4x4 trips in the Timiskaming District

Are you looking for dirt roads? Drive up highway 11 and take any of the 500 or 600 highways that turn off of 11. There are uncountable service roads up there.

Beavers can build amazing dams. Here, the water surface was about 1 meter above the road. These dams don't always hold and may flush the road away.
The structure looked intact and was still holding on our return. Like so many others, this road ended somewhere in the forest. And remember, you are beeing watched.

Logging Road off hwy 566
We noticed a service road to the south-west of hwy 566. This is about 11 kilometers north-west of Matachewan. We knew that the Mistinikon Lake was in that direction. That was good enough a reason to have a closer look.

Day trip in the Matachewan township

The area was logged a few years ago and the trees had a good hight.
You may notice some single trees still popping up or wood left on the ground. These are called deadwood and provide the fertiliser for the new growth.

Like most logging roads, this one ended at these coordinates: 47.98444, -80.73139.
Even so the road and sidearms are together about five kilometers in length, we spent about an hour looking for wildlife, rocks, trees and the Mistinikon Lake. There is no access to the lake for what we know.

Marter Road 19
The Marter Road is about 15 km north-east of Englehart. The Road 19 connects to the 624 further north from what we concluded from the topographical map. It could be considered a side ride to the the 624. We found the road sign at these coordinates:
47.899484, -79.762112

The road looked as if we could drive it in 10 minutes. The area has lots of sand and mostly small to walnut size rocks. This combination is not the Jeeps friend. We tried to drive up a small hill and the tires dug into the sand almost immediately. Hm, good to know.

Dashcam footoage from Marter Road including stunning night shots. The video is 5 minutes 07 seconds.

And here was to proof that this gravel combination doesn't hold. The road was completly washed out. The logs were put down for the ATVs. There was barely enough road left to walk. We climbed down to the culvert and found this interesting root.

If you don't succeed from the south, try from the north. But this time by night.
The topographical map indicated that we can expect some muddy passages. Sure enough, the road got soft and softer.

With these blackflies waiting outside the Jeep, we had absolutely no urge to drive through the mud and get stuck. One of us would have to get out there. So we turned around and waited for the sun to set.
We were doing some research into blackflies. There are over 160 species in Canada and this one here may be a Axymyia furcata, or Brown Fly. Not all of the blackflies bite, but that was not part of our experiment out in the wild.

We took lots of pictures. The colours on the horizon changed slowly and finally there was no more light. We found this spot on a sideroad that had no swamp, therefore less mosquitoes and blackflies. We actually could stay outside to take the pictures.

For the naked eye, it was dark and the stars took over the night sky. Not so the Samsung camera, the sensor seems to pick up all the invisible variations of dark and colour. This composition with the moon was only captured after we turned on the offroad lights and the camera was in HDR mode (High Dynamic Range or Rich Tone).
The offroad lights are the Rigid D-SS PRO Spot. Amazing lights that also lights up the side of the Jeep.