Petite boucle Chochocouane n° 61 · Réserve faunique La Vérendrye
Violette and Stan paddled SEPAQ's Petite boucle Chochocouane in July. It's a counter-clockwise loop through the western sector of Réserve faunique La Vérendrye, with 21 portages, taking out at the Lac Lavis take-out. SEPAQ maps it as a five-day route; we paddled it in four. There is no road access past the put-in, and across the whole trip we did not meet another soul.
Leaving home, a moose and her calf on the far shore, the rapids we pushed the loaded canoe up, and the last morning on the island. Music by JHS Pedals.
What we did not expect to find so interesting was the water system itself. In a single stretch you cross a huge lake, drop into a narrow stream, follow it into a river, watch that river widen into a bigger one, then open back onto another lake and thread through a marsh. It keeps rearranging itself in front of you, and it is both immense and quietly beautiful.
The weather moves just as fast. It swung from hot, still afternoons to cold, grey days in the middle of July, often within a few hours, and we rarely guessed it right. That unpredictability turned out to be part of what makes the place feel so alive.
With no road and no one else on the water, one small thing mattered more than we expected: the Garmin inReach Mini, pinging our position home every ten minutes. It was the most important piece of kit we carried, our only line out.
The route we paddled, the gear we carried, the journal, and the Garmin track from put-in to take-out.
The full loop with an interactive map, day-by-day distances, portages, and campsites.
View the map →The full kit Violette and Stan paddled with, broken into six categories.
See the kit →Route reasoning, training, the food plan, and what we were nervous about.
Read the plan →Short dispatches and photos from the water, written up now that we're home.
Read posts →The reserve covers 12,589 km² of contiguous land and lake in the Outaouais and Abitibi regions, about 180 km north of Ottawa. SEPAQ's canoe-camping programme maintains 800 km of developed trails across nearly 20 lakefront circuits, with 500 overnight campsites spread thinly across the whole map. SEPAQ is also blunt about who the routes are for: "most of the circuits are designed for an independent and experienced clientele." Paddling Magazine calls the reserve "a blissfully quiet alternative to Algonquin". Two Algonquin First Nation communities live within the boundaries: Kitcisakik on Great Victoria Lake and Lac-Rapide on Cabonga Reservoir. The reserve was renamed in 1950 for the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, on the bicentennial of his death, and gained wildlife-reserve status in 1979.
Our loop n° 61 follows the eastern bank of the Rivière Chochocouane, which is SEPAQ route n° 60 and, per the same article, the reserve's "premier whitewater river". We don't have the whitewater experience for the river itself. The chain of lakes east of it gives us the same drainage on water we know how to read.