Week Seventeen - Spray Lake, 2015

Week Seventeen – Spray Lake, 2015

 

A chilly week at Spray Lake!  I had hoped to show you some lovely autumn pictures in this blog but winter came early!  We had snow on Saturday and that chased a lot of long-weekend campers away.  On Sunday night we only had a handful left, most of them in trailers or campers.  Only one couple stayed in their tent…hearty folks!  The snow lasted into the next day but it was more sleet/snow mix by then.  By Tuesday it had pretty well gone except for what will now stay up higher on the mountains.  There are several Inukshuks along the dam road now…I liked the one someone else had built so figured I could build a few myself.  Tom got into it too so he built a couple too.  Oso was a bit sad that there were only “people” Inukshuks so we built a dog out of stone.  First thing he did was went and peed on it!  That’s pretty typical I guess!  Lots of people have stopped to take pictures of the Inukshuks…guess it’s kind of fun to see them and they do look cool with the lake and mountains behind them.

I found this little snowman on the picnic table at the day use across the lake when I took Oso for a walk.  He’s pretty cute and deserving of having his picture taken.

We also saw these two mergansers fishing along the shore.  They didn’t seem to mind the cold water at all.  There are plenty of tiny minnows in the lake so the birds are quite well fed.

 

 

 

There was a family from France in the campground the other night and they wanted to see moose so I’d told them to go down to Engadine early in the morning and watch for them.  Talking with them made me want to go see the moose too so I got up early this morning and off I went.  I was in luck and saw two nice big bulls.  One was out in the meadow near the mud hole licking at the ground.  He was a huge bull but had small antlers so must have been fairly young.  The other was big as well but lay in the grass and never got up so I couldn’t see if he measured up to the first one.  He did have a nice big rack on him so was probably an older moose.  You’ll notice the picture of him shows the velvet on his antlers is coming off.  This time of year they are rubbing up against anything they can to work the velvet off. I talked with a conservation officer last night and he said there was a moose attacking a flexible plastic post at Engadine the other day.  Every time the moose pushed the post over, it would snap back up and the moose would attack it again.  That would have been fun to watch!  Oh, I do love the moose!