Originally Posted by
Machka
I'm familiar with Red Lake.
I used to camp at Blue Lake (175 km to the south of it) every August long weekend for many years. And I cycled out to Dryden and a little way up the road to Red Lake.
IIRC (a lot of years ago now), we drove up to Ear Falls, and maybe all the way to Red Lake.
But you would be heading up, more or less from Kenora, not Vermilion Bay. That route doesn't look like it has any settlements on it in about 200 km, so you would want to have food, raingear, and basic tools. I see that the Google van hasn't even been up there.
I'm not getting any images of the road.
As a newbie tourer I don't think I would try to cycle all the way up that road. I'll be starting with baby steps. If I got a consulting gig in a town like that, or Sioux Lookout, I would fly there and then use it as a base to perhaps bike out from there around the area or to a lake cabin or campground. But that is the kind of fairly deserted landscape that inspired this thread.
I also have a thought of maybe taking the train from Toronto to Red-ditt, and
biking to Kenora (30 km or so) but the train stops there at 3 am, and there's no station building, so I'd probably have to pitch a tent or climb into that emergency bivvy (good tip) and wait til daylight. Or I could get off at Brereton lake as the train stops there a little closer to morning and from
Brereton I could easily revisit my childhood summer experiences at West Hawk Lake, before going on to Kenora.