The night woods are noisy in Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park. Loons yodel across moonlit lakes. Owls hoot. Moose and black bear rustle and snuffle in the underbrush.

Then, at 3 a.m., comes the long, low howl of a wolf -- a sound guaranteed to wake even the soundest sleeper.

It certainly woke me.

We drove nine hours this summer to spend a week paddling in Algonquin in south-central Ontario to hear sounds like these. The 3,000-square-mile park is famed among North American canoeists. Long chains of remote lakes, most accessible only by carrying a canoe over portages that can exceed a mile or more in length, offer more than 900 miles of woods and water routes.

And then there's the draw of the wolves. Ever since activists began conducting late summer public wolf howls in the 1963, people have come to listen to the wolves. About 30 packs are thought to roam the park.

Algonquin is one of Canada's oldest parks, established in 1893. It has a rich history. Loggers cut choice red and white pines in the early 1800s. The extensive cutting led the government to create the park to help protect the forests and wildlife there. Once the park was established, great lodges were constructed on some of the more popular lakes, much as happened in the Adirondacks. As a result, tourists, anglers and canoeists flocked to the region.

For me, a visit to Algonquin was the fulfillment of a life-long dream. An elementary school friend attended a girls' camp in Algonquin. Each summer she would return from her two months at camp with stories that fed my imagination. Loons, woods, water, sky, a place where wildlife outnumbered people: I wanted to experience it firsthand.

I vowed someday to visit the place. This August, my family and I did.

Amazing Landscape

South-central Ontario is flat compared to Vermont, but Algonquin vistas are stunning. Vast, blue lakes lap against a surrounding ring of deep-green conifers; the colors grade uphill into the pale greens of maples, birch and beeches – familiar forests for most Vermonters.

Wetlands fringe many lakes, and in the early morning fog, it's common to see moose feeding on sparganium and pickerel weed in the shallows. We saw at least one moose every day. One morning we floated out on an early paddle and spotted a young moose and its mother grazing in the weeds. They chewed noisily like great, brown cows, snuffling in the water and blowing big bubbles. Best of all, they were completely unperturbed by our presence.

Otters feed on freshwater mussels; loon families ply the lakes. One of our favorite campsiteswas also prime fishing grounds for a pair of loons and their rapidly maturing chick. We watched in delight as the parents dove into the clear waters and returned with small fish to feed their baby.

Fishin' fools

Loons weren't the only ones fishing. Algonquin's clear, deep lakes are home to delicious and easy-to-catch lake trout. The summer's end is the best time to paddle in Algonquin if you want to avoid bugs and have the best chance for good weather, but the warm water drives lake trout and brook trout into cold, deep holes. That said, we caught fish nearly every day. Well, everyone caught fish except me.

Our biggest success came from trolling the lake bottom with a rig set up by our friend Eric Nuse, who also happens to be a Vermont Fish and Wildlife warden. We caught lake trout that were 20 inches or longer and great eating. For their length, however, they were slender fish, a reflection of the lake's clear waters. These big lakes aren't loaded with nutrients, which makes it pleasant for swimming but not productive for fish.

Pack light, be happy

There's plenty of information about Algonquin on the Web, and a few guidebooks available for purchase. Unless you've been there, however, it's hard to know exactly what you're getting into. Your best strategy is to limit your gear and carry the lightest possible food loads so you have to travel each portage only once.

With two small children, two boats and enough food for eight days, we had to double our carries. That transformed a mile carry into a three-mile carry. We naively assumed since we were seasoned backpackers that the longer carries wouldn't challenge us. We also brought a set of wheels to roll the canoe along the portages. We couldn't use the wheels, and the carries were hard work.

We should have packed like backpackers -- we packed in the much more relaxed manner of canoe campers. Eric's family even brought a cast-iron frying pan (although we didn't regret it one bit after we fried those 20-inch long lake trout in it).

Next time we go, we're talking about renting a Kevlar canoe and carrying only freeze-dried food. The bottom line is, you'll be happiest if you pack for an Algonquin trip the way you would for a long backpacking journey -- light.

Trip planning

Choosing a route among Algonquin's hundreds of lakes is a mind-boggling experience. Ontario Route 60 slices through the lower third of the park and sports the main access points: Lake Opeongo and Canoe Lake to the north, Smoke Lake and Lake of Two Rivers to the south.

Those willing to drive a bit more can take advantage of two dozen other access points scattered along the park's perimeter. One rule of thumb applies: the longer the portage, the fewer the people. Given the long drive from Vermont to Algonquin, we chose to take advantage of a water taxi to ferry us on our first day eight miles from the put-in on Lake Opeongo to the lake's northwest arm. It cost $84 (Canadian) for six people and two canoes.

We were dropped at an ideal campsite, where a long, sloping rock led to the water, and the tent sites were tucked in the woods. The kids caught so many smallmouth bass introduced into this lake, but not generally found in the lakes away from the roads that they caught our limit in about 10 minutes.

Our campsite's easy access via water taxi didn't take away from its remote feel. Indeed, we saw only one other canoe from this spot, on a faraway campsite about one-half mile from ours. Here were moose and loons galore, and our access to the interior.

During the next eight days, we made a big western-curving arc through the park's interior. Our route was against the wind, and without realizing it, went from remote lakes to more widely traveled lakes.

We ended our trip in Canoe Lake, which joins a chain of lakes with relatively short portages. Those lakes -- Canoe Lake, Joe Lake, Burnt Island Lake, and the Otterslides -- are so popular they've earned the nickname ''The Alcan Highway.'' While the Alcan highway is a real, 1,522-mile highway leading from Canada to Alaska, Algonquin's Alcan makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the prevalence of many folks, some in aluminum canoes, along the lake chain.

Since we left Algonquin on a weekend, the number of canoers in these last few lakes was impressive, but not offensive. The lakes are pretty much big enough to swallow even long flotillas of canoes originating from the many camps in and around the park.

Algonquin's most famous visitor, painter Tom Thompson, memorialized the park in his many turn-of-the-century paintings showing water, woods and sky. Ironically, he drowned in mysterious circumstances on Canoe Lake, where his friends erected a cairn to recognize his contribution to Canadian art.

Thompson's dreamy paintings do much to feed the imagination, like the park itself. A simple description of the place doesn't really do it justice, as Thompson himself recognized. In 1914, he described the park like this: ''The best I can do does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty.''

You'll just have to go there to see for yourself.