River Otter Quest – part III

 I know you are anxious to see how we did on our quest! 😜It was a failure for otter hunting. We have to see the positive, though. It is lovely seeing the open water, the old barns, interesting homes. 

I agree with JB, the place we were looking for is like Brigadoon, and only appears in odd years. This was it, and we cannot find it.

2013

We kept on driving. The Skootamata river, thought to come from Ojibwa words meaning 'burnt shoreline,' is a lovely river.

Look at the open water! YIPPEEEEEEE!!!! 

This was a delightful little river, with a quaint sign. It is, indeed, crooked!

The Mazinaw-Lanark County Forest was impacted by the tornado in July, 2022. (I wrote about that yesterday.) It is a sustainable forest on Crown Land.

Here is a wrap-around deck, which JB loves. 

Flinton is a town that celebrates the bike trails in Lennox and Addington. You can download a map of the trails. They are closed, due to the tornadoes.

It was time to head back home along Highway #7. I had numb bum! 

This must be an old root cellar.

Lots of posts need repair. Victims of winter incidents.

But the rocks, without snow! Hooray for spring!

We arrived home, after the 3-hour marathon. Happily, hubby went out and bought me a Hawaiian pizza, and himself a vegan one. I didn't have to cook. His first since he was diagnosed with dairy, yeast and egg intolerances. He enjoyed it!

My late client, who passed away during COVID, used to complain about the hours she would have to stand and watch food cook. I often think of her. I loved her. She had a passel of kids in her day. I stand at the stove and think of the times we laughed.

Just for fun, here are the river otters from 2013

 Hubby made me get out of the house that day. Said I needed a change of scenery. We went looking for birds and open water. We found otters (3, methinks) bugging the Canada Geese!

Otters at Buttermilk Falls from Jennifer Jilks on Vimeo.

This was on our dock! I video the ducks in spring before the vernal pond dries up. The otters did not hang around, as they are river otters, not lake otters! 😉

River otters from Jennifer Jilks on Vimeo.

Other otter travels:

• We went looking for otters! Part I (2023)
• River Otter Quest – part II (2023)
• Friday, March 11th: a quest (2016)
• River, Otter and Canada Geese photos (2013) 

River Otter Quest – part II

 Yes, we went looking for river otters and didn't find any. JB figures it is Brigadoon, it disappears in between times! I suppose I should put my readers out of the suspense. It got me out of the house, and resulted in a change in scenery! 

UPDATE: I did read a news item stating that Tweed and the other affected towns, are getting some funding for clean up. This approaching a year from the storm. The province of Ontario is pretty slow, but our premier is pretty reluctant to spend money.

Here we were driving along, and I noticed the trees were just a mess. I came back home and found out about the horrid tornado: Tornado hit near Tweed on July 24th, 2022. The tornado picked up a truck (📹 Global News), and sent it 300m across the road. No one died, but they lost power and water. The Tornado Project sent up a drone, with amazing footage (on Twitter). The tornado travelled from Rockdale to Actinolite, just north of Tweed. Classified as an EF2, with winds estimated at 190 km/h. It had a track length of 55.8km, and a maximum width of 1420 metres, said Environment Canada.

I first noticed it when I took a photo of the turtle fence. But the damage was obvious. It devastated the campground, as well as the Zen Forest Meditation Centre (YouTube 📹 ). The video, including drone footage from CTV news, was interesting. While they lost 500 old trees, none of the buildings, nor their marble, hand-crafted Buddhas, were damaged. Volunteers helped clear the property.

Black River Trading Company estimated they had $200,000 in clean up costs. CBC posted images of the damage. 

They did some stories about the damage in early 2023, and said it was painfully slow, since municipal crews don't have the training to get rid of the tree damage. 

Sunday morning, having just posted my initial trip photos, I read that Highway #7 was closed between Highways #41 and #37 (Tweed), with Flinton Rd. being the detour. That's where we were! There was an incident on the highway, that closed the road and didn't open up until midnight, when they finished the investigation and cleanup. Such incidents are not a surprise.