Pixie Lake

The road from the main to the put-in is overgrown and has two large deep puddles. We waded in to test the depth before putting the Tracker in 4 wheel drive and fording through. At the lake edge a swarm of wasps arrived to examine the hot vehicle.

I stood back nervously but James was brave.

After a few minutes the wasps lost interest and we put out onto a strange and eerie world. the shoreline bristled with dead trees, watershield decomposed under the sun, dark deep water slid under our hulls.

We did not see any pixies, but at one point James commented that it was the sort of place you thought you might look into the water and see ghostly white faces looking back with dead eyes.

Memorable would be a word to describe the experience.

Here is a photo album of the paddle: http://www.homestead.com/rrpowell/files/PixieLake

Moran Swamp

Vancouver Island Backroad Mapbook - Map 24 D6
Atlas of Canada Link: Moran Swamp
Latitude and Longitude: 49^o 22' 0" N - 125^o 1' 0" W

Trip Date: June 7th, 2008

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz was an odd fellow. He could not stop naming things in Latin. Born in 1783, by the age of twelve he knew botanical Latin and started a collection of plants (a herbarium) which grew into thousands of specimens until it was lost, along with his collections of shells (60,000 of them) when the ship carrying both, and 50 boxes of his books, sank off the coast of Connecticut in 1815. It is hard to imagine what a loss of this magnitude would do to an collector of his caliber but apparently undeterred by this disaster Sam began collecting again and by 1818 (two years later) he had collected and named more than 250 brand new species of plants and animals. His unquenchable desire to find and name things in the natural world is perhaps unparalleled by any other human. We have Sam to thank for naming both the mule dear(Odocoileus hemionus) and the white footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus), two of my personal favourites.

In Medical Flora, a Manual of the Medical Botany of the United States of North America published in 1828 Sam wrote that the underside of the water shield leaf is "...covered with a coat of pale jelly, sometimes purplish, first described by Schreber (Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber)" He went on to explain that, " ...the leaves afford one of the few instance of pure homogeneous vegetable jelly, being spontaneously produced, and covering the whole under surface of the leaves and the stem. Deer and cattle are very fond of eating these leaves; (the animals) even swim in the water in search of them. They are mucilaginous, astringent, demulcent, tonic and nutritious. The fresh leaves may be used like lichen in pulmonary complaints and dysentery. When dry the gelatinous matter almost disappears yet they impart mucilage to water...unnoticed as yet by all medical writers but well known to the Indians."

A scanned copy of the book is available online (http://www.botanicus.org/title/b12058269) and from it one gets the undeniable impression of a man manic for meticulous observation and curious about the healing properties of plants.

I thought about old Sam while puffing my way up through the forest from Moran Swam with my canoe on my shoulder. I wondered what it must have been like to be the first person to put a name to a new plant, to categorize it and research its medicinal properties. Much of Rafinesque's information of the medicinal properties of the plants was gleaned from first nations experience with the plants and as I read them, I wondered what process first nation's people went through to test each plant. It is ancient knowledge, I suspect, passed on from nameless healers in the distant past.

As it turns out the tender jelly-caked floating leaves of Water Shield that are so sought after by deer and cows are also prized by Japanese culinary mavens. The young curled leaf tips, replete with the thick transparent mucilage, are eaten as a salad with vinegar, sake and soy sauce. They are also used to thicken some soups. In Japan, transparent bottles full of the delicacy line the shelves of better markets. Similar in nutritional make up to other greens like spinach, their unique texture has kept me from harvesting them for my own table. Maybe I need the recipe for the vinegar, sake, and soy sauce combination. Lots of sake I suspect.

As I reached the road -- the shoulder muscles under my canoe spasming -- I pondered how many edible plants surround the average paddler, sliding past bull rushes, and bog lilies. Of course edible does not equate to palatable. I had read that indigenous residents of our coast picked and ate vast numbers of Salal berries and so plucked some ripe ones at the end of a long warm August and popped them in my mouth. Pithy and sour, I could imaging enjoying only their laxative properties, the taste disappearing in the overwhelming texture of fibre and roughage. Unlike the less plentiful but equally well utilized huckleberry, I do not seek out Salal berries to supplement my mid day meals.

I am, at the end of a long day paddling, often humbled and awed by the myriad bounty in the woods, and especially on the margins of any waterway. Salmon berries are always a favourite and I was surprised one year to discover that the large skunk cabbage leaf carefully pressed from the year before had turned into a remarkably resilient parchment on which I could write notes. But the real wonder was the smell. Unlike the flower, the skunk cabbage leaf, when dried, becomes faintly fragrant and it is not at all an unpleasant fragrance. I plan, at some distant date, perhaps when I retire, to take dried skunk cabbage leaves, blend and screen them and see what kind of paper they will make.

Moran Swamp contains wonders beyond water shield and skunk cabbage, however. It contains the beautiful Eriophorum Chamissonis or Chamisso's Cotton-Grass. I had never noticed this wonderful reed in seed before. I had driven all day, visited different lakes in search of something special, felt frustrated because I had run into snow on the way to Oshinow Lake, and had finally settled for the floating honey dew gardens of Lois Lake, before packing up to head home near 8:00 pm. The summer sun was descending and I was wondering if I could find some place to explore and photograph during the golden hour just before sunset. I had passed the turn off to Moran Swam earlier in the day and my heart had fallen because a crew of loggers was working the ridge beside the swamp harvesting every tree and filling the air with the smell of sawdust and diesel. It is private land, however, and I respect the crew's dominion so I had driven past.

Now however, on the way back, I saw no sign of activity, and decided to try an old road I knew of that ran below where the crew had been working, hoping that it might still lead to the edge of the swamp. The old road turned out to be badly overgrown and Alder branches squealed and rasped along the side of my Tracker as I made my way along it. I kept looking through the forest on my left for any sign of a path or trail down to the swamp.

The Road suddenly climbed sharply and merged with a secondary road which turned me directly into the active cut. Large road building machinery sat motionless like slumbering dinosaurs and I drove past several of these muddy toothed giants until I reached a sign that forbade me to travel further. I got out and looked down the road and could just see in the distance the area that used to give access to the swamp. It was now buried by a massive pile of logs. I turned around and drove back along the recently widened spur looking through the trees towards the swamp. Gaps in the branches gave occasional glimpses of open water with sunlight slanting through rugged shore pines on the far shore. After backtracking one more time, I finally settled on a route that began as a steep bank down into a dark forest and then pushed out through dense bushes onto a soggy and bushy shoreline.

With my canoe slung on my shoulder, paddles and camera in the other hand, and wearing my pfd, I made my way with some effort to the water's edge. I wore knee high paddling boots, which sunk deeply into the reedy meridian of the swamp and when the mud was finally up to the tops of the boots, I set the canoe down and climbed in, pushing my way through the remaining 6 or 8 more feet of soggy reed zone before breaking out onto the open water of the swamp, startling a passing beaver, who slapped her tail wildly and dove under the canoe. She surfaced on the other side a few minutes later to watch me intently before slapping again and then surfaced again on the other side of my boat. She continued to swim near by, occasionally diving with the slap of her tail until I had paddled out into the middle of the open water. I was hot from struggling through the bushes with the canoe on my shoulder and I welcomed a gentle breeze that riffled the water of the swamp as I paddled along. I made my way toward the island which forms the centre of the swamp, and smiled with delight at the sunlight illuminating the sedges and rushes that bordered the island.

Sedges blowing in the wind glinted pleasingly in late sunlight and I thought of a woman's clean hair. The sound it made in the breeze reminded me of the rustle of skirts, and I had to quell the urge to anthropomorphize the swamp as a living presence birthing graceful water spirits. The beauty, however, was stimulating - the brilliant greens of the sedges in the setting sun, the skeletal trunks of dead trees next to dark green moss-hung living companions, the densely crowded hummocks rising here and there from the water crowned with bobbing white flower heads. It seemed like a planted garden, a carefully tended space that someone had worked at diligently for years until the Sweet Gale formed cloud-like pillows above the darkening water.

I paddled around the island, watching a bald eagle chased by smaller birds, listening to the evening call of sparrows, the distant gawk of a raven, and finally, just as the sun is winking out behind the western ridge, a loon, somewhere on the other side of the marsh. Then, rounding a corner, I saw the Cotton-Grass. Like characters from Dr. Seuss the tufted heads rocked on the shoulders of their tall graceful stems and the sunlight yellowed the trees behind them giving the scene a dreamlike feel. I idled along the shoreline my eyes skipping from tawny tuft to tawny tuft. I realized that few people would see what I was seeing, that quiet, nameless garden rising to fame in the obscurity of my little mind. I considered that no one knew where I was, that quite possibly no one else had seen this estate of enchantment. Certainly not as I was seeing it then, light draining from the sky, greens resolving into darkness beneath the hemlock and fir.

So as I strapped the canoe onto the Tracker, thinking of Samuel Rafinesque and his passion for naming, I tried to think of my own label for this place. profundus tabernus silentium (beautiful hut of silence) or perhaps, locus recolligo una profundus (place where little combinations flock into beauty). I thought of Sam, gone so many years, and felt a kinship with him, my own odd delight in finding words for a place of wonder, bordered so close by the buzz of cutting chains and rumbling reapers, my herbarium tucked away as pixels on a thin magic wafer inside my camera.

For more photos of Moran Swamp, in higher resolutions, visit the "pictures only" page that accompanies this trip report at: http://www.stillinthestream.com/files/MoranSwamp/index.html

©Richard R. Powell

Roberts Lake

Vancouver Island Backroad Mapbook - Map 40 A2

Atlas of Canada Link: Roberts Lake

Google Earth: Type in “Roberts Lake BC” and it will take you right to the lake. There is a Google Earth user photo already on the lake.

Latitude: 50°12'58.15"N
Longitude: 125°32'40.69"W

Trip Date: February 24, 2008

I leave the house at 9:30, the sun is stark in a cloudless winter sky. From the parkway above Malaspina University-College I glimpse open ocean all the way to a fogbank against the mainland. Those poor citizens of Vancouver are shrouded in mist. No sun for them, at least not for several hours. It always feels good to be heading out paddling in sunshine, but somehow doubly good when it is a fortuitous event. The random fate of weather, allowing me to seize the day, while others ponder the ceiling of grey.

Part of the pleasure is knowing that no one is thinking about me, I am a self contained expedition, master of my own destiny. Not expected back till after dark, the whole day spread before me. Solo trips are luxurious, truly incomparably deluxe. A Westfalia van passes me, a couple in their thirties with outdoor jackets and hats. I imagine they are heading for the great outdoors too and speculate on their destination. The woman sees me watching them and I smile dumbly at them, a goof with a canoe in February.

My destination is Hell Diver Lake. Last night I looked up elevations on several lakes. Hell Diver is at 132 meters. Nanaimo’s own Westwood Lake is higher than that at 164 meters with no ice, so I think the water will be open at Hell Diver, but when I get there an hour and a half later, it is frozen over.

A small lake below Hell Diver, but just as frozen over...

Hell Diver is a small shallow lake south of Campbell River, so I can see why it might be frozen. I head further North to Quinsam Lake, which is a large deeper lake so perhaps not frozen. But it is at a higher elevation. It’s a gamble, but I head for it anyway. On the Gilson Main I run into snow. In the dip by Gilson Lake I feel the Tracker fishtail through the ruts of previous vehicles. On the hill between Gilson and Quinsam I reconsider. I can see Gilson Lake frozen below me on the right. The ruts in the snow are deep, throwing me around, wheels spin, the load behind the back seat shifts back and forth, paddles knocking together. I look for a turn around. I’ve wasted hours finding Hell Diver and now trying to reach Quinsam. I wonder where the Westfalia folks are and hope they are having better luck. I turn the Tracker around and head back down out of the snow, trying to think where else I can try.

On Gilson Main above Gilson Lake

Larry Bowers of West Coast Canoe Company had given me a tip that Roberts Lake was a nice paddle, close to the highway north of Campbell River. I know that another lake near Roberts, Twin Lake, is at 247 meters but I had not looked up Roberts, so I’m left to speculate. I drive into Campbell River and stop to eat a Big Mac and ponder my options. It is 2:00, the sun is past its zenith, but Roberts is a deep lake, I reason, and my curiosity gets the better of me.

On the way past Menzies Bay I catch up to a transport truck, he slows down slightly as we pass a section of planted alders, the sunlight streaming through them across the road. Flash, flash, flash all down the long straight stretch of highway. When we are past the alders the truck speeds up again, the grey trunks and tawny sunshine lingering in my after image, such beauty from such dormant elements.

I watch the snow grow deeper in the ditches all the way up the long hill past the Menzies Lookout, past the turn off to Twin Lake. I am very doubtful that Roberts will be clear of ice. But then the road crests and begins dropping and shortly I see the Roberts Lake Resort sign, and glimpse the lake through the trees. I stop at the rest stop to get my bearings and see that there is a road running along below the highway, right beside the lake. I hop back in the Tracker and find the turn off almost immediately near the northwest corner of the lake.

Roberts Lake Looking North

The water is as still as I have ever seen a lake be. There is literally not the slightest breeze. In the bay there is a small amount of floating clear ice but I take down the canoe and head out onto the water craning my neck to see the snow covered mountains to the east and north. I paddle out across the lake towards the farthest north-eastern corner where a creek drains Cecil Lake. I want to see if it is possible to paddle or portage up the creek to Cecil Lake. Along the northern shore I cruise carefully looking at large rocks just under the surface. Some have black tops, with dead algae below. I deduce that they stand above water part of the year, the algae line indicating the usual water level. The lake is full but the water is clear and still, I can see the rocky bottom as it curves steeply over a sharp underwater drop into darkness.

In the bay near the creek a wooden structure stands on a point, bones of a summer camp. Buoys float without moving in the lake. I imagine that in the summer boats, power boats even, dot this shore, oil spilling across the pristine surface. I listen for voices, laughter, splashing children, but it is quiet as velvet, only the small whisper of the creek running out across gravel.

The sound of the hull contacting with the gravel rouses me and I clamber out to stretch my legs. I spend some time examining stones along the shore. The gravel is uniform in size but sharp edged. This is a young place, the stones have not been smoothed overly, they are recently cracked apart, but the uniformity is pleasing.

Back in the canoe I paddle down the eastern shore, past another long dock and along a small island. Then, in the distance a large boulder on the shore catches my eye and I paddle towards it. Someone has constructed a very precarious looking diving board on top of it. I look into the water below it and can not see a bottom. I look at the shore to discern a camp or building. There is no obvious clearing.

I paddle around the point and towards the second inflow. There is another point, then a sandy bay, then a cluster of shrubs with red branches. As I paddle closer I see that the branches are a variety of shades from orange to pink to red. These bushes are worth the whole trip. I rest my paddle and stare at them, the canoe gliding silently, the sun angling towards the horizon.


Roberts Lake on a sunny February day consumes my visual field. Dark grey almost black rocks roughly cut but slightly smoothed, bleached logs, rippled sand, dormant vegetation armoured in color, the sun drawing out all pigment, exposing subtle variations in texture and pattern.


My muscles warm as I paddle back across the lake to the vehicle, the sun winking out behind the hill. Like an unexpected jewel on a grey stony shore, this unexpected winter beauty has been mine all day, and if feels as if no one else knows about it. A gem sitting in plain view along highway 19. It would be a nice place to set up a Westfalia.

More pictures of Robert Lake are located on my Flickr pages at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stillinthestream

Text and photos © Richard R. Powell

Sarita Lake

Vancouver Island Backroad Mapbook - Maps 7 and 8

Atlas of Canada Link: Sarita Lake

Google Earth: Type in Sarita and zoom out a bit, the lake is East of Sarita
Latitude: 48°54'18.85"N
Longitude: 124°53'17.03"W

Trip Date: January 16, 2008

After morning errands I loaded up the Tracker and left Nanaimo at 10:35 heading for lakes located along the road to Bamfield. At the Summit of #4 Highway between Cameron Lake and Port Alberni I took the connector road over to the Cameron River Main, down past Bainbridge Lake and on to the Bamfield Road. I arrived at Lizard Pond at 1:20. Finding both Lizard Pond and Hawthorn Lake frozen over, I returned to Bamfield Road and continued on the Sarita Lake, arriving at 2:25.

The bridge right before the lake that spans a tributary of Sarita River gave a glimpse of a very large log jam, cleaved in the middle by the creek. Just past the bridge on a muddy landing was a drilling machine of the sort used to drill into rock during road building. “hmmm...” I wondered, “did they dynamite the log jam?”

The Atlas of Canada map indicates a campground on the southern shore near the Eastern end of the lake, and the Backroad Mapbook placed the campsite further down the lake, so I watched intently for a road access. Recent grader work was evident creating a large furl of rock and gravel at the road edge, but I spied no turn off until reaching a road further down the lake, which I turned into. This turn off revealed the campsite nestled under deciduous trees, right where the Backroad Mapbook said it would be. It is a pleasant forestry style campsite with direct access to the lake via a gentle grassy boat ramp. The campground and boat ramp seemed oddly cluttered with logs and woody debris. I unloaded the canoe and headed out onto the water, my attention drawn immediately to a large white bird gliding along the far shore. A determined but stealthy paddle towards the bird nevertheless scared it into flight. I took several photographs of it winging its way to the far end of the lake, but it was too far away to make out the exact species. It was probably a Trumpeter Swan. Turning east I paddled towards the inflow of the Sarita River and was completely dumbstruck by the view. I had been so focused on the Swan, I had not fully appreciated it. White barked trees of the type at the campground, probably alders, were showing a red haze about their branch tips, the tightly bound buds waiting for spring. Sunlight, breaking through the cloud cover, striped the hillside behind.


As I approached the southern shoreline again, I noted a number of large logs and tree stumps clustered together in an odd tangled mess. Spanning between two of these stumps were other pieces of driftwood. Could it be that the forest company had, in fact, blasted the log jam causing a wave of water to wash these specimens into the lake? If that was the case, the water level must have risen to depth 10 or 12 feet above the level I was resting on?
Pondering other possible explanations I rounded the next small point of land and drifted past a flock of Golden Crowned Kinglets peeping to each other in the underbrush. A Junco and Winter Wren were also gleaning the shoreline logs and their activity drew my attention to a graceful piece of driftwood.

Rounding the next promontory where I had initially expected the campsite to be I startled into flight two black and white ducks, probably Ringnecks, from an area of shore where a creek had recently deposited large amounts of sand and gravel, arranged on the lake bottom like a multicoloured fan. The water turbidity was moderate, though the river had seemed relatively clear when I had crossed it.

After paddling around the eastern side of the lake I headed back toward the put in, sun descending behind snowy mountains. A mist was forming as I took the canoe out of the water and the temperature was dropping steadily. My thumbs were feeling it, even through my titanium lined neoprene gloves. As with all paddles during the winter months, the limited daylight hours, and temperature mean the paddling time always seems a little too rushed. Nevertheless, I was pleases to have paddled the lake on such a calm and tranquil day.

Summation: Sarita Lake has a nice shoreline with moderately interesting hillsides surrounding the lake on all sides. The most striking aspect of the lake is the long line of Alders (?) on the Eastern shore by the inlet from Sarita River. This panorama is breathtaking. I would like to see it both in its spring raiment and summer greenery. I expect that the lake is used heavily in the summer, being so close to a main road and less than two hours drive from Port Alberni. It may, however, be overlooked by many who are heading to and from the West Coast Trail, providing for them only a brief visual break from the miles of forest and clear cuts. I will not make Sarita Lake a destination lake during the warmer months, but if I should happen to be in the neighbourhood, I will definitely swing by to check it out again.

Recommendation: If you plan to visit Sarita Lake in the winter months, be prepared for cold water and possible changes in water level. The roads this winter are heavily used by forest vehicles and graders will most likly be working, I passed one on the trip. I also passed two loaded logging trucks, and another with its trailer piggybacked, and numerous of the ubiquitous white forest company chevy pickups. Also two cars. Tracks in the snow indicated that at least two vehicles had visited Lizard Pond, the snow being over a foot deep in places. This is a high use area because of the active logging.