Gatineau Park

Any book about Ottawa's outdoors must prominently feature Gatineau Park. This huge block of public protected space, shaped like a spear-head thrusting into the urban core of the National Capital area, has been the city's playground for many decades.

In fact, one of the problems I had with choosing trails to include in HTO was how to limit myself to only 10 listings in Gatineau Park. It contains so many possibilities, more kilometres of trails within its boundaries, both managed and informal, than exist near most North American cities. Gatineau park is so popular, and so well-known to Ottawa residents, that whatever selection I made was certain, I believed, to fail to include many people's favourite route and cause dissatisfaction.

In some respects the knowledge that most people would almost certainly be upset no matter what I decided made choosing easier. After all, if it was unlikely that anyone else would be pleased, I only needed to worry about satisfying myself!

Accordingly, I selected serveral shorter, but popular trails for novices and visitors. The Lauriault Trail seemed an obvious choice, as did Lac Pink and King Mountain.

Another short route that I included, Luskville Falls, I rated as a difficulty level of "3" because of the steep climb. Other, longer, intermediate walks are Herridge Hut, starting from P16 near Wakefield, and the Skyline Trail, beginning from the Chelsea picnic area.

Two routes I selected earned an advanced difficulty rating of "4": the challenging Sentier des Loup and less well-known Trail 56. And garnering the top difficulty rating of "5" are the long and climbing Lusk Caves trail, starting from Lac Philippe, and the physically and navigationally challenging route to Western Hut from the shores of Lac Meech.

I attempted to select routes that went to lakes and waterfalls, viewing areas and woodlands, and I tried to enter the park from a wide variety of directions. As I said earlier, there are any number of choices that could have been made. I hope that I included your favourite trail. If not, hopefully there is one that you do not know and are interested to try. Maybe you will discover an area of the park that you have overlooked.