Camping

During my second internship (at a high school this time) I volunteered with an Outdoor Pursuits class and joined the class on a two-day camping trip. This past weekend both Greg and I volunteered for another camping trip. This was just a one-nighter, but it was a hike in and camp rather than car camping like the first adventure.

The camp was on the Kingston Peninsula at a Scout Camp:

The weather was pretty agreeable given how rainy it has been lately (in ALL of the Maritimes!) We only had 1 million black flies to deal with. The benefit to having so many was that I could develop a pretty solid hypothesis: black flies like things that are black in colour more so than other colours. Unfortunately both my rain jacket and lighter-jacket-zippy-shirt were black.

Lesson learned.

We saw lots of different flowering plants and birds. One that I've only seen in the Ontario Trillium Foundation logo:

Source

We set up a tent, but this is the cabin that served as a lovely kitchen for the epic camping cooking that ensued. Not too sure what's with the giant water tank in front of the cabin?

Blowing on the boiling water + spaghetti to hopefully keep the whole thing from overflowing:

Using the top of the pot to warm up the sauce. It was frozen initially, but thankfully melted quite a bit by the time we wanted to have dinner:

Bill, the teacher of the Outdoor Pursuits class, had this crazy tiny wash cloth that when you put it in water it expanded. This is it before, in comparison to my hand:

This is the after, pretty impressive!

I paused later in the day for a good o'l self portrait - it's hard to tell because of my headband and zipped up coat, but I chopped my hair off. Apparently 6 inches were cut from the back, I didn't know I had that much hair to cut off! Better pictures will eventually show up.

Sunday we packed up and headed back out to the main camp:

There was this really wobbly bridge we had to cross...

The bridge crossed this pond which is full of all kinds of birds (there's a giant osprey nest at the top of the centre tree) and a beaver dam far off in the picture. The trees in the surrounding area have definitely felt the impact of the beavers, there were a bunch gnawed on and falling over.

Greg told me a neat fact, that next to humans beaver have the most impact on their environment.