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A Late Snowpack Means A Late Marmot Tour
Last Friday I took a drive up to Labour Day Lake. For those who don’t know, Labour Day Lake is a fairly high elevation lake that is the source of the Cameron River, the River that runs through Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island. I wanted to see how much snow was still around. We had an unusually heavy snow pack this winter and a cool, moist spring. So I was curious to see just how much snow was around.
The road to the trail head was in the best shape I have seen it in years. In this area, that can mean only one thing. Logging is coming. And sure enough I drove through lots of areas that had been logged recently. I also met a couple of workers on the road who had just finished fixing it up. They told me that near the trail head there would be more logging this fall. And that there were some forestry engineers in there now looking at the timber.
Logging and access to wonderful spots is a double-edged sword. You can get to where you want to go thanks only to the road system that the logging companies have created.
Anyway, I went in to Labour Day Lake and found the water level quite high. It was weird though. I left summertime conditions at lower elevations and found myself looking at early spring conditions around the lake. The ferns, which were fully out near home were just emerging here. Trilliums were in bloom again. And there were patches of snow around.
I decided to climb the trail to Mount Moriarty to see what it was like on the Ridge. The trail is poorly marked, very steep, and not that well trodden. As a result I had to spend time searching for the next ribbon marker. It was just as well, I was out of breath anyway. I brought some ribbon of my own and refreshed the ribbon that was already there but shredded by winter storms.
As I hiked, I noticed that the trees around me all had, what is called pistol-butts. This is where the trunks come out of the ground at an angle away from the hill slope and turn up to a vertical position producing a peculiar curve or sweep at the base of the trunk. This is from snow-creep. In the winter, on steep slopes, the snow pack creeps downward taking sapling with them. In the summer the snow melts and the saplings recover a little bit. Repeated years of this result in a pistol-butt.
At the top, it was like winter. There was well over a meter (a yard) of snow everywhere, with areas where rock outcrops had emerged from the snow. It will take at least a couple of weeks before the marmots can be seen. So I will wait.
