Silent Lake: Me and All the Mosquitoes

Silent Lake Provincial Park is located between Peterborough and Bancroft in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. The lake is ideal for paddling and features a trail that circumnavigates the waters with several lookouts and points of interest along its 15km length. It features a classic northern Ontario landscape with rock and white pines. The trail is in the moderate to difficult category, with a lot of ups and downs as the trail follows the lakeshore and passes through small ravines. I visited the park this year after one of the most wet and rainy June months in a while. Although I brought (and applied) a bunch of mosquito spray, the bugs were abundant and barely gave me a moments rest as I pushed through the forrest at almost a jogging pace. The only time the bugs let up was when I managed to make my way down to the waters edge, where a mixture of the sun and breeze out in the open cleared them away. I succeeded in getting a couple of images, shown below, but by the time I made it back to the car I has several dozen bites covering the back of my upper arms where I must have missed with the bug spray.