Celebrations

It was a festive and happy long weekend. Not only was it Thanksgiving, but it was also our first anniversary and TheManNorth’s birthday. On Sunday we went on a celebratory hike in the cold and wind (-16C with windchill) to explore the local cross country ski trails and discovered that we’ll have to work on mastering our control of downhill descent if we are to use the trails and get down some of the high steep slopes safely later this winter. We paused to watch redpolls flit through the trees and to examine lily pads frozen into the ice of a small lake.

After ariving home, we sipped hot tea and busied ourselves with food preparation. TheManNorth cooked up a delicious turkey dinner for our anniversary/Thanksgiving meal, which we ate with great gusto later that night and I assembled a three-layer black forest cake (which I suspect was equivalent in calories to the entire anniversary dinner) for his birthday the following day. We'll be munching on leftover stuffing and turkey for days to come and also enjoying the spicy cranberry sauce TheMan whipped up from scratch (although from dried cranberries and not the deliciously refreshing frozen wild ones I munched on during yesterday's hike).

As “was his want” on his birthday, we had cake and coffee for yesterday's breakfast and then went out exploring again, burning off the calories by following a 10km round trip route along the river bank and across country through the woods that TheManNorth will follow to work by ski or snowshoe as soon as there is enough snow cover.

We were lucky enough to spot a weasel as it ran among the alders and willows, stopping to peer at us from atop an old beaver dam, its white coat standing out against the exposed mud and shrubbery but providing good camouflage in the snow. The snow also provided a great record of some other local fauna. We were surprised to find that a grizzly bear had crossed our path in the forest not long before us, imprinting one paw's print over another. It's been well below freezing for some time now, and we speculated from its route, that it might be heading east, to den in the hills some 20km or so from town. Perhaps it was the same bear that had wandered the riverbank while the mud was still soft and before a recent snowfall.


Fox, raven, and ptarmigan prints were in abundance as were multiple tiny mouse crossings and occasional prints of solitary mice scampering through the snow.

We stopped to watch a rare length of open water at a creek draining from a local lake, the water trickling under ice overhanging tiny waterfalls to disappear under thicker ice covered in snow. We picked our way across the creek, along beaver dams and from tussock to tussock, using walking sticks we'd scavenged from driftwood along the river.

We're keen to try that route again and although snow mobiles and dog teams also frequent the riverbank (and river) in the winter, we hope that most of the route will remain as quiet and solitary as it was yesterday.