Next Hike

The next hike will be on Saturday, 22nd January.

We meet at the Ballpark in Gillies Bay at 10:00am.

For the hike last Saturday the weather was mostly dry, but cloudy and cool and there was still quite a lot of snow and ice about on the higher ground. We ended up hiking down Hydro East road which had been very well ploughed and totally free of ice and snow so very pleasant and safe for walking. The downside of the snow on the side roads was that we had no choice but to hike downhill before lunch, then uphill after and the uphill was quite a climb — over 1,000 ft in fact.

My photo this week was taken on the last midweek hike and captured some cormorants on the rocks at Marshall Point. One is drying it's feathers by spreading it's wings. Cormorants don't have so much of the natural oil that most waterbirds have so their feathers don't shed water so well. The trail we have used for many years was badly affected in some places by recent logging and has had to be rerouted to avoid the slash covered area. It's now in excellent shape for hiking again and some new sections are more interesting than the old ones were!

JD.

Double-crested Cormorants at Marshall Point.