I have a yard, but then there is my “other” backyard. The one that starts a block and a half from my driveway and goes for many kilometres in either direction.
The rain has stopped, for now, and the temperature came up to something more comfortable than it has been for the past week. After work hours were done, the canyon was calling us to go for a walk in the woods.
Humans seem to have a need to rebrand things to somehow make already good things somehow new and more interesting. Microadventures used to be called day trips, or overnighters, or simply “outdoor activities”. Why did we need some silly new term for getting out of the house?
I like when people do it in a really fun way….like “Trash Panda” instead of raccoon. There are some good ones in here too (https://bit.ly/3f77HzQ).
Going for a walk in the woods and listening to the birds, enjoying the light, feeling the breeze as it rustles through the leaves. That apparently now is called “Forest Bathing”.
OK, that one I’ll go with, it took fewer letters than what I wrote.
So I guess that we didn’t go for a walk in the woods after work, we took a bath together, in our backyard 🙂 And there was even a forest window to look through.
The Capilano Canyon is a great spot to wander. The forest is pretty thick, so even when it’s raining, well, not coastal raining…that’s equivalent to a monsoon, so let’s say when it’s showering, which qualifies as rain for most anywhere else in the country, the forest shelters you on its trails. And when the sun is shining, and the orb is lower in the sky and filtering through the leaves with that later-in-the-day golden splendour….the trails are a haven.
On the other side of the coin…there is virtually no flat ground in North Vancouver, or what is flat doesn’t stay flat for far/long. The canyon is full of stair-masters. I was glad to be going from top to bottom of this one; we’d already walked up to the dam through the canyon and opted to come back down towards home via a different set of trails rather than walk the residential area…although it’s always fun peering into people’s yards to see what projects they’ve been working on.
Two things, in particular, caught my eye on the walk. This fellow (do you see him?) perched up on his rock, tucked in among the trees above the Cable Pool on the Capilano River. This spot is just a short distance from the hatchery that I am so hopeful to get back to soon. I miss working from anywhere but home and would give much to go back to working at the little office upstairs at the hatchery. I’d like to move my reference materials that are at the downtown office back here and reunite my books all back to one place instead of the current scenario, which is some downtown, some at home, and some at the hatchery
But back to him, in the photo below.
I’ve never really been into fishing. My Dad loved fishing. From a boat, from a canoe, whatever. But I remember being fascinated watching him fish for trout on the bank of the Crooked River. The arc of the fly rod and the way the line floated through the air had a beauty to it.
I just don’t have the patience for fishing.
But this guy does. He looks so meditative there on his rock above the river. I almost envy him. I would get bored with the fishing part, though I’d probably be happy to sit there for a time and just stare at the water below, and watch for the movements of the coho hidden within.
The other gem on the walk was seeing the blackberry blossoms. It’s been a cold and rainy summer so far, but there is a healthy crop of blackberry flowers that, if the rain would lessen and the temperatures would rise, and the sun would shine strongly….we could have a very good crop of blackberries soon…free fruit for the taking for those fearless enough to brave their arsenal of thorns.
When I first moved to Vancouver, a friend attending UBC invited me to go blackberry picking with him. He told me to wear long sleeves and full length pants.
It was August and it was around 30C.
I clearly thought he was being ridiculous and arrived in shorts and a t-shirt. I grew up picking fruit on my grandparent’s orchard in the summer. I spent a LOT of time picking raspberries, among other things.
I stuck my arm in the bush to pluck a big, juicy, ripe blackberry off the cane and….stopped.
I called out his name… he replied “What?”
I asked…”how do I get my arm back?”
I’m wiser now.
