Grey Owl's Cabin at Ajawaan Lake

The most celebrated destination in Prince Albert National Park is a small log cabin on the shore of Ajawaan Lake, deep in the backcountry. Getting here requires either a 20 km return hike from Kingsmere Lake or a canoe crossing of Kingsmere Lake followed by a 3 km walk — there is no road. The cabin where Grey Owl wrote his books and kept his beavers is preserved much as he left it, with his name carved over the door: "Beaver Lodge."

The journey is worth it. The lake is still, the spruce forest closes in, and beavers — descendants of the ones Grey Owl rescued — continue to work the same shoreline. Parks Canada maintains the trail and provides interpretation at the trailhead. Allow a full day.

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A story
Grey Owl was Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, born in Hastings, England, in 1888. He emigrated to Canada as a teenager, learned trapping from the Anishinaabe, and spent two decades presenting himself to the world as the son of an Apache father and a Scottish mother — a performance sustained through three books, a lecture tour of Britain where he addressed the King, and a decade of global celebrity. When he died in 1938, journalists revealed the deception within days. The conservation work survived the scandal; the beaver he protected still swim at Ajawaan Lake.

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