Art in the Park and Counting The Dots

    The morning was beautiful and quiet. We couldn't hear any of the sounds you usually hear in a campground setting. There were no kids yelling, no loud talking or sounds of nearby campers moving about. There wasn't even the sounds of the noisy flocks of crows and other birds that you hear in a campground. It was so quiet that it almost seemed as though we were already on the trail.  It is so peaceful here. 
   We ate breakfast and got ready to go to the art exhibition. We decided we would come back to the campsite to get our backpacks later. We made a quick stop to the bathroom before we went. Outside the bathroom was a little girl and her parents and they were looking up at the green roof of the bathroom. Tucked in under a ledge was a little nest with two baby birds quietly waiting for their mom and dad to come back and feed them. They were so quiet that if the little girl hadn't been pointing them out to her parents, I never would have known they were there.

By 10:30 a.m. we were off to the art exhibition and sale. The show was much bigger than I had expected. Apparently they host this show annually and if you happen to be around one year while it is on I highly recommend that you stop in to take a look. And bring some money because I am sure there are things you will want to buy. I certainly wished I had more money on me at the time, that's for sure! 

This section of the park was filled with rows and rows of tents filled with fantastic works of art. 

One of my favourite booths was that of ​Ted & Sheri Oosterlaken who made gorgeous concrete furniture. I bought a couple of cement coasters from them. One day I hope to buy a bigger commissioned piece from them. I will leave their website address right here so that I ( or you) can find them again.  :)
http://www.tuscanyconcrete.com/index.html

Heather and I instantly fell in love with an oil painting of some storm clouds over the mountains done by Rick Phieffer. Heather is going to save up so that she can buy it from him. 

I spoke for awhile to David Dossett who paints on the screen of screen doors. He has a little shop in the town of Kingston which is hidden down a little alley.

Heather bought a couple of prints of a moose from the artist Gerry Wright. (Sorry my photo is pretty blurry and does not represent his work very well at all... but you get the idea. For better pictures of his work, click on the link below)
https://galleryraymond.com/artists/gerry-wright/

Every one of the artists here were very talented. If you are interested in art, then here is a list of the artists that attended the exhibition and their websites. 
https://www.bonechofriends.ca/art-exhibition-and-sale-2018
​​
Since we were in the middle of the park, there were no ATMs or debit machines. So to purchase something with a card, the artist would write down on a slip of paper, the piece of artwork that you wanted and the price. Then you take the paper down to the park's gift shop (which is a cute little cabin in the woods) and pay for it there. Once you have paid for it, you take the receipt back to the artist and then you can get your art. We did this for Heather's moose prints.  

On the wall inside the gift shop was a wall decoration of "Mazzie" the local lake monster. I didn't even know they had a lake monster until I saw this. 

More art was for sale inside the gift shop. I don't think any of it was from the same artists in the exhibition.

This print caught our attention. There are a number of hidden animals in it that you have to find, Where's Waldo style.  This piece is called "Spirit Path" and is done by Blake Richardson.  You can find more of his Earthprints as well as his Earthen Sculptures on his EarthArt website:
https://blakerichardson.com

I bought a new compass and a nifty grey and blue Bon Echo T-shirt. The prices of the T-shirts were pretty reasonable here. Heather was going to buy a hat for the trip because she forgot hers at home, but the ones she was looking at either only came in children's sizes, she didn't like the looks of them or they were a bit too pricey. So she didn't buy one. 

The gift shop is also where you can buy tickets for the boat that takes you to see the pictographs on the cliffs and to the cliff top trail on the other side of the lake. But we didn't have time for the boat. that will have to be another day.

Directly across from the gift shop is the Visitor's Center. There used to be an Inn in the park before it burnt down decades ago. The Visitor center is a cabin from the original inn. 

They had a diorama of the original inn inside. It looked like it was a pretty grandiose building at one time. 

There was a young lady on staff there who told us a bit about the place. She said that somewhere in the cabin the previous owner had carved "Dollywood" into the boards somewhere. She was going to show us but she got side tracked by other people before she had a chance. But, not before she gave us a map for our backpacking trail. Up until this point we were having difficulties finding a map. All the brochures and such had information on the trails but no map. We were thrilled to get a map and were even happier to find that it was made of water resistant paper. But even this map did not have the distances from site to site in it. We know that the whole trail is about 19 km, but we didn't know the breakdown of those distances. 

After picking up Heather's moose prints from Gary Wright, we went back to our campsite and packed up. We had to be off the site by 2 p.m. and we made it by a hair. We were off the site at 1:50 pm and headed to the park office to register for the Abes and Essens hiking trail. 

The guy at the office asked us the usual questions "What colour is your tent? What is your license plate number?" etc.  Then when he had us all registered he gave us two permits; one for the car and "one for the post on your site"......We said thanks and then left. On our way out the door, Heather and I said to each other "There are posts at each back country campsite? That's different."  There actually isn't any posts in the back country campsites. I think the guy just has a little blurb rehearsed and he says it so often that he didn't click in that we wouldn't have a post to put it on. 
      
We had to drive back a fair distance the way we had come to get got to the parking lot at the trail head. We finally got there at about 2:25 pm. Since the first site that we had reserved is closest to the end of the trail instead of the beginning, we were going to be doing the trail backwards. This meant that we had to walk a little ways up the road with our backpacks on before we even got to the trail. But it also meant that when we came out of the bush on the last day, we would come out just across the road from our car. 

We stopped to check out the trail head sign and map and then we began our hike. The Abes and Essens Trail  has 3 loops. The shortest loop is Clutes Lake loop, followed by the Essens loop and then the Abes loop.  So the first part of our journey is hiking the Clutes trail. We were happy to finally begin.

The trail itself was extremely well kept,  wide, and easy to maneuver.  In my opinion, this is a perfect trail for beginner backpackers. It's not very strenuous with the exception of a few uphill climbs from time to time. 

We were only in the bush for a minute or so when we were swarmed by mosquitoes. And I mean swarmed. I counted about 15  on Heather as she walked and a whole bunch more flying around her. It was bad enough that we actually had to stop and put on long sleeves and spray some bug spray (and I rarely use bug spray). 
I was already thinking that if the bugs were going to be this bad then I was probably going to be miserable for the whole trip. What had I gotten myself into? We realized that the reason for so many mosquitoes was because we were passing right by a marshy area on our left. 

Fortunately, the further into the woods we went and the further away from the marshy area, the fewer the mosquitoes. After about 5 to 10 minutes there were no mosquitoes at all. And the wind picked up a bit so that also helped. 

One of the things I like best about this trail is that, for about 3 quarters of it, you have some sort of view of a lake as you are walking. 

Where the Clutes meets up with the Essens trail there is a cute little boardwalk bridge. It is the perfect place for a picnic lunch because there are plenty of open spaces to put a picnic blanket down or sit on some rocks and it is very scenic. 

There is a little pond on one side with a whole lot of water lillies.

As well as a bunch of white Buttonbush flowers. ​Buttonbush is a swamp/marsh shrub. It likes to grow where there is water all or most of the year. Most people don't get to see this shrub because of this.

The area near the bridge was so nice that a little garter snake was enjoying it too. 

After a short break we started down the second loop of the trail; the Essens Lake loop.

When you weren't looking at a lake, you were often times looking at a marsh of some sort. 

It wasn't too long before we got to site # 526. 

It is a beautiful site. But as nice as it was, it wasn't our site. Ours was number 527. According to the map it wasn't too much farther ahead, but we stopped here momentarily anyways so that Heather could use the bathroom. It was not very easy to find on this site. Despite this, I think that this site was one of the nicest ones on the trail. If I were to reserve again in the future, I would try to get this site.

Someone left a frying pan behind at site 526. I can only imagine that either they forgot it or that it was too heavy to carry. A frying pan on a backpacking trip is not something that seasoned backpackers usually bring. Could be a day tripper who left it behind though. 

And someone also left a green, plastic, water bottle behind, hanging above the fire pit, instead of taking their garbage out with them.

Our site was just over the ridge. The signs for the sites here are bright orange easy to see. There is no confusing which site is which, like the problem we had at Pukaskwa.

​​And the campsites all have picnic tables! Now that's glamping for backpackers! 

Our site was pretty nice too. It was big and it had plenty of shade. There were really only two downfalls to it. The first was that it was up on the top of a hill. That meant going down a large hill to get to the water. 

It was definitely an incline but not so steep that we feared we would roll down the hill or anything like that. There were some nice big boulders to sit on at the bottom.  

And once you were down the hill there was a beautiful view of Lake Essens. 

The second problem with the site was the thunder box. As difficult as the bathroom was to find at site 526, we had the opposite problem with ours. Our thunder box was in full view of anyone who happened to be walking down the trail. The trail runs right through site 527.  You had to just cross your fingers and hope that no one was hiking past when you needed to go pee. 

When we got to our campsite, we didn't even set up camp right away. We took off our packs and went into the lake for a swim. The water churned up little bits of debris when you stepped into the shallow end of it, but the water was warm and it was nice. 

After a swim, we set about setting up camp. As we were doing this a guy and a girl hiked by from the opposite direction that we had been travelling in, and each was carrying a grocery bag. They told us that they had gathered up a grocery bag each of garbage from the campsite they had passed through awhile back and they were taking the garbage out with them. We were all disappointed that anyone would leave garbage out there like that. We thanked them for cleaning up because it was where we were headed tomorrow and it would have been us trying to carry the garbage out with us from site to site. 

While we continued to set up a new girl came by. She didn't say anything but  headed straight over to use the thunder box. As, I mentioned, the thunder box is in full view of everyone near by. So we saw her reach the box and then stand there and look at it for a moment or two deciding if she wanted to use it. Heather and I looked away out of politeness, but it didn't matter because she changed her mind and came back up towards us to the main trail. 
   We asked her if she was staying on site 526 and she said yes and that she was staying there by herself. I told her that there was actually another bathroom close to her site, but she would just have to search a little for it. We also told her that it had way more privacy than ours did. She seemed pretty happy to hear this and she went back to find her own thunder box. 

After we were all settled in and set up, Heather pulled out the map to see if we could figure out how many kilometers we had to travel tomorrow.  There were no kilometers listed on any of the maps we had found so far and this one was no different. We knew the entire trail was about 17 kilometers, but we didn't know the breakdown of the kilometers from campsite to campsite. Looking at the map we figured we did about 2 km today. So Heather counted all the dots on the map. She said "We traveled 22 dots today and we will travel 51 dots tomorrow".  I chuckled at our newly found form of measurement. From what she gathered, every 8 dots seemed to be a kilometer. So tomorrow we would be travelling just over 6 kilometers to site 529.

For supper we had stew that we had been re-hydrating in plastic containers we had been carrying on the side of our packs all day. We would need more water for tomorrow so we got out  Heather's brand new Platypus that she got for her birthday and we cleaned some water. I think I will invest in one of these myself one day. 

We explored the area a bit and noticed that the bases of almost all the trees were charred black.
It looks like there was a forest fire here at one point. I don't think it was this year, there is too much green under brush here. 

Perhaps it was a controlled burn. Whatever the case, this little toad didn't seem to mind that he was sitting on a charcoal tree base. 

The evening was fantastic. It wasn't too cold and it wasn't too hot. The site has a good amount of shade but still enough sun. It looks even prettier in the evening than it does in the daytime. 

We gathered wood for a fire and we hung our food in the tree. There are no bear bins on any of the sites on this trail. 

We started a fire after dusk (around 9 pm). We didn't make a very large fire because we didn't want to stay up all night to tend to it. It was just enough of a fire to say we had one. 

It was a gorgeous evening. The moon was out and Venus was big and bright and setting in the sky. We sat and enjoyed the peacefulness of the evening. Eventually we headed into the tent and played a game of Quirkle or two until we were too tired. It had been a good day and we were looking forward to seeing what tomorrow would bring.