Toad the Fast Rocket, and Dobson the Fly

Arrowhead Park is a wonderful little park that is open year round. We were here before when we were kids and I have always remembered it fondly. It's a big park with lots of trees for privacy and it's very quiet. Even the kids on the next campsite over were barely heard through the thick trees. 
   Unfortunately at this point there was a total fire ban in effect so no camp fires for us. Our meals were cooked on a Coleman stove the whole time we were here. Considering in the city we live in we could smell  and see the smoke in the air from the many forest fires all around us, we could understand the cautiousness and being careful about not starting any new forest fires. 

We were on site 330. It was quite large and private with lots of shade. The first night we were here we went to bed relatively early. As a die hard night-hawk that meant I was awake pretty early in the morning. Six a.m. is way too early for me so I tried to go back to sleep. Finally at 7:45 I gave up and decided to get up.  

Everyone else was still asleep, so instead of making a lot of noise and waking them up I walked down to the Stubbs Falls Trail which was quite close to our campsite. In a matter of minutes I was at the trail. 

​The trail is wide, nicely groomed, and easy to walk down. It was so quiet and peaceful that it was easy to feel like you were the only one in the park. It was a bit chilly since the sun was not high in the sky yet and there was a lot of shade. But as the day wore on it got warmer. 

Soon I was climbing down the long winding stair case towards the rushing water. I remembered how, as children, my siblings and I had sat in the shallow parts of the moving water and how fun it was to feel the push of the water  over us as we tried to keep our balance. 

But this sobering sign kind of took the fun out of that idea. We had never been in any area of the water that was dangerous. We had only been in the water that ran off from the main stream. But I guess the sign is a good reminder to those who considered getting into the more powerful part of the rapids. Especially since a lady had died here only weeks before we arrived. 

The view from the bridge was beautiful in the morning sun. 

And equally beautiful on the other side of the bridge. 

I was surprised to see so many people down at the falls this early in the morning. There were about 6 other people there. One by one they all left until it was just me. I was glad for this because I had wanted to spend some time with just me and God and contemplate the beauty of his creation. 

Some of the things that I contemplated were that God is an amazing artist and that his art is alive. He uses living mediums and his art work is always in a constant state of change and movement....this reminded me of the portraits in the Harry Potter movies, geek that I am. We have some amazing artists in this world that can make paintings and sculptures look like they are real, but really they are lifeless. They are only just symbols and copies of the real artwork. It's like someone taking a photo of the Mona Lisa, rather than having the original Mona Lisa in their house. It's just a reminder or a memory of the real thing. These thoughts made me appreciate Gods creations all that much more.

I stayed at the falls for about an hour with my thoughts and watching the water run and the fish trying to swim in the current. Then I went back to the camp but Carsten and Penny still weren't up yet. So I decided to follow some roads that were running along the back of our campsite. We had wondered what the roads were for since they didn't seem to be for any current traffic flow and they were not on the main map. As I walked along them I think I figured out what they were for. I am pretty sure they are part of the winter trails. In the winter the park is still open and they offer trails for skiing, snow shoeing and, to my surprise, even as ice skating trails. That's right... you can ice skate down their trails! I think this may have been one of their ice skating trails. I walked these trails for some distance. Sometimes they ran right through peoples campsites but mostly it ran in behind them. I walked  the trail until the bugs got too bad and then I turned around and went back to camp.

When I got back, Carsten and Penny were getting up. We had breakfast and then Carsten and Penny wanted to go and see Stubbs Falls. So I tagged along with them back to the falls. This time we went off the bridge and down to the rocks and rushing water below. 

As I have mentioned, we have had a really dry summer so the water level was much lower than we had remembered it as kids. 

You could see some places where the water had worn down the rock but was now completely dry. 

On the other side of the bridge there were plenty of places to explore. There were some interesting rock formations. 

And there were some trees that looked like they were ready to get up and walk away on their own accord. We decided to walk the entire trail. We had been told by a passer-by that there was another bridge at the other end of the trail and we wanted to see it. 

It wasn't as scenic as the other bridge but it still had a nice view of the river and of the foot bridge down by one of the beaches. 

On the way back we saw a squirrel and we spotted a Yellow-bellied Sap Sucker.

After the hike we hit the showers. We wanted to know if there was a place to charge our phones at the comfort station, but there wasn't. The water was the perfect temperature and it stayed on long enough without having to press the button multiple times like at some other campgrounds. However, I had a difficult time trying to figure out how to turn the water off again. Turns out that it does eventually shut itself off. 

On the information board was an event that was taking place at 8 p.m. It was about the wolves of Algonquin. I kind of wanted to go to that but the mosquitoes were pretty bad as of late and I had visions of having to sit around uncomfortably in a swarm of mosquitoes. So we ended up not going. 

Next on our list of things to do was to go and check out the park store. It had all sorts of great little things in there at decent prices. I picked up a T-shirt and a new pic coil holder since the last time I lit a pic I managed to melt a hole in the lid of the container that I had it placed on. 

The other thing that we got at the store was a free calendar. It wasn't so much the calendar that I was excited about, but it was more about what was inside of it.

Inside was a big pull out map showing all the provincial parks in Ontario that have services and /or facilities. This was perfect for me and this blog! Now it will be so much easier to plan my trips with this!  If you have a chance to get your hands on one of these I highly suggest doing so.

After leaving the store we went back to camp, had supper, cleaned up and settled into the dining tent for an evening of board games. Eventually it got dark and we were playing by lamplight. 
​   I heard some rustling behind me in the bushes and I thought it was a raccoon. We shone the flashlight through the screen of the tent and laughed when we realized it was only a toad. 

Awhile later Penny had to go to the bathroom so she left the dining tent and almost ran right into a huge spider that was hanging from a tree outside the door. It was making a web that was running from the dining tent to the tree. I guess it thought that it was a good place for a web because the light from the tent seemed to be drawing in an above average amount of bugs this night. 

While Penny was gone we heard another rustling from outside the dining tent. This time it came from the other side of the tent. We shone the flashlight outside again and sure enough we saw something hop. And then there was another hop, only this time it was much higher. It was unusually high for a toad as a matter of fact. What happened next almost made me fall over backwards. The toad started hopping about 3 to 4 feet in the air, and the further it went the faster it went! Soon it was going at rocket speed and at the last second it managed to speed around the corner of my little purple tent without even slowing down or skipping a beat! It ran like a jack rabbit but was way to small to be one. We could hardly believe our eyes and we sat there stunned for a moment.  And then all of a sudden it occurred to me what it was. Earlier in the day we had read the park tabloid and I remembered reading a list of all the commonly seen animals and birds in the park. On that list was the "woodland jumping mouse" and the "meadow jumping mouse". I am pretty sure we had just seen the woodland jumping mouse. 

Photo of mouse from Wikipedia. Photo taken by D Gordon E. Robertson - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6432566

By the time Penny got back from the bathroom the spider had disappeared from sight. This made us more nervous than having it hanging in front of our faces as we went in and out the door. We imagined it was spinning a giant web from the dining tent to the sleeping tents and no one wanted to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and walk right into it. We discussed a plan to look for it later and move it elsewhere. But for the time being we went back to playing our games. 
   All was well for a time until all of a sudden a giant insect started flying  around inside the tent. It was about 5 to 6 inches long. It was so big and it was flying in such a frantic way that at first I thought it was one of those huge Luna moths. But then I realized that it wasn't green; it was a greyish colour. 
We all jumped up and said "What is that!!" and we moved to one side of the tent for fear that this thing would land on us or get stuck in our hair or something. As we shone the light on it to get a closer look we saw that it resembled a flying ant. But it was the biggest flying ant we had ever seen in our lives. 

We had no idea what it was but it was agitated and flying all over the place. Finally it landed on the ground down near one of the chairs and proceeded to to start biting the metal leg of the chair. Now that it had landed I grabbed a mug and the newspaper and I scooped it up and threw it outside the dining tent and zipped up the zipper so that it wouldn't come back in. I didn't even retrieve the paper and the mug. I decided that I would get those the next morning. 

Since we were already off our seats we decided to deal with the spider. We took the flashlight and started to hunt around the outside of the dining tent for it. It wasn't there. We could see the web though and we looked t see where the strands led to. Finally we found the spider above our heads in one of the lower tree branches. We didn't want to leave it there though because we had visions of it falling on our heads as we walked by. So Carsten grabbed a stick that was long enough to reach the spider and he scooped it out of the tree. I was on one side holding the light so that we knew exactly where it was at all times and Penny had another light and was following close behind. 
     "Where are we taking this?" Carsten asked. "How about across the road" I said. In order to get to the road we first had to cross the campsite, go down the drive way and then cross over to the other side of the road. It wasn't going to be a short trip. So off the three of us went, stick in hand with a large spider at the end. I am sure we would have looked hilarious to anyone who would have been a by-stander.
  The plan was going well until we got about half way to our destination. That's when the spider decided that his end of the stick is not where he wanted to be and he started to crawl up towards Carsten's end of the stick. "Oh oh! Walk faster! Walk faster!"  I shouted. We all started shuffling faster and together in a tight knit ball because if I dropped the light we would not know where the spider would be and then it could end up anywhere (translation... on us!).  Penny says " Why don't you just grab the other end of the stick?" Carsten says "No, because then our hands will get caught up in the web and if it's still attached to the web it will only drag it more towards us".  So we continued to shuffle as quickly as we could, laughing all the way,  towards the other side of the road. We were almost there, but the spider was almost at the end of the stick by now too. So, in one, last, final hoorah, Carsten threw the stick into the woods and with that our spider problem was over. It was a close call but we won the race. 

Photo of spider from Pixabay.com  by Tzuwen Su

At this point it was my turn to need to go to the bathroom. Since we were already at the road and we had our flashlights we figured we may as well make a trip to the bathroom. Once I was done, I waited with Carsten while Penny went to the bathroom again. Carsten and I decided to google the large, flying, ant-like bug that had been in the dining tent. Turns out it was a "Dobsonfly" The males of this species have huge, long mandibles about an inch in length, but despite this they do not bite. The females, however, don't have the long scary mandibles but when agitated they do bite! The one we had was definitely female and judging how it was attacking the metal chair leg, I would venture to say that it was definitely agitated. Google went on to say "The adults are  nocturnal, and are seldom seen as they hide under leaves in the canopy during the daytime. However, they do sometimes form aggregations under bridges or other structures along streams. Since the adults live only about a week, they are not known to eat anything. They may be attracted by mercaptan, an indicator additive in natural gas and propane."  Well at least we now know what it was.
  Just as we were finished reading this we heard a shriek come from the bathroom.  It was Penny. Then she started laughing. We were wondering what was going on and finally she explained that she had looked down and a mouse had been sitting on her foot. She isn't afraid of mice, she had just been startled to see anything at all sitting on her foot. 

We returned to the dining tent with the intent of finishing up our game. However, when we returned we were dismayed to find that the Dobsonfly was back in the dining tent. Well that was it for us. We packed up our games and we decided to head for bed. We didn't even attempt to get rid of the Dobsonfly. We figured it would be wiser to attempt extraction during the daylight hours. And on that note we went to our tents and went to bed. (Once we got home and I did more research, I found out that this is not a Dobsonfly, but is a close relative called a "Summer Fishfly").