I have been visiting Algonquin Provincial Park since the early 1970s.  It is the largest provincial park in Ontario, and is several hours by car north of Toronto. One highway travels through the park. To see almost any part of the park, therefore, the only kind of travel is by canoe, portaging between ever-more-remote lakes and rivers, setting up camp at night in the vast, undulating, boreal forest. At the end of the day, as darkness pulls its soft cloak around you, you relax in a camp chair on the vast granite rockfall right where it drops into the water and realize that, but for yourselves, the world around you is wholly without human witness.

These images were taken during canoe trips two years apart, both over the second to last week of September when fall was moving with haste through deep pines, igniting the deciduous canopy in fruit-colored waves. These trips had put-in and take-out at the park's western Magnetawan Lake entrance point.  The weather for both trips was jaw-droppingly gorgeous, weeks of sunny and nearly 70° days and cool and bugless 50° nights, giving star-filled night skies, and nary a breeze to paddle against in shirtsleeves during the days.  We travelled down the Petawawa River, the Tim River, over Ralph Bice Lake, Misty Lake, Little Misty Lake, Trout Lake, and many others. In the wild, you are always up before dawn, and the lakes in the early morning were often shrouded in fog. Before the sun burns it away, you sense a break in habitual perception because the world is real and present, but not knowable yet.