Next Hike

The next hike will be on Saturday, 29th June.

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

Last week we drove up to Bell Rd and along to the Hydro East Junction, then left on to the Russ Creek road and left again at the the old Masck Farm road.  We parked at the top of the hill and headed north along some fairly recently built logging roads eventually reaching the fairly large forest lake we have been calling "No Name Lake".  After lunch we checked out the smaller lake not far to the east and saw lots of evidence of beaver activity including a well used trail connecting the two lakes over a low ridge.   Returning to the first lake I spotted a single loon quietly fishing out in the deeper water and we are now going to call it Loon Lake. 

I think I mentioned that we had run into a lot of fallen trees on the recent Twin Peaks so I thought I would illustrate the email today with this shot of the devastated forest. I've never ever seen this much wind damage to a piece of forest on Texada — it made finding our way through very difficult as parts of the two hiking trails were covered by masses of debris.  Some very large old trees had been broken off or rooted up on the west sides of both of the peaks and in the dip between them a multitude of younger trees had been snapped off.  I wonder what the wind speed would be to do this much damage.  

JD.    

Wind storm damage to our trail in the dip between the peaks at Twin Peaks.