Kaladar Jack Pine Barrens: Day 1

At 3 AM, the Greyhound bus rumbled away down the highway, leaving the small crossroad known as Kaladar empty and quiet.  I shouldered my pack with a grunt and began the hike west along Highway 7.  I walked on the pavement, only occasionally moving to the curb to allow sporadic trucks to pass.  For a minute or two after each truck, the darkness and the quiet seemed more complete.

Of course, darkness and quiet are relative.  Compared to my home in central Ottawa, the night seemed still.  But the Big Dipper pointed over my right shoulder to the North Star.  Spring peepers and gray treefrogs called from the wetlands.  A barred owl called from deep in the forest, and a moment later, a great horned owl hooted even deeper in the woods.  As I approached the rock barrens just west of town, I began to hear the calls of nighthawks and whip-poor-wills.  The moon had fallen, but starlight traced the pale path of the highway.

I recorded the call of a whip-poor-will in the darkness.

My pack weighed heavy after the long night.  Sixty-five pounds of equipment:  enough to support me for six days and five nights.  Except for short stints along canoe portages, I hadn't carried a heavy pack in years.  It took fifteen minutes of walking before my legs and pace steadied.  My shoulders ached.  I took a fifteen minute break every forty-five minutes.  Three hours of hiking left me feeling my fifty-two years.

I chose such an early start in order to reach the Kaladar Jack Pine Barren Conservation Reserve at dawn.  The later bus would not have brought me to town until late afternoon, leaving me with an evening hike and a night-time search for a camping site.  Instead, I found myself in the early morning light at the site of an old hunt camp -- only the outhouse still standing -- about 100 meters off the highway, well hidden from the road.  Songbirds called brightly from the trees, and geese honked in a nearby wetland.  A track led back into the forest toward the heart of the rock barrens.  I pitched my tent and set up a cooking area under a protective tarp.  I made a hot breakfast and coffee.

After a nap, I began my explorations of the rock barrens.  I looked first for a good place to fetch water.  I found it about a five minute walk along the ATV trail into the back country.  Just below a beaver dam, where a creek ran swiftly through a narrow gully, the ATV trail crossed a small bridge.  Beside the bridge, a large boulder sat beside clear, flowing water.  I pulled out my water filter and tablets, filling my three water bottles -- a process that I repeated twice daily for the next six days.  A rock outcrop overlooked the stream.  I circled around to the top, almost stepping on a green snake in the thick moss along my approach.  It slithered into a jumble of stones before I could grab my camera.  I left it alone.  I sat on the rock in the sunlight, enjoying the thin warmth, scanning the rocky slope for skinks.  Later, I followed the ATV trail deeper into the woods, leaving off only when my map and GPS suggested that trail had crossed on to private property.

I returned to camp about 5 PM, ate a quick supper, and decided to explore the long escarpment immediately south of and parallel to Highway 7.  I'd speculated about the ridge many times during the two years that I'd commuted weekly between Ottawa and Peterborough.  It appeared much as I'd imagined it:  a long, rippling feature, backed by a rocky plateau of oak woodland, scattered outcrops, beaver ponds and small alder swamps.  Wildflowers bloomed everywhere:  choke cherry, pin cherry, pale corydalis, wild columbine, trilliums in abundance.  I flipped rocks in search of skinks, looked for birds, and listened to the frogs begin to call.  As the sun began to sink, I turned back to camp, scrambling along the very edge of the ridge, with the highway below me.  A rustle in the brush caught my attention.  A grizzled old porcupine emerged briefly on to the ridge, turned his gaze scornfully upon me, and then sidled bank into the bushes.

I arrived back at camp just in time to tidy up, brush my teeth, and hang my food from a tree before retiring to my tent in the dusk.  As night fell, the night birds and amphibians began their songs.  I fell asleep quickly in complete exhaustion, with the calls of nighthawks and whip-poor-wills all about me.

Fun with beavers

Thomas, Sue, Ben and I walked to Pure Gelato on Elgin Street this evening.  On the way home, we angled straight for the canal, walking north toward the footbridge.  The golden light tangled in the newly-emerged leaves of the maples beside the bike path, flaring them into luminescence.  They are still almost translucent, delicately formed, with that pale, innocent green of youth.  Some still hold a touch of red from the bud.  If fairies danced in the woods, they would give the same light.

I rose early this morning -- early for a Sunday -- and drove to the center of Stittsville to admire the small marsh maturing along Poole Creek upstream of our beaver deceiver.  I eased along the banks, stopping to scan ahead with my binoculars and to admire the songbirds flitting between the wetland and the rear-yard feeders beside the trail.  Blackbirds called continuously.  Pairs of geese and mallards complained of my intrusion.  I saw a chain of ripples spring suddenly in the slow, smooth run of the creek, settle, and then appear again another ten feet downstream.  Watching more closely, I noticed a hatch of insects emerging from the water.  A small school of fish swam slowly below them, sipping larvae from the surface, invisible but for the concentric circles left on the water.  I wished that I had brought my fly rod.  That wish grew when I reached the tail of the riffle at the head of the run, to see a small trout hanging in the eddy of a rock, easing out every few seconds to snatch some morsel in the current.  I marked his place for another day.

After an hour cataloging the wildlife at the marsh, I took a few minutes to clear the outlet of the beaver deceiver, then headed to the Trans-Canada Trail site.  The sweetness of the morning air had given way to the midday heat.  As I walked the hundred meters down the trail, encumbered by hipwaders, binoculars, camera, rake and spade, I began to perspire.  The first of the summer flies began to buzz around the brim of my hat, seeming to seek the moist corners of my eyes.  A blackfly landed in the hair on my forearm, but didn't bite.  In another week or two, I won't venture out without DEET.

I watched the pond beside the trail for the first half hour, quietly sitting on the edge of the culvert.  Several painted turtles basked warily across the water.  A woodcock called periodically from deep in the cattails.  It flew up once, circled and then dropped again into the reeds.  A pair of ravens flew past pursued by crows.  Minnows rippled the pond surface.

Finally I got to work, reinforcing a hasty patch job on a hole under the beaver fence, where one of the animals had forced its way inside.  I bridged the gap in the dam along the fence with a framework of old sticks, threw in some boulders and mud, and stomped it down until certain that no beaver could easily breach it.  I cleaned out the mouth of the culvert.  Then I moved to the two small dams just below the culvert, breaching each of them with a narrow V notch.  The water began to chortle through.  Returning to the beaver fence, I confirmed that the renewed flow of water through my partial dam had started to sound.  If everything goes as planned, then Mr. Beaver should even now be packing mud around my framework to complete the new diversion dam.

I stopped last at my site on Goulbourn Forced Road.  Despite the presence of two active beaver lodges back in the marsh, no beaver has yet tried to rebuild a dam at the culvert site.  But I went in the water anyway with my rake to clear some debris from inside my fence.  Much to my chagrin and amusement, I found myself sharing the water with a large, very nervous snapping turtle.  She seemed to have forced a passage under the fence on one side; but having found her way in, could not now find her way out.

Not surprisingly, snapping turtles don't herd very well.  Particularly, when the mud and muck is stirred, and one can't see the turtle below the water.  It took ten minutes of careful prodding, nudging, and outright shoving with the rake to get the old girl over to the hole.  Several times she slipped past me, tried more than once to take a bite out of my waders, and once managed to get a death hold on the head of my rake.

I considered simply reaching down to grab her and lift her over the fence.  However, she weighed at least twenty pounds -- twenty angry pounds -- and my footing was not good.  I had a vision of myself on my back in the muck, water pouring into my waders, with an irate snapping turtle on my chest twisting off my nose.

Finally, I cornered the turtle by the hole, which lay about a foot underwater.  With a final, firm push down on her shell, I got her into the hole, where she quickly escaped, emerging safely in the pond weed on the other side.  I closed the hold with boulders and exited the pond, dirty but content.