So, to continue, heres the final winter post. In early April we were blessed with some freeze/thaw cycles that provided me with a bit of a present, the opportunity to skate into camp.
The thaw melted much of the top snow on the lake, especially near shoreline. This provided an incredibly flat smooth ice surface, if one chose to skip over the odd bit of stuck snowdrifts. I had an great fast skate around St. Patricks Island, so chose to continue on the ice towards the mouth of the Steel River, 7km away. I did make it most of the way, but scared myself a bit, as the ice makes some tremendous cracking and heaving noises. Since I was alone, without a cell phone, I decided to take a cautious approach, and returned to the cabin.
Of note, I saw and took this picture of wolf tracks leading across the lake towards the Slate Islands in the distance. In winter 2014, the deep freeze allowed wolves to travel across to the Slates, but they returned to the mainland before the end of winter. Apparently this winter, the wolves did cross over again, and remain on the Islands, 10km offshore. The Slate Islands, as noted in a previous blog, harbour a remnant caribou population, that previously lived without predation. Some of the caribou became quite tame, I wonder what the result will be from this introduction of a new batch of predators.
Oh, here is what it was like to skate on Superior!
