Can’t Bear Nature

This message is actually post dated. I’ve entered it as if it were written on 16th April as that was the day these events took place but it was actually written on 9th May because Sarah and I have had a really busy couple of weeks (more on that later).

I was able to get today off work, which was great as it meant we could celebrate Craig’s birthday and have a long weekend together. Craig and Wendy like the great outdoors, well Wendy does, Craig just likes curries. Ottawa has a national park called Gatineau right on our doorstep so we decided to set off in search of beavers and bears.

I didn’t really expect to see bears so close to a city and we joked about which of us would be the slowest runner should we come across a bear (that’s one way to make them angry). I changed my tune when we got to the welcome centre and was told that black bears had been seen by walkers yesterday in the area we were going to. Hmm. Armed with our camera tripod and a pamphlet on what to do if we saw a black bear we set off into the woods.

The reassuring sound of traffic was soon replaced by the scarily unfamiliar sounds of nature. The first creature we heard and eventually saw was a woodpecker. An interesting bird with a bright red head that was most importantly not a threat to us. A few minutes later I heard some rustling of leaves, which I assumed was Sarah walking behind me (they always pick a group off by going for the ones at the back first), but Sarah’s shout told me otherwise. Sarah had disturbed three snakes, each about a metre long with a couple of green stripes down their length. We didn’t have a pamphlet of how to do deal with metre long snakes so we got really close to them and took lots of photos (see album 9).

We were heading for an area in Gatineau called Pink Lake, just because it sounded pretty. A few minutes walk after we left the snakes blinded by camera flashes we found a lake. It was over grown with weeds and looked very untended and not at all pink. It wasn’t very large either but we set up the tripod and got the obligatory photos before deciding to walk around the lake. We were a quarter of the way around the lake when we noticed a parking lot through the trees. Heading over to the parking lot we saw that the reason it was there was so people could easily get to the large and very pretty tree lined lake just the other side of the car park.

It took us an hour or so to walk around the real Pink Lake and we saw a red squirrel, some mallards and a chipmunk, but no bears. Craig wanted to prove he is still crazy even though he’s old now and so walked out onto the frozen lake. Wendy joined him and Sarah has asked me not to mention the cracking sound when she also got onto the ice.

With the lake being frozen we couldn’t tell if it was pink or not, but we did find out that it is a rather special lake. The sides are so steep and protected and the lake is so deep that the water at the bottom of the lake has remained unchanged since prehistoric times. Also, because there is no mixing of the lakes waters, no oxygen gets below 300m depth so any creatures found at the lake bottom must breath another gas. They’d be like aliens! Sadly we didn’t get a photo of them, but we did get a photo of a deer at the edge of the national park next to the road and later this evening we saw a rabbit in downtown Ottawa and when we dropped Craig and Wendy off at the train station Sarah and I saw a groundhog burrowing into the ground on a traffic island. AND when we dropped Craig and Wendy off at the train station Sarah and I saw a groundhog burrowing into the ground on a traffic island…