Northern Saskatchewan 2011 - Awesome Sights

Of course the most awesome sights are the ones where I don't have a picture.  You'll have to take my word.

A possible once-in-a-lifetime sighting was a woodland caribou, an endangered animal.  I went to one campsite's lake shore quite early one morning, not quite awake yet, walking along the shoreline.  Coming towards me about 200 metres away was this majestic animal.  We each detected the other simultaneously.  I'm standing still, open-mouthed in awe.  He turns, prances at a trot, back perfectly horizontal to the ground, head thrown back holding very very long polished antlers.  After about 50 metres, he turned and went into some muskeg and I lost sight.  I was totally amazed.  Awesome sight.

One day I am having a lunch fire by a narrow, long lake.  I'm sitting against a spruce tree, drinking my green tea.  A few minutes earlier, I had broken a length of dry wood against a boulder to add to my fire as I was sweaty and cold now after a long walk on this cool autumn day.  All of a sudden I hear the low bellowing of a rutting bull moose.  A few minutes later he is on one side of the lake about 100 metres away, big antlers.  He sees my fire, but can't really see me well as I am sitting and still.  I have a favourable wind so he cannot smell me.  He probably came to investigate the noise as a possible competitor.  I am updating my journal while I eat lunch, and I record that I bet he is going to turn and go around the lake to come up behind me to see what the heck is going on.  There are red squirrels chattering, a Canada jay calling.  I hear a spruce grouse fly, and then a large crack as a branch is broken.  Too large a crack for a small animal I think.  I pick up my gun, slowly arise and step around the few trees behind me.  Ten metres away is the moose, looking a lot bigger this close.  He still couldn't smell me and had been trying to figure out what was on my side of the trees.  I spoke, saying "Hi guy, what you doin?".  He didn't answer, but turned and walked a few steps, stopped for one last look and took off at a run.  I had not heard a sound from him as he went around the lake, until that "crack".  The grouse probably flew because the moose and he crossed paths.  Awesome experience.  I was impressed that I had guessed the moose would come around the lake to investigate.  (I have been charged by a bull moose before.  And threatened by a cow moose that I stumbled on just after giving birth to a calf.  But it's all good!)

This may have been the same moose that came up to check my camp out another day.  Again I had heard a suspicious "crack" outside my tent.  I stepped outside to investigate, and a bull moose was behind my tent about five metres away.  He turned and ran and I didn't get a really good look.

I saw some wonderful sunsets, rosy red sky with all kinds of pictures painted in the clouds.

At night when the sky is clear, you see it chock full of stars, unlike anything you will view when in a city.  (You also see moving satellites and jets, reminding that you can't really get totally "away from it all".)

This is NOT an awesome sight.  After six months I desperately need a haircut.

Northern Saskatchewan 2011 - Cold Spring

Ice on the lakes until June this year.

I think I can canoe now as the lake seems to be mostly free of ice.

However, I get to the lake's outlet and am stopped by a very large mass of ice.  So I have to set up camp after a very short trip to wait several more days until the ice melts.

The advantage of the later spring is that I can have a lunch fire anywhere in the bush.  There is lots of snow to melt for tea, and to extinguish the fire.  Life is good!

Northern Saskatchewan 2011 - Fresh Food

Alder catkins, early spring. A good salad ingredient.

My "refrigerator" keeps fresh food.  Later in the year a carefully selected spot dug into a mossy area and covered with a very thick layer of moss will maintain temperature at about 4C.

A snowshoe hare roasting over hot coals.

Lake trout, early June when lake waters are still cold enough for these fish to be caught in shallow water.

Morel mushrooms grow profusely in recently burned jack pine or mixed forest areas.

Labrador tea.  The flowers make excellent salad ingredients.  The leaves can be used for tea.

Spruce buds are good salad ingredients.

Birch and alder leaves make good salads.  The latter is my mainstay, available and tasty right up to the period of autumn frosts.  The best are those new shrubs growing after they have been cut or burned the previous year.  Both contain salicin, related to acetylsalicylic acid (ASA, Aspirin), so to be avoided if allergic.

A mixed salad incorporating the above ingredients, seasoned with sugar water, lemon pepper spice and parmesan cheese.  And a frypan of morel mushrooms.

 Lingonberries (bog cranberries), tart but very tasty.

Pincherries.  I eat the entire fruit, including the centre pit;  not too much of the latter as it contains cyanide.

Saskatoon berries, one of the best fruits if you are lucky enough to find them.

Harvested pine mushrooms, showing the various stages of growth from the smaller button stage to the large open stage, which can be as large as a dinner plate in diameter.  My favourite mushroom, growing in the sandy soils shared by jack pines and reindeer lichen.

Birch bracket (birch polypore) mushrooms, the new growth being the ones you harvest.

A meal of fried pike fish fillets (coated with cornmeal and Montreal steak spice), fried pine mushrooms (seasoned with lemon pepper spice), and my favourite colourful salad of fireweed stems, leaves and flowers.  Pike is my mainstay fish ... because it is the easiest to catch.

Northern Saskatchewan 2011 - Companions

A junco that shared meals with me.  She would march right up to me if I was not forthcoming fast enough with bannock crumbs, as if to say "Where's MY food?".

A young snowshoe hare.  He's trembling, scared of this large blundering so-and-so that surprised him in his hiding place.  One of the adults was a voyeur, often watching me when I had a shower.

This mother spruce grouse was acting injured to lure me away from her young.  Her family were little balls of feathers running in all directions when I stumbled into their midst.  The mother flew directly at me, hitting me in the chest in a very pointed statement to leave them alone.  This is the third time ever that I have been "attacked" and hit by a mother grouse.

I had two families of grouse that often visited me when they were on their feeding rounds.  One family of five and one of seven.  The mothers would be constantly talking in a low cooing voice to let the children know where she was.  If I remained still they would come quite close.