Sunday, March 26

The weather was fantastic on Sunday. When I ventured out at 10am the sky was clear and the sun was shining. The sun had even been shining long enough to turn the ice on the roads to slush (which is dirty and muddy, but it's not slippery and it means the temperature's above zero, so slush is good with me). I promised myself that I would go for a walk in the afternoon.

A few hours later I ventured out in a light coat and no gloves. Actually I had one glove, wrapped around my camera, in the hope that by keeping it warm I could coax it into taking a few photographs. I wandered down the hill beyond my cabin, towards the place where we had a barbeque in my first week here.

[As an aside, Petter recently referred to the location of the barbeque as 'the island'. I think I've unknowingly scrambled across a frozen lake. I guess I'll find out when the lake thaws, and land and water are separate once again.]

Just beyond my cabin is a large enclosure...

They used to keep moose here and experiment on them. That sounds kind of nasty, but I think the worst that happened to the moose was that they were tagged and people made notes on what they ate. When their experiments stopped it became too expensive to maintain the moose population in the exclosure, so gradually they were eaten. I suppose that was really the worst that happened to the moose.

Just past the moose enclosure is a small car park. To the left is a bridge over a running stream. It's pretty cool to hear the water running under a layer of ice and then see it emerge in a few places...

To the right of the carpark is a snowmobile track that leads to where the stream meets the lake.

Since I now suspected that a lot of this snow concealed nothing more firm than water, I didn't want to walk any further. I just turned to the right to zoom in on a cute red cottage nestled amongst the trees on the far side of the lake... and my camera shut itself down. A breeze had started blowing, cold enough to make my ears hurt. Time to go back to my cosy 18 deg cabin.