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The original was posted on /r/Ultralight by /u/RamaHikes on 2025-09-17 01:46:39+00:00.

tl;dr

The Ottawa Temiskaming Highland Trail is a ruggedly primitive path running 140 km from Latchford to Thorne in Ontario. The northern half meanders through the highlands and lakes of the region; the southern half mostly parallels the shore of Lake Temiskaming.

This “Trail” might be better called an “Overland Route”. The route is generally well-blazed but the track itself is more like following a game trail cross-country through the forest. The route is usually overgrown, especially in low-lying sections near a water source. Beavers actively engineer streams and lake outflows in the area and impact the blazed route, so cross-country detour may be required. Blowdowns are frequent and navigation can be challenging. Reality occasionally does not match the digital and printed map sources, so keep an open mind on-trail.

This route is very similar in character to Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness, except without the well-worn footpath, the throngs of hikers, or the high peaks. This route feels wilder. The ups and downs are steep. You will traverse a handful of beaver dams, ford a few streams as well as a marsh, and do some moss garden and highland slab walking. You’ll rarely meet other hikers on the trail.

Consider this wild route through Ontario’s rugged Canadian Shield country if you enjoy traversing forests and rocky highland moss gardens, streams and lakes, and are comfortable handling uncertainty and adversity over challenging terrain.

General Info, Maps, and Shuttle

My hike was southbound from Latchford to Thorne, from August 23 to 30, 2025. My base weight for this trip was 13 lbs. Gear discussion is at the bottom of this post. Photo highlights from the landscape and wildlife are on the gram.

I drove up to the area from my home in Ottawa, and used Doug Adams from Northland Paradise Lodge in Temagami for shuttle service (705-569-3791). His rate was extremely reasonable, and keep in mind that he accepts payment only by cash or e-transfer (it’s a Canadian thing). The official trail info lists Murray Muir first, then Doug, but call Doug first—Murray will ask you to arrange something with Doug if you can.

Doug will use your car for the shuttle, and will keep your car at his Lodge for the duration of your hike. Doug mentioned that he usually does about 12 shuttles a year, but that I was only his second for this year.

The official map set and planner are available in digital form from the trail club and a physical copy of that can be ordered from Chat Noir Books (this is the same PDF document from the trail club printed on waterproof paper; this full printed map set weighs 3 oz).

I created a map of the route in Caltopo. The default MapBuilder Topo base is good for this route, but if you’d like to use the Canadian Basemap Transportation as a custom base, instructions for that are at the end of this post.

Trail Club

You get the feeling from the campsites and hand-lettered signs that this trail is a labour of love for the members of the trail club. Which it most certainly is: The Appalachian Trail is managed with an annual budget well north of USD 6,000 per mile; Based on a comment I read somewhere, the OTHT appears to be managed with an annual budget of less than USD 200 per mile.

If you’re planning to hike the OTHT, please consider supporting the trail by purchasing a membership to the trail club or making a donation. You’re quite literally funding the fuel for the chainsaws.

Campsites

The route is dotted with frequent campsites, and you’ll want to plan to camp at these official sites every night.

In the northern half of the trail, each campsite is furnished with a stack of firewood under plastic sheet, along with a shovel, rake, axe, saw, and water pail, and a picnic table and benches. Campsites are bracketed with trail signage 100 meters before and after, and are strikingly well-developed compared with the trail to access them.

In the southern half of the trail, the campsites are far less developed. Usually no firewood or tools, limited signage, and only occasionally a picnic table or benches. I sometimes missed even seeing the blue-blazed side trail to the site when the site was not directly on the main trail.

It’s clear that a few of the campsites get a lot of use, and some get almost no use at all. Based on the plant growth at some of the previously cleared tent sites, many had not been used at all this season.

Opportunities for dispersed camping are few on this terrain. That said, the one night that I did need to find a dispersed site, I was able to. Skurka’s campsite selection article FTW! I’d been aiming for the campsite at Price’s Lake, but the exact location was unclear on the official paper and digital maps, and simply wrong on the open street map data used by Caltopo. I ended up bushwhacking a bypass past the official campsite—which was basically on an island and required a precarious balance across a thin tree trunk, or fording an unmapped marshy arm of Price’s Lake to access.

Hidden Lake was one of my favourite campsites. A nice pine forest and hardly any mosquitos, even though I’d been swarmed with mosquitos at Opimika Creek just a mile previous.

Copper Lake is another gem. There is a canoe with paddle and life jacket at that campsite, and I regretted not planning to spend the evening there.

Overgrowth

The route does not get enough boot traffic to keep plants from growing up through the use-path. This means that much of the trail is overgrown, and you are regularly pushing through scrub: shin-height blueberry, waist-height maple and raspberry, waist- or chest-height grasses/reeds/etc., and sometimes even vegetation grown over your head and totally obscuring the blazes in front of you.

At one point south of Opimika Creek and before Hidden Lake, the overgrowth had thorns.

There is not enough boot traffic on the route even to wear the moss off the rocks, so in many places in the highlands, you’re walking on a spongy moss carpet rather than directly on the rocks themselves. In some places, not even the lichen is fully worn away from the path.

In late August I found a few ripe blueberries and raspberries. A few weeks earlier in the summer, this route would be a berry-lover’s paradise.

Blowdowns

Yo dawg, we heard you like blowdowns! Even our blowdowns have blowdowns! In all seriousness, there were a few places where I saw fresh blowdowns overtop of older blowdowns.

The frequent blowdowns are a function of the terrain and the reality of a small trail club with limited funds managing this rugged and remote route.

The club is well aware that the section from Grand Campment Bay south to Ottertail Creek is bad (see the note at the top of the 2025 Spring update) but it won’t be until later this Fall that the section might be cleared. In the meantime, that section is brutal. The worst blowdowns come as the trail traverses a steep and rocky slope through dense forest.

Just to the north of Gorrie Lake Campsite, one blowdown required a cross-country bushwhack across marshy ground pushing through thick taller-than-me vegetation.

Just to the south of Mata Campsite, as I bushwhacked around a blowdown on a steep bank, the cedar root to which I’d just transferred my weight collapsed and my leg plunged at least two feet down into the hollow beneath, my foot settling into the muck at the bottom. Thankfully, I escaped with only a well-bruised and well-scraped shin. It didn’t hurt to walk, but your shins sure take a lot of hits when pushing through overgrowth and bushwhacking around blowdowns.

A little north of Ottertail Creek Point Camp, one tree trunk across the trail is a hazard for taller southbound hikers (I’m 6’1”). It’s been there long enough that it has a northbound blaze painted right on it, and you’re meant to duck underneath. But hiking south, the trail ascends slightly right under the tree trunk. I was focused on foot placement on the rocky terrain. My wide brim hat concealed the trunk from my peripheral vision, and from underneath I stepped up directly into the trunk, striking the top of my head with enough upward force that I felt my neck compress. It was maybe the scariest moment I’ve ever experienced while hiking, as I paused in a daze to recover, taking stock that I could still move my neck and the rest of my body, and evaluating myself for signs of concussion. Thankfully there was no serious damage, just a wicked headache right in the middle of the most brutal section.

Wildlife

The route is essentially a wildlife track through the forest. I didn’t encounter animals using the path, but saw scat frequently. I saw moose and deer droppings, and scat from bear, wolf, and what was probably fisher. At times there was another pile of moose droppings every few meters, and I saw more moose prints than boot prints in the mud.

I saw beavers and loons swimming in many lakes, a hawk that came in for an ungainly landing a few…

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