Monday, September 26, 2011

Jean Marie River take 2

Spent the last week in the bush again. Fantastic weather.
Funny how the weather is always what I comment on first, apparently Canadians are weather obsessed.
Anyways, drove out on Sunday with Glen and camped out on the bank of the Jean Marie River with the students from the school, and a couple of community members. It was pretty fun having the kids around, much nicer camping with a group than by ourselves.
We spent the week paddling around in the beautiful fall colours of Ekahli Lake. It was so nice out! The first day was socked in with fog, but after digging a bunch of test pits at the trail head of Embaa Eteneh and finding some flakes, the fog lifted to perfectly still water!
We paddled the length of the river several times, dug tons of test pits, several flakes were unearthed, all in all it was a very successful week!
We spent Tuesday walking in the bush looking for old trails. Tons of high bush cranberries, which turned out to be gross. I do not like them at all. We didn't find any of the caches we were looking for, but we did find three abandoned cabins. Not so much wildlife, lots of moose tracks and bear poo, and poor Richard was hoping for a moose, but no success. But all the fall colours, and the fact that we could wander around in the bush with no bugs harassing us made up, somewhat, for the lack of moose.
Wednesday and Thursday were more of the same as Monday, lots of paddling. On Thursday I also hit a major load of cranberries. Glen thankfully let me stop for a half hour and pick what I could!
Staying with the school kids was pretty interesting too, their teacher is amazing. They made omelets in ziplock bags and boiling water, cooked pizzas in cardboard boxes, played so many games like sardines and camouflage with them, made and set snares, set fish nets, tracked moose, and did art projects. Koodoos to them!
All in all it was a fantastic week, it started to rain Friday morning as we were packing up, and rained the whole drive home. What a luck! Unfortunately I got sick along the drive home. Argh.