A Day Of Hiking

Morning greeted me with sunshine through the tent walls and a promise of a nice day. 

Looking through the screening on my tent under the fly I noticed an unusual abundance of Crane flies. Normally we only see one or two a year, but I guess it was mating season because I had about 20 or 30 all over the outside of my tent the whole time I was there. Growing up, my siblings and I had come to call them "Mosquito Hawks"  because they looked like giant mosquitoes and we had visions of them swooping in and eating up all the little pesky mosquitoes. In reality, they do nothing of the sort.  Crane flies are  fairly poor fliers with a tendency to "wobble" in unpredictable patterns during flight, and they can be caught without much effort. Not only do they not eat mosquitoes but they do not bite humans either. Most feed on nectar or they do not eat anything at all. Since they were harmless things, and since I am known not to kill anything if possible (except earwigs, mosquitoes and other blood sucking bugs) I just let them hang out and enjoy the shelter my tent afforded them.  

Hiking was the main theme for the day. Just like at the Wye Marsh I planned to leisurely hike the one hiking trail that McRae Point Provincial Park has called "Water's Edge Trail". According to the map it actually splits up into two parts so I figured I would do one part today and if I had time before I went home the next day then maybe do the other part. 

After breakfast I packed up a lunch bag with some snacks and a drink and set off to see what I could see. The entrance of the trail starts down at the lake near the Pet Play Area and the mix of water sun and trees was beautiful right from the very beginning.

All over the place I saw signs of woodpeckers making their homes. I was hoping that I would see some.  I didn't have to go very far before I did see one.

Look there it is! Honest! I spent about 15 minutes trying to get a good picture of it without scaring it away. This was the best I could do. Yeah, I never said I was a great photographer. (And this photo certainly proves that). From the distance that I was at and from the best I could tell, it was a yellow bellied sap sucker. 

So imagine if you will, I had taken a picture more like this one and you will know what that little blur you see in the previous picture is supposed to look like. This one by the way was taken by a much better photographer named Cameron Rognan  and is found on the All About Birds site  (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/yellow-bellied_sapsucker/sounds) where you can also find recordings of their calls. The Beea Call that is posted there is the sound I heard most often and I thought it sounded something like a cat in a tree sometimes. There's lots of other info about these birds on that site too. If you are interested in birds, I suggest checking it out. 

This trail is filled with some interesting tree formations. As I got nearer to the Point I noticed a clump of trees growing naturally on an angle and a few other trees growing on a different angle. They way they were growing made them intertwine to form a natural lean-to. If I were playing Survivor I would have claimed this spot as my own because it would only take minimal effort to add some more branches and things to this to make a full fledged shelter, right near the water. The pictures don't really do it justice. (I did say I wasn't a great photographer, didn't I?) 

When you come to the Point, you emerge from the trees to see the beauty of Lake Simcoe unfold before you. The sun was sparkling on the water and the clouds were all wispy. 

The water was so clear but since it was September, it was a bit too cold to swim for my liking. Besides this spot had a little more sea weeds than I prefer. If I had wanted to swim, there were better places to do that along the trail. The sea weeds were kind of pretty dancing in the ebb and flow of the waves though. So I sat on some rocks and ate my snack and enjoyed the scenery for awhile. 

Eventually I continued on my way down the trail. This part of the trail had the water's edge on one side and the camp sites on the other. There were many tiny little off shoot trails leading up to various campsites and down to the water. Almost every path opened up into a little sunny area with a picnic table sitting either completely or partially in the water. 

I thought this was great! These are better than those benches you usually see along the side of a trail. I picked a particularly pretty spot with the tree branches drooping down over the table. The way it shaded the table from the sun reminded me of sitting under a weeping willow. 

Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought these tables in the water were a great idea. These rarely seen Table Ducks thought so too! 

Ok, so maybe the official name for them is not "Table Ducks". These are some female " Common Merganser". 

It was about this time that some other hikers came down the trail. A family with two little children. As children are prone to be, they were a little bit noisy and the ducks decided to high tail it for safer waters. 

I was nearing the end of the first part of the trail. I had noticed quite a few spider webs in amongst the trees. It was a good thing I was wearing a ball cap because these spiders seemed to like to make their webs go from one side of the trail to the other so that if you aren't paying attention you run the risk of running into it face first. A shorter person (say 5 feet or under) could walk right under them and not even notice. But I am fairly tall so I had to duck to avoid them. Then I came up with the idea of carrying a stick to just hold in front of me while I walk to prevent this problem. Now I know why you see people carrying walking sticks on hikes. 

I had been walking almost 3 hours by this point and I was pretty tired. I am sure you could do the first half of the trail in about 15 to 20 minutes if you just wanted to rush through it. I just took 3 hours because I was stopping to see and enjoy every little thing. I decided not to do the other half of the trail. Perhaps I could squeeze it in tomorrow. Instead I decided to head back. There was just one more place I wanted to see before I headed back though. I ducked up one of the side trails into the closed off section of the campground where all the non-electrical sites are, just to see what they were like. 

They were just as big and spacious and nice as the ones in the electrical sites. I would say that if I were to go back during mid-summer one year, I would choose either site # 183, 185 or 187. The others were nice too, but those three were particularly nice. 

With that accomplished, I headed back to camp and spent the rest of the afternoon working on the book I am writing and doing crafts. It was my best day at camp yet. 


The evening would prove to be much more nerve racking than this afternoon had been.........