a motorhome is a combination that works beautifully at sea level and asks serious questions of you at eleven hundred meters on a six percent grade. The mountain highways through the Canadian Rockies are engineered, maintained and entirely reasonable — they are also long, sustained and unforgiving of a rig that was set up for flat prairie driving.

Most of what goes wrong is thermal. Very little of it is dramatic.

Weight, and being honest about it

Start with the paperwork you have been ignoring. The tow rating on your chassis, the tongue weight, the gross combined figure, and what the vehicle actually weighs with full water, a full propane tank, four people and everything in the bays. People routinely tow within their rating and over their combined limit because water is heavy and they forgot about it. Eighty gallons of fresh water is not a rounding error.

The practical move for a mountain crossing is to travel with the fresh tank low and fill at destination. That is easy to say and easy to forget. It is also an argument for a cassette system over a large fixed black tank: the waste you're carrying up the pass is measured in liters, not in tens of gallons, and you can service it without hunting for a dump station at the top of a mountain corridor.

The descents matter more than the climbs

Climbing a pass tests the cooling system. Descending it tests brakes, and brakes are what actually hurt people. The technique is unglamorous: pick a gear that holds your speed without touching the pedal, let the engine do the work, and stay off the brakes so they stay cool enough to be there when you need them. If you're using the brakes continuously on a long descent you are in the wrong gear.

Use the brake check pull-outs. They exist because enough people didn't.

Trailer brakes, if you have them, need to be adjusted for the load you're actually pulling, not the setting from last season. Check the breakaway cable. Check the safety chains cross under the coupler. Check tire pressures cold, including the trailer spare, which is statistically the tire most likely to be flat and least likely to have been looked at.

Wind, width and the parts of the highway that surprise people

The corridors through the mountains funnel wind, and a boat on a trailer is a sail with a keel it can't use. A crosswind gust on a bridge deck with a loaded trailer is a genuinely startling experience the first time. Slow down early rather than correcting hard.

Length is the other one. Some of the older tunnels, avalanche sheds and tight campground loops in the mountain parks were built for a different era of vehicle. If your combined length is over about eleven or twelve meters, check the specific campground before you arrive, because "no vehicles over" signs at the entrance to a loop with no turnaround are a memorable afternoon.

Launching in cold, deep water

Mountain lakes are cold enough that immersion is a safety issue rather than a comfort one, and the ramps are often steep, short and made of whatever the lake did to the concrete last winter. Back down slowly, keep the tow vehicle's rear wheels out of the water where you can, and remember that a wet ramp plus a heavy coach is how a rig ends up in the lake. If it looks marginal, it is.

Invasive species inspection is mandatory in several jurisdictions, with mandatory stops at highway stations. Clean, drain and dry the boat between water bodies. This is not bureaucratic theater; whirling disease and mussel colonisation have already changed management on some of these waters permanently. Check the current requirements for the province you're entering, and expect to stop.

Arriving with something left

The measure of a good mountain travel day with a trailer is that you arrive tired rather than rattled. That means short days, early stops, a route planned around grades instead of distances, and not committing to a pass late in the afternoon when the light is flat and everybody in the vehicle is done.

The boat will still be there tomorrow. So will the fish.

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Tide, fog and halibut on Vancouver Island's west coast

Fishing · Boats · British Columbia

The west coast of Vancouver Island is where inland anglers go to discover that everything they know is freshwater knowledge. Tides that move real volumes of water. Swell arriving from three thousand kilometers of open Pacific. Fog that closes in fast enough that people who have run the same passage for twenty years still keep a plotter on. And, underneath all of it, some of the most reliably excellent saltwater fishing on the continent.

It is also a place that is genuinely well suited to traveling by RV, in a way that surprises people who assume the coast is all lodges and charter docks.

Getting there is part of the decision

The road across the island to the Pacific Rim side is a mountain highway with a reputation. It is paved and perfectly drivable, but it is narrow in places, tight in others, and the sort of road where a wide motorhome meets a logging truck on a curve and both drivers remember it. Take it in the morning. Take it slowly. If you're towing, know your width and your overhang.

Port Renfrew, Bamfield and the smaller communities have their own access, some of it gravel, some of it seasonal, some of it not appropriate for a large coach at all. Ask locally before committing a forty-foot rig to a resource road. The answer is often "yes, but not you."

Fishing the tide instead of the clock

This is the hardest adjustment for a lake angler. The productive windows are set by tidal exchange, not by sunrise, and the good bite may be at eleven in the morning on a big ebb. Get the tide tables for the specific station near you — not the general regional ones — and plan the day around them. On a strong exchange, current through the passages runs faster than most small outboards want to fight.

On this coast the marine forecast is not advice. It is the plan, and it has a veto.

Salmon, halibut and bottom fish each have their own seasons, areas, gear rules and retention limits, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada adjusts them in-season, sometimes with little notice, sometimes closing an area entirely for conservation. Anything I printed here about limits could be wrong by the time you read it. Check the current DFO area regulations and any in-season variation orders before you drop a line, and if you're new to it, book a charter for the first day and ask questions relentlessly.

Small boats and big water

Plenty of people fish this coast in trailerable boats in the sixteen-to-twenty-two-foot range, and plenty of them do it safely for decades. The ones who do it safely share habits: they leave early and are back before the afternoon wind, they carry proper safety gear rather than the minimum, they file a plan with somebody on shore, and they do not cross open water in fog without electronics they trust.

Swell is the variable that lake anglers underestimate. A two-metre swell with a long period is a comfortable ocean. A one-and-a-half meter swell with wind chop on top of it, on the shoulder of an ebb through a narrow entrance, is a serious situation in a small boat. Learn to read the entrance before you commit to going out through it, and be willing to turn around in front of an audience.

Living out of the coach on the coast

Coastal camping brings a specific set of problems, and they're all moisture. Everything is damp. Salt gets into everything. Neoprene, rain gear and a fish tote all end up inside the vehicle at some point, and the bathroom is where that load lands because it's the room with a drain.

Salt is the part people underestimate. It attracts moisture, it doesn't evaporate, and it stays in any surface with texture. A plastic bowl that has been abraded by years of cleaning holds saline film in a way that becomes obvious after a week of charters, and no additive fixes it because the problem is mechanical rather than chemical. A vitrified glaze rinses genuinely clean with fresh water, which is why a lot of the people who use their coaches hardest are the ones who bother to change the bowl.

The other coastal habit worth building: rinse everything with fresh water at the end of each day, including the outside of the vehicle if you can, and especially the trailer. Salt in a wheel bearing is a slow, expensive problem that begins invisibly.

Where the trip actually goes right

Base somewhere with reasonable services for a week rather than moving every second day. The driving on that side of the island is slow and the roads punish repetition. Pick a launch you're comfortable with, learn one piece of water properly, and let the weather decide the order of the days rather than fighting it.

Take the fog day off. Go to the beach, look at the surf, eat well, and go out at first light tomorrow when the forecast has settled. The fish are resident; you are not.

The one thing I'd insist on

Safety gear that fits, is accessible and is current. Immersion in that water is survivable for a short and clearly-defined window, and everything about your outcome depends on flotation, a way to call for help and somebody knowing where you went. That is the entire lecture. It applies as much to the twenty-footer as to the aluminum boat, and it applies more to the confident than the nervous.

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Ice-out: the first trip of the season on Lake Nipissing

Fishing · Ontario

There is a specific week in spring where the ice has gone off Nipissing, the water is still barely above freezing, the shoreline is brown and unlovely, and the fishing can be exceptional. It is not a comfortable trip. It is the one a lot of people look forward to most.

Nipissing is big, shallow for its size, and full of structure, which means it warms unevenly and the fish do predictable things about that. It also means the wind builds a nasty chop quickly over shallow water, and a spring cold front can turn a pleasant morning into a small-craft advisory by noon.

Waking a vehicle up after winter

The first trip is a shakedown whether you planned it that way or not. Whatever you did to winterize has to be undone properly, and the order matters. Flush the antifreeze out of the fresh system thoroughly — more thoroughly than feels necessary, because the taste lingers in a way that ruins coffee. Sanitize the fresh tank. Run every tap until it's clear. Check for split lines and weeping fittings under pressure, ideally while parked somewhere you don't mind water appearing.

Then check the seals. Rubber that has sat compressed and frozen for five months does not always come back. The blade seal on a cassette toilet is a wear item and a cold winter is hard on it; if it weeps or drags, replace it now rather than diagnosing it at a boat launch. Same for the bowl seal and the flush mechanism.

Spring is when you find out what winter did. Better in your driveway than at the ramp.

Batteries are the other spring casualty. A lead-acid bank that sat at partial charge through a cold winter may have lost real capacity, and it will look fine at rest and collapse under load. Test it properly before you rely on it four hours from home.

Cold water fishing, cold weather camping

Walleye behavior around ice-out is driven by the spawn and by water temperature, and the specific timing shifts by weeks depending on the year. There are seasonal closures designed to protect spawning fish, and they vary by zone. Read the current regulations for the zone before you go — spring dates are precisely the ones that catch people out, and the fines are not nominal.

Dress for immersion rather than for air temperature. The single most dangerous thing about spring fishing is that a comfortable, sunny afternoon sits on top of water that will incapacitate you in minutes. Wear the flotation. If you fish alone, tell somebody the plan and stick to it.

The campground reality in early spring

Most Ontario Parks campgrounds and many private ones open late for the season, and the ones that are open in the first weeks often have water off and dump stations closed until the frost is properly out of the ground. That's not a problem for a self-contained vehicle with a cassette and a full fresh tank — it is a problem if you assumed services and arrived without a plan.

Check operating dates. Then have a fallback thirty minutes away.

Why it's worth being cold

Because the lake is empty. Because the fish haven't seen a lure since November. Because the light in early spring on a big shallow lake at six in the morning is a genuinely different thing from the same view in July. And because after five months of not going anywhere, the act of putting the coach on a road and pointing it north is most of the point.

Just fix the seals first.

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Pike and portages in eastern Manitoba

Fishing · Manitoba

Eastern Manitoba does not market itself. The country between the Ontario border and the Red River valley — Whiteshell, Nopiming, the granite-and-jack-pine landscape that geologists call the edge of the Shield — is full of small lakes with big pike in them, and comparatively few people looking at them.

It is excellent country for a modest rig and a canoe on the roof.

Why small water rewards this setup

The lakes here are mostly accessible by a short gravel road and a rough launch, and many of the best ones don't take a big boat comfortably. A canoe or a small aluminum boat with an outboard you can lift is the right tool. Which in turn means the vehicle can be small, and a small vehicle can get down access roads that would end a Class A's day.

Provincial park campgrounds in Whiteshell and Nopiming offer a range from serviced to basic. The basic ones are better. If you're self-contained, a site with a pit toilet and a water pump on the far side of the loop is quiet, cheap and close to the launch, and nobody will run a generator next to you at nine in the evening.

Pike fishing, in short

Pike are the reason people come and the reason people underestimate the fishing. They're aggressive, they're plentiful in weedy bays, and they'll hit almost anything moving in the spring. The larger fish are a different proposition — deeper, more selective, and generally found where the structure is. Handle them properly: wet hands, no fingers in the gills, support the body, pliers within reach, and keep it short. A big pike out of cold water can be revived, but not if you spend two minutes on photographs.

Bring the long-nose pliers, the jaw spreader and a decent net. Not one of the three. All of them.

Regulations, size-based retention rules and any special management on specific lakes come from the current Manitoba anglers' guide, and they differ lake by lake in ways that surprise people. Check the specific water body.

Bugs, and a genuine warning

June in eastern Manitoba is a legendary insect experience. Mosquitoes in numbers that make people leave, plus blackflies, plus horseflies in the open. This is not the exaggeration of a bad season — it's the normal one. Screen room, permethrin-treated outer layers, head net, and a plan for eating dinner inside.

It matters for the vehicle too. Every time somebody opens the door, a hundred mosquitoes come with them, and by day three the coach has a resident population. The compensating advantage of a small rig with a proper bathroom is that at least nobody has to walk across a campground at two in the morning to make a contribution to the ecosystem.

Late August is the secret

The insects have eased, the water is warm enough to swim, the pike have moved back onto structure and are feeding hard before fall, and the campgrounds have thinned out after the long weekend. If you can only take one week, take that one.

Bring the second cassette anyway. Basic campgrounds mean no dump station, and the nearest one may be an hour of gravel away.

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The bathroom problem nobody mentions on fishing trips

Camping in Canada · Practical

Every trip report skips the same forty square feet. People will describe the weather, the boat, the fish, the campground and the drive in detail, and then say nothing at all about the room that determines whether anybody wants to come back next year.

So, briefly and without enthusiasm: the bathroom is the deciding factor on trips longer than four days, and it is almost always the bowl rather than the plumbing.

What actually happens over a week

Day one, everything is fine. Day three, there's a smell that appears when the coach warms up in the afternoon and disappears when you open the door, which makes you think it's coming from somewhere else. Day five, someone buys a more aggressive cleaner in town. Day six, they use it, and it makes the surface slightly rougher, which means day seven is worse.

That cycle is mechanical, not hygienic. A molded plastic bowl leaves the factory with a smooth gloss. Grit, brushes and abrasive cleaners cut that surface over a few seasons into a matte, micro-textured finish. Texture holds pigment, moisture and the bacteria that produce odor compounds. You are no longer cleaning a surface; you are cleaning the inside of a very fine sponge.

You cannot scrub a surface back to being smooth. Every attempt makes it slightly less smooth.

Why porcelain instead of a new toilet

The obvious answer is to replace the toilet, and plenty of people do. It costs what it costs — a four-figure sum once you count the unit, the shipping, the labour and the chance that the new one doesn't share a footprint with the old one. Some coaches make it a genuinely awkward job because the toilet went in before the wall did.

The insert approach exists because the bowl is the part that fails and the rest of the toilet usually isn't. Fired porcelain, shaped to the interior geometry of the specific bowl, sealed in with sanitary silicone around the upper rim. The toilet stays bolted down, the cassette mechanism stays untouched, and the surface you actually interact with becomes the same material as the one in your house.

Installation is about an hour of work and mostly consists of waiting for silicone to cure. Clean the bowl, place the insert, run a continuous bead, let it set. It adds a pound or two to the vehicle, which is nothing against a full fresh tank, and it has been doing this in RVs in Europe long enough that the road-vibration question is settled.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't fix odor coming from the cassette. That's a ventilation problem, and it's what the SOG exists for — pulling air out of the tank rather than perfuming it. If your issue is a smell when the blade is open, the insert is the wrong product; if your issue is a bowl that never looks or feels clean, it's the right one. Plenty of people end up with both, which is why they're sold together.

It also doesn't do anything about the actual chore. Somebody still has to carry the cassette to the dump point. Porcelain won't help with that, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who claimed otherwise.

The honest version of the pitch

This is a small product that solves one narrow, unglamorous problem well. My dad designed it because he was annoyed, not because he spotted a market. It doesn't make your coach faster or lighter or worth more on resale. What it does is remove a low-grade irritation that compounds over a long trip, in a room you use several times a day and never think about until it starts bothering you.

That's the whole case. Take it or leave it.

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