Camping - Day 3

Hi again! We are off on a hike today... This is a new area for me so... it is a bit of an adventure finding the start of the trail.

Luckily, I am a good navigator bear and co-pilot... so we found the start of the trail after only a few false starts...

Here we go! You can see from the dry grass how long it's been since we've had a good rain.

This old rotten stump had a couple of little bear holes in it... perfect for leaping up and going "boo" at unsuspecting German cousins who then shriek in terror at the wild Canadian bear!

The trail was pretty cool with different topographies... some creek bottoms with big old cedars...

And a dead garter snake as well!

Also some ponds...

With the cat tails coming along nicely. Did you know that you can eat many parts of the cat tail??

Ummm... in some places the trail was beary overgrown... This is an old beaver dam that was serving as a bridge across some of the ponds.

There were even salal berries! They tasted pretty good but make an even better jelly...

This was a slightly bigger lake where we decided to sit down and have a break.

It was a nice open arbutus forest slope with grasses...

The cousins enjoyed the walk a lot...

Valentin and I shared the Cool Ranch Doritos... yum!

Now is the season when the arbutus bark is peeling off... beary pretty.

Of course we had to stop and take a few grass pictures... We also saw a LOT of garter snakes, even baby ones... but they all slithered away too quickly to be photographed. Beary annoying... but...

I saw a mouse!! A real, live mouse and it was just hiding in the leaves and if we crouched really still, it would forage around a bit. I thought Beanie Mouse would like this!

He was pretty cute... but not highly photogenic either. Maybe that's why there aren't postcards of wild mice??