Moose Hunt On The Way To Ishkuday

We woke up at about 8:30 in the morning. Today we were not in any rush. We only had to hike 3.9 km to get to our site on Ishkuday Lake. There is only one site there so we had no competition to get to it. There isn't a good place to access water at Ishkuday anymore due to beaver activity so, we had to plan accordingly.  Heather filled up the water filter and we put it inside an empty, red, food bag (the water proof kind that we had been using to hang our food in the tree). We had eaten enough food by this point that we had a bag to spare. Then she put that into her backpack. It meant that she had to carry extra weight but at least we would have water when we got there.

We were beginning to pack up our stuff when a gentleman came hiking by. He was headed in the opposite direction that we were headed. That meant he was headed towards the sinking bridge that we had crossed yesterday. We warned him about the bridge and about a couple other muddy places that he was about to encounter. We started talking about different hiking stories each of us had and, before we knew it, about a half an hour had gone by. Eventually we said good bye and finished our packing up. It was about noon by the time we finally left the campsite.

We looked for fresh moose tracks in the place that we had seen them yesterday, but there weren't any new ones there. We did see some fresh tracks further on down the trail though. 

The mosquitoes were not bad at all today. We were actually able to enjoy the view and stop to look at some of the flowers and mushrooms.

We came to a wide open grassy area that used to be an old logging road.

And a little further on you could see deep grooves in the ground where old logging machinery had once been. You could just feel the history in this place. It was all overgrown now though, of course.

Then we came to a spot that was much more interesting than the old logging roads. It was an area where all the grass had been flattened down. A moose had bedded down here!!  Right in the middle of the trail!  Our hopes of seeing a moose had just risen again.

However, if there had been a moose sleeping here, he wasn't there now. We kept hiking for awhile and eventually my attention turned to other things. Smaller things. Like toads hoping through the dead leaves on the ground. 

As usual, Heather was ahead of me. I was just coming up over a rise when all of a sudden we heard a huge CRASH!!!  I looked up to see Heather grabbing for her camera. And over to the left of us, not more than 40 feet away, was a male yearling moose jumping up from the ground! It had been lying on the ground near an old fallen root of a tree and had blended in perfectly so we didn't see it until we were almost upon it. And clearly it hadn't seen or heard us right away either.  Heather and the moose surprised each other.

I didn't see the moose as clear as Heather did because I was a bit further behind. The moose had run into the trees and then stopped for a moment. All I could make out was a dark blob. We both stopped too and tried to take a picture. But I couldn't get one and Heather's came out too blurry to know what it was. She quietly mouthed the words "Did you get a picture?"  and I shook my head "No".  So she quietly tried to tip toe closer. But the moose was having none of that and he took off running. Oddly enough he didn't run into the trees but instead came back out onto the trail and ran up the trail. We tried to follow, cameras in hand. Then we came to a long, wet, muddy area in the middle of the trail. The moose of course went right through it. And Heather went right through it. But I played the part of the clean freak and tried not to get all full of mud. That was when Heather got way ahead of me and I lost track of her all together.

By the time I got past the mud hole, all I had to go on were the moose tracks in the mud. I listened as I went, trying to hear either Heather or the moose. I thought I could hear the moose but I wasn't sure. It is incredible how something so big can move so quietly through the bush! 

I could see where the moose had slipped a little in the mud as he ran.

This whole time we were following the moose, we had remained pretty quiet. But then I came to a fallen tree right in the middle of the trail. There was no way I could get around this tree and still stay quiet. By about this time I was ready to give up. 

The lake was to my left and I figured that the moose probably headed that way because I thought I could hear him. I wondered if Heather had gone off trail to follow him. I knew that she knew better than to do that, but then again with all the excitement,  maybe she might have.  I decided to stick to the trail.

Eventually I came to some places where I could see the lake and I was hoping maybe I could see the moose from a distance, figuring that he would be way over on the other side by now. I wondered if I should turn back and look for Heather or just assume she went on ahead to the camp. I really wanted to find out if she had gotten a good picture or not.

When I came to a rocky area where I could sit to rest for a minute, I decided that I would just continue on to camp and if she wasn't there then I would leave my pack and come back to find her. I knew that the chances of seeing the moose again now were next to nothing. So, I continued on alone to the campsite.

The closer I got to the campsite the less lake there was and the more marsh there was. I could see why a moose would like this area.

Finally, I came to the orange marker for the Ishkuday campsite. And there was Heather waiting for me. She thought that I  had gone chasing the moose into the bush too.  Both of us laughed when we thought that the other had taken off into the bush after the moose, even though we both knew that the other knew better than to do such a thing. We swapped details about our moose experiences and discovered that neither of us got a good picture.  We were disappointed about that. 

By this time it was about 2:30 pm.  We began to set up camp and I  had a chance to look around the place. The site is not bad, but there is definitely no place to swim, and there were not a lot of flat places without roots sticking up. It has a very woodsy and remote feel to it. But it is shady and peaceful here.

There are a couple paths to water but water that is not "marsh soup" is not plentiful.  The water here would be very hard on your water filtering system. And if you didn't have one of those then you would certainly have to boil the heck out of it.

Someone had left a pot behind and I used it to scoop some relatively clean water from Ishkuday Lake. We only used it for putting out the fire later on though. After all, Heather had carried all the drinking water with her. We didn't want that effort to be for nothing. So we used the water we that brought with us for drinking purposes.

Ishkuday Lake was as wild and overgrown as everyone said it would be.  There were reeds and tall grasses and old grey dead pines sticking up everywhere. 

But way out in the distance there was some open water.

A mergenser duck was enjoying a swim out there, far from the reaches of any human or predator. 

Blue damselflies flitted around the shoreline. 

And frogs tried to camouflage themselves in the water near the fallen logs.

The trees along the path to the bathroom reminded me of the backyard I had when I was growing up (we lived out in the country on 23 acres of forested land). 

One of the trees had a huge growth or "burr" growing on it. My nephew says people cut these burrs off and can make wooden bowls and things from them. I was just glad it was a burr and not a bees nest. 

The bathroom was home to a Tomentose Burying Beetle. I had seen two or three of these on this trip. They were always near the thunder box. 

   After we rested awhile, Heather and I decided to backtrack to where we saw the moose without our packs on to see if we could see it again. We knew the chances were slim to none, but then we thought that seeing it the first time was not likely to happen. We still had the excitement of adrenaline rushing through us so, in our minds, anything was possible. 
   We had invited my niece to join us for the last two nights of our hiking trip and we didn't know if she was going to show up or not. But just in case we left her a note and a map showing her where we saw the moose which was where we would be. It was only about a 20 minute walk from the campsite. 

When we got back to where we saw the moose we analysed the tracks. The footprint was almost as big as the top half of my shoe. 
Heather described her moose chase to me as we walked along saying things like "and here is where the moose ran onto the trail." and "this is the spot where he ran into the woods and I lost sight of him". 
Turns out that all the time I had thought I had heard the moose to the left of me heading towards the lake, the moose had actually gone to the right, heading away from the lake. So, it was a good thing I didn't try to follow him. I was way off base as to what direction he and Heather went after I lost sight of them. 

We didn't see the moose again (which was really no surprise to me) but we did see some bear scat. It was pretty old and we were not concerned about it being in the area at all. 

We enjoyed the walk back through the trees that were starting to grow long shadows as the sun was beginning to get lower in the sky.

When we got back to camp we made supper. My niece never did end up joining us. Instead we played Yahtzee for awhile; just the two of us. We were joined, however, by a couple of shrews that live in holes at the bases of a couple of trees. I tired for so long to get a picture of them scurrying around but they were way too fast for me. They are cute, but they just don't sit still even for a moment. 

Eventually the sun started to sink below the horizon. We were hoping for a nice sunset, but once again, there were no spectacular displays of colour. Just the fading sun and then the oncoming greyness of dusk. I went to the side of the lake in hopes of getting a nice, colourful,  sunset picture, but it wasn't to be. 

And then something strange happened. When I took the next picture and looked at it in the picture viewer, I found that the picture looked as though I had taken it in the dark of night. But it wasn't dark out yet. So how can that be? 

And stranger still was that I could see two little white dots in the center of the picture between some branches. When I zoomed in, it looked like two eyes peering at me from the dark. 

The next picture was not dark at all. It was back to normal. 

I checked my camera to see what the picture before it looked like. It was a picture of the fire we had made. It was not dark either. So here was this dark, night time picture of something peering at us from the marsh smack dab in the middle of my early evening pictures. I really don't know what to make of it. 

I had one more strange picture that I took that evening. I was trying to take a picture of the cozy glow of the flashlight on inside the tent, but I accidentally turned the flash on so it lit up the whole site when I took the picture. Later, when I got home and looked at the picture, I noticed an orb of light at the tree (on the left just beside  my walking stick). I wonder if other people who have camped here have had similar strange things happen when they have taken pictures here. It would be interesting to find out. I went online when I got home to see if there were any spooky stories about this particular lake or campsite, but I didn't find any. 

Despite the strange pictures, nothing else unusual was seen or heard. Instead, we went to sleep with the sounds of frogs and crickets singing all around us and with thoughts of chasing moose down the trail going through our heads. It had been an exciting day for us and we were looking forward to what tomorrow might bring.