Road trip: Ottawa to the French River in a 2022 Toyota Tacoma Trail

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Just south of Sudbury flow the majestic waters of the French River. Canada’s first official “heritage river” was once paddled by explorers and fur traders, flowing with it the lifeblood of so many Algonquin and Ojibwa. A series of interconnected lakes, gorges and rapids, the French runs all the way from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay. Coupled with the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers, the French was essentially part of the fur-trade equivalent of Highway 401, stretching from Montreal to Lake Superior.

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Getting there today, especially from Ottawa, is far less arduous, of course — especially in a 2022 Toyota Tacoma Trail. This mid-size truck, with its extra off-road chops, seemed perfectly fitted for our kayak trip because it was intended for we outdoors types in faux raccoon hats. Essentially a bare-bones Tacoma with skid plates, a slight lift and a locking rear-diff, the Trail is immediately identifiable by its heritage grille (from the TRD Pro) with with bronze-coloured lettering instead of white. It comes in two colours — army green and lunar rock — along with bronze TRD wheels.

Unfortunately, the Trail only comes with a short, 60-inch box composite box. That might be prime for offroading, but it was less than ideal for our 14’-10” kayaks that we were taking to the French. My hitch extender, however, managed the long protrusions out back with the ease in which it always seems to do.

Had we been towing a small boat, things might have been easier: a tow package comes standard on the Trail edition, with a maximum tow weight of 6,400 pounds. The package includes a Class IV receiver hitch, engine oil cooler, transmission fluid cooler (automatic transmission only), power steering cooler, 130-amp alternator, 4- and 7-pin connector with converter, and Trailer-Sway Control (TSC). Time to hit the trail.

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Ottawa to Renfrew rolls through gorgeous Ontario valley farmland. Near Mattawa, where the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers join, the landscape becomes an undulating array of majestic white pines, forest and field. Glimpses of the mighty Ottawa River along Highway 417 are a constant reminder that we’re witnessing more or less the same sights as Samuel de Champlain did in 1615. Mattawa, which gets its name from the Algonquin word for “meeting of the rivers,” still bears a wooden statue of Champlain, although in town, it’s Big Joe Mufferaw everyone wants to see.

Mufferaw, of course, was the French-Canadian logger and 6’-4” folk hero made famous by Stompin’ Tom Connors. Big Joseph Montferrand was the strongman hero to the working class when Mattawa was a hub for the logging industry in the early 1800s, when vast, untouched stands of white pine were being cut down, the logs transported down the two rivers. Montferrand is today immortalized by a wooden statue of the man, taller than the length of our kayaks, standing proud over the town. He definitely wouldn’t have driven a Tacoma — more likely a diesel dually of some sort.

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Instead of diesel, our Tacoma Trail uses a 3.5-litre gasoline-fuelled V6 producing 278 horsepower and 265 lb-ft of torque. Using Toyota’s VVT-iW technology and an efficient Atkinson combustion cycle, the engine needs to be worked hard to extract its power, and with just six gears to choose from, there’s considerable gaps in the power delivery. Sure there’s enough power, but its delivery leaves a lot to be desired.

Drivers really need to hammer the throttle to get all that this engine can deliver. When the torque does arrive, it hits like some rushing headwater instead of a smooth and seamless transition. D-4S fuel injection employs both direct injection and port injectors to help with fuel economy and carbon build up, and we were able to manage an 11 L/100 km average for the roughly 1,000-km trip, but with many full-size trucks also getting highway mileage close to 11 — including the 2022 Tundra — there’s clearly room for improvement.

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In fact, the Tacoma in general is starting to feel old. The tough little truck, born from the small Toyota pickup that was nearly indestructible, has yet to morph beyond its third generation. Introduced in 2015 as a 2016 model, the current third-gen model is still a tad noisy, still a bit odd to sit in, still using an actual key. The back window in the Trail has to be opened by hand.

As such, the Tacoma Trail is the last of a breed. An all-new Tacoma is expected to debut before the end of the year, likely to be much more electronically controlled, heralding the end of several generations of unbreakable.

The charm of the Trail, like other models of Tacoma, is less in its sophistication and more in its quiet strength. This is a truck known for its heroism to the hard-working and outdoors people who have made this truck a success, all despite so few updates over so many years. It truly is the Big Joe Mufferaw of trucks.