This is a good time to go moose-spotting.
Especially in the highways near Provincial Parks.
The critters are attracted to the leftover salt on the roads from the winter.
So, at least once a year, in April, I do a mini-road trip and bring my camera along, and try to find some moose.
It never fails.
I always find at least one.
Like I did today.
So I’m happy to report: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
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As a bonus, I try to include Junior Bear into a photo as well.
And that mission too, was accomplished.
I have a favorite country drive in the Madawaska Highlands that I like to do at least once a year, especially during the fall.
I’ve blogged about it before, and I always take lots of photos, many of which end up as watercolor paintings.
This year was a bit different.
Due to a ski injury, I was out for the rest of the season, which gave me the opportunity to see my favorite sights during the winter, for a change.
I find it kinda neat to compare the seasons….
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I’ve been all around this country but I’ve never spent much time in Manitoba.
I dont’ know if I’ve ever spent more than 36 consecutive hours in that province. I’ve always considered Manitoba as a place to drive through, to get to someplace else.
This summer, though, I finally had the chance to see some of it, when I was sent to Winnipeg for a few days.
(Hooray).
From the air, the area around Winnipeg is as flat as a table-top.
This was in late June, when the fields were still fresh and green. Within a month, they would be golden brown.
Winnipeg itself is just west of where the forests of Ontario end. West of the city, it’s all prairie. North and east of Winnipeg, the lakes and trees start again.
South of Winnipeg, is North Dakota (which is as exciting as it sounds).
From the hotel, the city itself is surprisingly green with lots of trees.
But I wasn’t very interested in seeing just buildings and streets. Junior Bear and I wanted to go see the back roads and the farms and prairie grass.
We didnt’ have to drive very far to find some empty roads.
Where I’m from in Ontario, it’s all forests and lakes, so I found it a novelty to see the flat landscapes and endless open sky.
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One thing to realize, though, is that while this part of the country is sparsely populated, this is NOT wilderness. Far from it.
Pretty much every square foot of land has been cultivated and plowed under to make room for wheat and canola oil.
This was a relatively recent phenomenon. The prairies only started to get settled in the 1870. Before this, this whole area was mostly virgn tall-grass prairie, which went on for hundreds of miles.
I would have loved to have seen that.
Only a few small patches remain today. Junior and I managed to find one. 
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More empty roads.
Again, there is no real wilderness in Southern Manitoba. Everything is a grid-square of farm roads, all mapped out, and all easily accessible by car.
The best you can find with the more “remote” roads, is when the pavement turns to gravel.
We found a grain elevator. Once the icons of the West, you’d find one in every town.
Today, grain elevators have mostly been phased out. But I managed to find one of the few remaining ones just north of the city.
They’re interesting buildings, because you can see them from far, far away. They’re often the highest object within 20 miles.
Unless you count highway off-ramps, which are the biggest “mountains” between here and the Rockies.
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I had to see the Red River Floodway. I flew over it many times, but I had to see it first hand.
This is a ditch that was constructed in the 60′s to divert the Red River around Winnipeg in case of flooding.
The Red River is unique because it starts in the south and flows toward the north. During the spring thaw, the snow-melt down south has nowhere to go, because the river up north is still frozen, creating ice-jams and hence the frequent flooding.
This happens so often, they built the flood way to prevent this. It was finished in 1968 and has been used 20 times and has saved Winnipeg billions in flood damage.
It’s quite an impressive engineering feat, especially when seen form the air. The ditch encircles the whole city.
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Here is the town of Landmark, which claims to be “The Centre of Canada”.
So of course, I had to take a picture of Junior Bear.
Hooray! We are about as far away from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as we can get.
And that’s one more interesting location to add to his resume.
Speaking of bodies of water, the amount of significant lakes or swimming holes around Winnipeg is pretty much zero (unless you want to swim with the catfish in the silty brown Red River).
But 90 km to the north, the trees and the lakes start again, and you have Lake Winnipeg and Grand Beach.
This is a damned huge lake (400 km long). Its on the same order of size as the Great Lakes, and Grand Beach is supposed to be one of the top-rated ones in the world.
Though I could tell by the huge parking lots and number of cottages here, that his place is an absolute ZOO in peak season. Highly-rated beach or not, this isn’t the type of place I would find relaxing.
But when I was there on a weeknight before peak season. So I Junior and I had the entire place pretty much to ourselves.
It was a kind of squally day. No rain, but it made for good photos.
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On the way home we managed to see a REAL bear.
Then, we left the trees and water and headed south back to the prairies.
It was the longest day of the year. At sunset (around 10:00 PM), I managed to capture the skyline of Winnipeg against the fields.
Nice visit, but I was glad to get Ontario.
I thought I was done with the fall colors. Half the leaves have fallen…the remaining hues are fading into a washed-out yellow or a dull, rusty brown.
But this weekend, I found there were still some pockets of color here and there.
After this post, though, I think I might be done the fall photos for the year.
These next four photos are from Letterkenny road, near Quadeville, Ontario. Rumor has it, Al Capone hid out here in the 1930′s. It’s still an out-of-the-way place, even today.
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How would you like to cycle up that hill? (I reluctantly admit, I know people who do).
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This whole ares is part of the Madawaska highlands. It’s mostly forested hills, with the occasioanal farm cut into a hilly ridge.
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I like this one with the cows, and the bright red maple sitting in the field all by itself.
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More cows.
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This area still had most of its leaves, and was very YELLOW.
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With this one, I deliberately cut off the top of the tree to hide the sky, to allow the bright red to contrast with the green:
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And here’s red against the azure blue sky. An artist would never paint such colors on their canvas. It clashes, to the point of almost being obnoxious. (….Almost!)
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This was from a Monday hike, on the forest floor:
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A few more around some farmland…
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Finally, here’s a comparison of how quickly things change. This first photo is from September 28th:
And here it the same scene later, on October 7th (a mere nine days later).
Hard to believe it can all be snow covered in 8 weeks.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been on the water this summer with my canoe, but it’s usually 2-3 times a week, on average.
Sometimes maybe four.
I almost always take my camera along, because you never know when it will be one of these evenings, when everything is just right, and you get that perfect shot.
Last week, I had one of those evenings.
Oh, and as an added bonus, I got a small pike.
Scrappy little guy, he was.
And it made the evening even MORE perfect.
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Flying in and out of Kaby Lodge, this is what most of Northern Ontario looks like from the air:
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Some days the weather was great:
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Some days it wasn’t:
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Lotsa beavers.
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Here’s a photo of an adolsecent bald eagle (though not with the best of lighting).
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Chipmunk falls. Not only a great place to stop for lunch, but also a good fishing spot.
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The lake is teeming with walleye. On a typical day, I’d catch 25 ? 30? 40? (I dunno….literally DOZENS…I’d lose count!).
Most were in the 17-18 inch range. But this was my biggest one, at 22 inches:
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Here’s a typical stringer for our shore lunch. We would eat shore lunch every day, and keep a few for the freezer for home.
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Here is a typical shore lunch. Which I love.
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Half the fun of staying at the lodge was playing with the two dogs, Jasper and Riser, who are obsessed with retrieving sticks, especially Jasper.
I like how Jasper is fixated on the stick.
This is considered perfectly normal behaviour for Duck Tollers.
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The younger pup (Riser) would keep stealing the stick from Jasper. He was being a little shit, and he knew it. Jasper would then yap incessantly at him to give it back. This game went on and on…those dogs crack me up.
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The lake has lots of pike too. People catch them well over 40 inches. I didn’t get any monsters like that this time. But I did get two respectable-sized ones, 29 inches and 30 inches.
Both fish were caught within 30 minutes of each other. It was one of my best afternoons.
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This pike wasn’t huge, but I’ve never seen one with teeth as large as this, for a fish that size.
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Not all of them were trophies, though. But still fun to catch.
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I had a lot of fun. So did the Bear.
We will both be coming back.
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You have 4 identical lures, but you spend 25$ buying two more, “just in case”.
You’ve tipped a canoe at least once. (Bonus points if it’s in ice water)
You’re destroyed your fair share of props.
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You’ve learned that “shore lunch” isn’t always as much fun as it sounds.
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You’ll gladly off-r0ad for miles into the bush, at the risk of wrecking your driveshaft, just to get to a remote lake that’s rumored to “maybe” have some trout in it.
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It could be either too early or too late in the season, but either way, you’ve fished in snow.
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By trial and painful error, you’ve learned which part of the walleye NOT to grab.
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You’ll burn 3500 calories in order to catch 500 calories worth of food.
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You refuse to use the politically-correct gender-neutral term “fisher”.
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What did you guys do after work today?
I went straight from the office and got into my car, and did a quick 5 hour road trip to see if I could find a moose on the side of the road.
And I did.
Three of them, in fact.
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Two of them were together.
In fact, I got a picture of both of them, with a BEAR.
Earlier this week, I did another quick trip out West on my air miles to ski at Revelstoke.
I was there for one day last year, and it blew my mind away. I knew I had to come back. So I did.
Last year, it was foggy and I didn’t get to see the Rocky Mountains very much.
This time, I had a blue-bird sky on the first day and finally got to see what the place looked like.
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Vertigo is one of my favorite runs. It’s a small bowl on the upper half of the mountain. It represents only a tiny fraction of the whole ski hill, but it’s still 2-3 times bigger than most ski resorts down East.
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The best part about skiing out West are the back-bowls. It’s just all open snow, and you can pick your own line down the hill, and gradually make your way down into the trees again.
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This, to me, is like dying and going to heaven.
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The other great thing about big mountains is that you can make it as hard as you want.
Down East, you’re limited to the most difficult double-black diamond run on the trail map.
Here, the most difficult run is limited to your own stupidity (i.e. how much you’re willing to put yourself at risk).
And if you wipe out, it’s not just a matter of falling and spraining your ankle.
There are cliffs, and risks of avalanches. If you take the wrong turn or do something stupid, you could DIE.
Here’s one of the steeper runs I took, and I was reasonably proud of myself for doing it.
But that was nothing compared to these guys…
Check it out: the two black dots on top of the peak are skiers, and the other black dot to their bottom left is another skier going down.
ne thing to this type of extreme skiing on video…it’s another to see it in real time, where ther’s a real risk of someone dying.
There were about 30 of us watching these lunatics. You’re kind of speechless, because you can’t believe at how stupid/brave they are. This is how skiers kill themselves.
You’d feel bad if they got hurt, but on the other hand, they’re skiing out of bounds and nobody’s putting a gun to their head making them do this.
If you look closely here, you can see the tracks where the first skier went down.
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You don’t know whether you want to congratulate him and buy him a beer, or smack him upside the head, and call him “shit-for-brains”.
I know if my Dad (Mr. Official Ski Instructor) were still alive, he’d do the latter.
Either way, that’s some damned impressive skiing.
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On the 2nd day, Friar’s Mom was on the road at 6:00 AM and drove 2 hours to meet me. We had a great ski day together.
On one run, Friar’s Mom wanted to “explore”. We ended up bushwhacking through a snow-board trail between the trees, dodging branches and trying not to get poked in the face.
I’ve bragged about this before, but I’m going to say it again: I don’t know too many 71-year-old Grandmas who can ski like this.
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While I was there, they also had rescue dogs,who were being trained to find avalanche victims.
The would get on the chairlift with their handlers and ski down the hill right beside them.
The dogs just LOVED this, as they’d run down the hill at full ballistic speed.
I mean.. look: how happy do you think this critter is?
On a scale of ten, I’d say ELEVEN.
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Now, of course, the weather was not always great. And it changed by the minute.
Day three started off like this:
The top (and best part) of the mountain was closed because of high wind, and things didnt’ look great. But within 30 minutes, it cleared up and everything opened up again.
I hiked the traverse on top to get to the back bowls, and suffice to say it was pretty windy.
I could barely see the skiers ahead of me, and their tracks were almost filled with fresh snow again by the time I caught up to where they were.
I felt somewhat safe, though, because there was a steady stream of skiers doing the same thing. I wouldn’t dare do this alone, under these conditions.
I like this photo of a random snow-boarder who was coming up behind me. I find the angle of the hill interesting.
Things calmed down considerably once I got to the other side. And I skied in half-tracked fluffy powder until the lifts closed.
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That was it. Three days of intense skiing. But I certainly got my money’s worth.
Junior Bear did too, as he made some friends in downtown Revelstoke.
