Next Hike

The next hike will be on Saturday, 27th January.

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

For the second hike in a row we found ourselves eating lunch on a mountain top quite surrounded with a clammy fog.  The week before last we did get a brief glimpse of a nearby peak, but the fog soon closed in again and we just had our memories of how the view looked the previous summer.  Last week the conditions were far worse with a strong cold wind swirling the fog around through the trees, but never a chance of it clearing enough to give us even the chance of any view at all.  The best we could do was hunker down on the lee side of a small cliff and just put up with the large water drops falling on us from the tree branches above! Judging by the weather forecast for the coming weekend we will need to be well prepared for another  cool damp hike again this Saturday.  

JD.

 

Lunch in the forest on top of Black Mountain on a cold, wet and windy day in January.

The Next Hike

The next hike will be on Saturday, 13th January.

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

Earlier this week my ophthalmologist gave me permission to return to my normal activities and I'm looking forward to getting back to hiking again on Saturday. I took this photo of one of our common woodpeckers a couple of days ago.  There are actually two species that look to be almost identical, but one is quite a bit smaller than the other.  This is a female Hairy Woodpecker and is larger and has a longer beak than it's cousin the Downy Woodpecker. Both species tend to be quite quiet little birds and when searching for insects on tree bark they tap quite gently compared with the much more noisy larger species.  

JD.

 

A Hairy Woodpecker near Sandbanks, much too busy finding food in the tree bark to notice me watching it.

The next hike will again be from Van Anda.

The next hike will be on Saturday, 6th January, 2018.

The meeting place is the Canadian Legion Parking and the time 10:00am.

The hike last week was a snowy one, but the weather was clear and cold as you can see from the photo below.  I'm still not able to participate, but I'm told there were four hikers who were brave enough to trek like "Good King Wenceslas when the snow lay round about deep and crisp and even". 

Thanks Mich for sharing this perfect photo you took on last week's hike - it captures the feel of the cold, clear calm day so well.

JD.

A snow covered tree-top on the last hike of 2017.