Outings with the Rod

   Scouring the overview maps of our planting job around Houston, the Whitesail, and the North of Babine Lake I find endless opportunites to throw the fly around in lakes to my choosing. I calculate the distances of bushwhacks that I hope to thrash around in. I look for where the little streams flow into the little lakes, assuming that the little rainbows will be hanging out there. The maps reek of adventure and I'm itching to get them underway.
  I remember the first lake that I went to this season. Just a little lake right off the Chisholm FSR. The lake had no name, I looked in many sources for the name, and no known trail to get to it. Seeing the lake from the road I pulled over and headed in a straight line to the lake.

Julie looking for the fish. An unnamed lake off the Chisholm Rd. Shot on the Nikon F100, Fujifilm 400iso

   I was much under prepared for this lake. I was wearing rubber caulk boots thinking that at least I'd be able to stand in the water up to my ankles without getting wet feet. Little did I know that the lake didn't really have a solid bank to stand upon and just trying to get the waterline involved hoping from grass clump to grass clump. Every step felt as if I'd break through the thick grass and plummet into the depths. Of course water surged up and over the boots and preceded to soak my feet. Ahh, so sad.

Julie not finding a dry spot to stand, she settles for a somewhat solid submerged island of grass. Nikon F100, Fujifilm 400iso 

   Bird Observations:

   1. American Three Toed Woodpecker

 Observed in Smithers BC at the Bluff mountain biking recreation area. 

Some ice pellets shrouding the forest across the valley. 

Bird Observations:

   1. Common Redpoll

   Observed at Call Lake Provincial Park just outside of Smithers, BC going east. They were flying in a group of about 30 birds or more.
   There is another bird who is extremely similar to the Common Redpoll, call the Hoary Redpoll. However, according to the Peterson's Guidebook the Hoary Redpoll has little to zero marking on the tail feather.

Morice Lake, BC Film 400iso

   "I want everything," she replied with a faint , wry smile. 

   "You know, I said that once, to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it."

- Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

   Sometimes when I am far away, on some distant lake like this one, I like to build some kind of reminder that humans have been there. I then look at it and the loneliness is subdued. And maybe, one day another fellow traveler will see this little reminder, and remember that he is not alone. 

Randy chalking up on Hot Rocks, 5.11c in Joshua Tree

Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.

That emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate,

in resonance with your world. Use it for once.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Bird observations:

   1. Pine Siskin

Male

   I found this guy just when I put the camera away in the backpack to start the trek up the bike path. Cursing my decision I slowly rifled the camera out. Quickly zooming and metering I managed to get some shots of this bird unbeknownst to me at the time. After the I checked the playback on the camera screen, a happy with the results, I noticed that he wasn't in much of a rush.

Female

   She came along once the male realized I wasn't a threat. They both just flew around doing their birdsongs.

   2. Chestnut-Backed Chickadee

   3. Mountain Chickadee

Julie the Navigator, Navigating Morice Lake, British Columbia

   "I'd made rules for nasty stretches of water where there were no easy landings, based on years of paddling. rough seas, and I followed them now. Think: What was the weather like yesterday?... Go early before the wind picks up... Paddle out for an hour, and if it looks bad, go back. Keep in mind the tide direction."

Audrey Sutherland, Paddling North

   No rough seas on Morice Lake that day. The wind and rain already fell. Now only the clouds hung low. Paddling the last stretch of water to the Subaru. 

The water from Simpsons Creek, Hudson Bay Mountain, Smithers

   "Everything is one. If anythings happen to the river, it affects humans, animals, and the sea. If one thing changes, everything else does to."

- Frank Schatzing, The Swarm

   

   Trees towering tall over Simpsons Creek. There is no trail going up this creek. This is a full scale bush whack, especially the lower flat section. Once the trees get big walking through the forest is an ease. 

Hudson Bay Mountain, Smithers, BC

   "A few hours mountain climbing turns a rouge and a saint into roughly equal creatures. Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity- and liberty is finally added through sleep.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

   The film does an excellent job catching the light high up on Hudson Bay Mountain. The red glow is slowly changing the cold blue mountain into a place more hospital. Julie and I wait patiently for these warm rays.  

   "It is fashionable to call any occupation that does not contribute in some dull way to the world's material wealth an "escape". It is a ridiculous fashion, as little connected with reality as acute insanity. Many people spend their lives in work that is materially quite unproductive, yet has a closer touch with reality than any simple, straightforward job where sweat yield. I remember a sympathetic left wing friend once wondering what would become of me in his revolution. "A writer", he said musingly. "Well, I supposed a writer is a producer in some sort of way. Or is he?".
   "Feeling the liquidation squad close behind me, I said boldly, "Producer, hell. A writer's a natural resource." He puzzled over that one for a long time and never did come up with an answer.
   This has slipped a long way from the point. What I started out to say was that it is fashionable to consider most forms of recreation "escape". Perhaps some of them are. Habitual and heavy drinking may be, several forms of gambling seem to be, intense preoccupation as a spectator with spectator sports may be, just as a regular attendance at shallow movies undoubtably is. But I think the list had better close just about there, and close with the admission that the "escape" generality can have plenty of exceptions. Strange as it may seem, lots of people do things because they just like to do them; they get a kick out of doing them, and don't give a damn whether the thing they are doing is productive or unproductive, whether it provides an escape from reality or a highway to reality.
   Reality for any properly constituted man in a properly constituted society can never consist solely in materially productive work. A balanced and rounded man who is really living a life instead of enduring it will have many interests beside his work, and they will all be part of his reality. Sports like hunting and fishing, actively and positively followed, are an important and integral part of living for many men. They are not escape from problems or work or reality, but are complementary to the more ordinary, and often less exacting, routines of living, giving substance and meaning and rounded form to a life that would otherwise be a monotonous passage through some seventy years of the world's history."

- Roderick L. Haig-Brown, A Fisherman's Spring

   The picture above is the scenery looking off the Red Rocks cliffs near Round Lake of the Renfrew County. I am not aware if the small lake at the foreground of the picture has a name. However, from this vantage usually one would have a sweeping view of the actual Round Lake, not the town, the actual lake, but with the low visablity brought by a storm not much can be seen. The lake to the left corner is a part of Little Pike Lake.

From yellow pin, the photo looks West. Note little unnamed lake and Little Pike Lake

   "I think of the bear hunkered down on the windswept tundra, the ptarmigan huddled in the lee of a leafless bush, the caribou whose sun-warmed slope has turned into a snow-caked maelstrom, and  I am embarrassed by my own desires: four solid walls and a good night's sleep."

Karsten Heuer, Being Caribou

   The towering jack pines stand far apart during a winter storm. This area has been cut before by loggers, however, unlike a clear cut where all valuable timber is cut, these tree were left. Of course this not a forest untouched, but at least this land is not spoiled. 

   This forest is along highway 58, the highway to Round Lake of the Renfrew County, behind the Jack Lakes.  

There's a lightness in things. Only we people move forever burdened,

pressing ourselves onto everything, obsessed by weight.

How strange and devouring our ways must seem

to those for whom life is enough. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Songs of Orpheus

   I don't think I have taken a better photo. There are no abruptions nor intrusions, only subtleties. Trees blend into the fog, water blends into trees. 

   This shot is of Julie exploring the shore of a little bay on Morice Lake. A place where big fresh water is free from all human stress and only held together by the shear mountains that form the sides. Fed by countless streams and creeks, the major waterways flowing in are the Nakina River that comes from the headwaters of the coast mountains and  the Atna River, which is all glacier fed. Its a wild place.