Backpacking Killarney - Day 5

I woke up to hear Heather outside the tent talking to someone. At first I thought she may be talking to my mom, but I quickly realized that she wasn't. Apparently we had some morning visitors. Heather was talking to a momma raccoon and four baby raccoons. I guess momma was teaching them how to make the campsite rounds. Can't start too young, you know. 

I went back to bed and just lay there listening to the sounds of the birds, and chipmunks for another hour or so. When I finally got up, Heather was by herself feeding peanuts to her new friend the chipmunk. And of course our ever present wasps were still hanging around despite the fact that there was no food for them anywhere in sight. 

My mom got up about a half an hour later and we wondered what we were going to do today. Call us crazy, but we decided to go on a hike. Yes, after 3 days of being sore and exhausted to the point where we could barely lift our feet, we still had the hiking bug. Heather wasn't going to hike one of the trails, but she was going to walk down to the gatehouse and buy a present for her grand kids. I decided to hike the Cranberry Bog Trail. My mom also chose the Cranberry Bog trail, however, we began the trail at different times so we each ended up going it alone. I left to go to the Cranberry Bog Trail at 12:45 p.m.  and my mom left at
​2 p.m.

I don't mind doing hikes alone because I can walk at my own pace and I can go quietly enough to sometimes be able to catch birds and animals with my camera that I probably wouldn't otherwise be able to photograph.  ​At the Cranberry Bog trail head is a place to lock up your bikes. That's another nice feature of Killarney Park; it is very bike friendly.

The trail starts out as a path that runs along some of the campsites. For the first little bit I could see other campers at their sites and hear them laughing and talking to each other. It looked peaceful but it was too noisy. 

Finally after you get further in, the voices start to fade away and you can finally hear the birds and the crickets. Not too far in I came across a rather rocky section of the path. At this point I was worried that this trail was going to become like the LaCloche trail with difficult and steep rock cuts to climb. I wasn't sure I was up to that the very day after coming out of the bush from the LaCloche trail. 

But soon my worries were abated when I came across a nice little rock bench.  I thought to myself "wouldn't it have been nice if there had been a bunch of these rock benches on the LaCloche trail.  I think there should be more of these on all the trails. These are a great idea! 

I was beginning to wonder if there were any boggy patches to this hike at all. Finally I came to some open grassy and kind of boggy areas. Well at least that was a start. The first real signs of bog was the small patch of Joe Pye Weed Flowers. They are a pretty flower in a faded pastel purple colour and they like to grow on the edges of open water, near the edges of lakes or rivers and require moist living conditions. 

A little further up the trail the Joe Pye Weed went from one or two occasional plants to a whole field of pastel purple. As folklore has it, the common name Joe Pye Weed reportedly comes from an American Indian named Joe Pye who used the plant to cure typhus fever. Other names for this flower are  gravelroot or Queen of the meadow.

Another sign that I was getting close to the bog was the occasional dragonfly spotted along the path. 

I came across an old tree that looks like the woodpeckers have frequented quite a bit. I was hoping to get a picture of one but there were no woodpeckers to be found. 

A nice little song sparrow did stop and pose for me though. 

It was an interesting old pine tree because it looked like it had a runny nose or something. The pine sap was oozing in long drippy strings down the side of the tree. 

Finally I could see Cranberry Bog through an opening in the trees. 

The very first part of the bog as a little bridge that borders the edge of a beaver dam.  When you are standing on the bridge you can see that the bog is broken up into 3 different water levels and the bridge is on level two. 

The bog is surrounded by orange Spotted Jewel Weed and purple Pickerel Weed.

And what would a bog be without some water lilies.

In a shallow spot near the rocks there was a whole bunch of water lily leaves that overlapped one another to form a giant floating floor where a bunch of ants were busy milking their farm of aphids. 

I found a nice spot to sit and eat lunch. I must have spent about an hour here. It was so quiet and so peaceful and so beautiful. 

Even the rocks were a beautiful shade of red and were smooth and worn by the winds and the rain over the years. 

Way across the bog I could make out two large black birds in the water. One was beating the water with it's wings. It looked as though it were fishing or something. The other was just sitting on a rock and watching. They were too sar away to tell what kind of birds they were. If I had to guess I would say cormorants. 

Eventually I could hear some people coming from behind me in the distance. I took that as my cue to leave. I had only come across one other set of hikers on the trail so far and they had passed me by going in the opposite direction near the very beginning of the trail. I had rather enjoyed my solitude up to this point and wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible. I came off the trail at about 4 p.m. The trail did not end where I had expected it to. I had thought that it went around full circle and that I would end up right where I started. So I was surprised when I actually came out down by the beach instead. It meant doing some more uphill walking to get back to the campsite. As I was walking up the hill I heard 3 gun sots off in the distance. I never did find out what that was all about. 

Upon my return to the campsite I found Heather making "wasp traps". They weren't traps so much as they were lures. She had placed about 3 pieces of home made fruit roll-ups on the picnic table and the usual 7 - 8  wasps were hanging out and chowing down on them. They didn't actually catch the wasps, instead they just kept the wasps out of our hair; both literally and figuratively. 

After just having come back from a hike I was fairly thirsty. We hadn't had a true cold drink in about 5 days now. Even the ones we bought at the corner store were kind of cold but not really cold. So I said to Heather "Let's treat ourselves to some ice!" She thought that was a great idea. So we left our mom a note (she was still on the Cranberry Bog trail) to tell her that we were gone to get ice. We went to the gate house and Heather went in to ask if they had any ice there. The guy at the desk said no, but we could get some at the Killarney Outfitters. Before she left she told the guy about the raccoon that had come to the campsite the night before. Then she asked him  "If the raccoon comes back tonight to play cards again, is it alright if I give it a beer? Or is it still considered wild?" We didn't even have any beer, she was just making a joke. The joke worked because it made the guy laugh. He replied "no...it's still considered wild".  Heather had decided to name the raccoon by this point. The raccoon was now known as "Willimena". 

So off we went to Killarney Outfitters to get ice. Along the way we saw a young black bear crossing the road. By the time we got back with the ice, our mom was also back from her hike. We began to make a supper of dehydrated tuna/cheese and broccoli along with some bannock. We also prepared some home made chocolate pudding in a zip-lock bag which we we put on ice along with the bottles of pop so that we could have it nice and cold. It's funny how things like ice you take for granted at home but when you are camping and it is hard to come by it becomes a real treat. 

It was another very good dehydrated meal. We figured it would have tasted even better if we were way out in the bush on the hiking trail, but we were happy to have stayed camping long enough to try it out.  We were too full for the pudding so we left it to chill. After supper we cleared up the food and the dishes and we settled in for another evening of card games. 

​At about 7 p.m. a raccoon came into the campsite. We had expected that Willimena may be back. She seemed like a regular with the attitude she had. She had arrived at about 9 the previous night so we thought that this was a bit early for her. But what did we know. We had only seen her the one time. The raccoon was reaching up in the tree for something and this pose was just too cute. So I took a picture through the screen of the tent.

​ I wanted to get a clearer picture without the screen in the way so I moved outside of the tent to take another one. This raccoon saw me and got a bit nervous about me coming so close. That's when we knew that this was not Willimena. Our Willimena is not shy by any means. This coon didn't stick around long. Soon we were back to playing cards. 

At about 9 p.m. another coon entered the campsite. Soon I had a coon tapping my butt and searching my pockets. Now this was Willimena! Nothing was scaring her off. We were talking loud and we were even playing a card game (Squarrels) that required us to slap the table once in awhile. The banging smacks on the table did not seem to trouble her in the least.

Eventually she got bold enough to get up on the table and join us in a game of cards. Heather would hold out her cards and say "Which one should I play Willimena?" and Willimena would tap one of her cards and Heather would play it. 

However, cards were not what Willimena was interested in. She was on the hunt for food naturally. She was going through every little bag and container we had on the table. She was searching the dice bag, then the card boxes. She tried for my mom's cigarette package but my mom took that away. Then she went for a baggie with some plastic bottles of juice in them that you can add to water to make flavoured water. My mom tried to wrestle that away from her. It was a tug of war battle until I pointed out to my mom that she may as well let Willimena have it because even if she got into the bag, she would not be able to open the plastic containers inside. Sure enough, Willimena gave up on those real quick. 

We thought we had everything under control when we realized that Willimena was going for the ice bucket...."The Pudding!!!!" we all yelled at the same time. We had completely forgotten about the pudding that we had left to chill.  It was to late. Willimena was too quick for us and she grabbed that whole bag of pudding and ran off like a dart with into the night. I gave chase but gave up pretty quick. After all, even if I caught her, how was I going to get her to drop it? Best case scenario I would have had a torn bag of pudding dripping all over me.  So I returned to the tent defeated. We resumed playing our cards and talked about how we had been really looking forward to that pudding. Wouldn't you know it, about a half an hour later the little devil came back to the tent looking for more! The nerve of some coons! This time we didn't ask her to play cards with us. We told her that she was not welcome anymore and that she should go to someone else's campsite instead. We had no more chocolate pudding for her anyways so she didn't stay long. 

We played cards until about 11:30 p.m.  As we were packing up the cards, once more we had a wasp buzzing around us in the dark. I have never seen anything like it. These bees were just always there. 

Heather and I decided to walk down to the beach to do some star gazing because it was such a beautiful night.We lay down on a picnic table, one on each bench and looked up at the stars. The sky was so clear and the stars were so bright and the evening was so warm. It was absolutely gorgeous. It was about the time that the Perseid Meteor Shower was beginning. It wasn't due to  peak until  August 11th; but sure enough we saw quite a number of "falling stars" in a very short period of time. We also were lucky enough to see the International Space Station go by. 

We stayed down by the beach for about an hour. When we came back it looked like the wasps had finally gone to bed. But the coons hadn't. As we lay in our sleeping bags we could still hear them roaming around outside the tent. I lie there thinking how odd it is that humans tend to feel safe even with just so much as a paper thin piece of material between us and the wildlife on the other side. It's silly really. We may as well have nothing between us. But at least the material does have some uses such as privacy from other humans, and protection from rain and bugs. That's about it though. But from what I have seen of the wildlife in this park the past couple days, the terrain seems to be much more wild than the animals are.