And the answer is, yes

Back in February I wondered if frozen ground will melt beneath a deep snow pack.
We had three feet of snow here in Nolalu this winter and the ground was well-frozen before the snows came. I reasoned that since the ground is unfrozen farther down, and because snow is such a good insulator, then the frozen ground should melt by the time spring came around. Well here we are, days are getting up to 7 C and we have had several nights that did not go below freezing. About half of the snow has melted and when I uncover the ground beneath the rest of the snow there is mud, not ice!
Incidentally, the deep snow pack was unique to Nolalu and other hilly country southwest of Thunder Bay. Most other areas in Northwestern Ontario had far less snow last winter. Red Lake may only have had a foot or so.
Without even digging through the snow there was evidence that the ground had thawed over the winter. Although lots of snow has melted, there is no runoff anywhere. The water is soaking into the ground and that is a good thing because it was exceptionally dry last fall.

Make Your Ice-out Prediction

Hey! It is almost April and since we're all confined to home anyway, here is a good opportunity to test my system for predicting Red Lake's ice-out.
If you view it on a computer, not a smartphone, you can see how the predictions for the next two weeks compares to normal on the Weather Network's 14-day forecast. Average ice-out is May 8. Days below normal move the ice-out later; above normal move it earlier. Try it out.
Even if we are unable to get to Red Lake in May due to the travel restrictions, we will find out from a Red Laker when ice-out occurs.

Here's why the coronavirus is so serious

Coronavirus or Covid-19 may seem off-topic for this blog but something Canada Health Minister Patty Hajdu, who incidentally is from Thunder Bay, said yesterday shows how relevant it is.  In essence, she said that like other Canadians, she wishes she could self-isolate at a cabin on an island in a lake somewhere until the whole crisis was over but we have no choice but to deal with it, here and now. I would add we also only have one chance to get it right.
I believe all levels of our government are doing the right things by shutting down everything but essential services, telling people to self-isolate, insisting travellers quarantine for 14 days and shutting down the border. All these measures are temporary. When the spread of the infection has stopped, things will start up again. It's a hit to the economy, of course, but the alternative is utterly grim.
Epidemiologists -- scientists who study how epidemics spread -- say that until a vaccine is developed every member of the human race will eventually get Covid-19. What does eventually mean? Without the delaying measures we are now taking, almost everyone would get it in the first year and whoever doesn't would get it in the second. That's how quickly it would spread.

It is NOT like the flu

 The various seasonal flus that we get have been around for years and we all have at least a partial immunity to them, especially if you get the flu shot. Still, the flu kills tens of thousands in the United States and hundreds to over a thousand in Canada every winter, mostly elderly people but younger ones as well.
Is is estimated eight per cent of the population gets the flu each winter and of those who get sick, 0.1 per cent will die from it.
Now let's look at Covid-19. Disaster planning models have estimated it could infect 40 per cent to 80 per cent of the population and the mortality rate will be 1-3 per cent. The higher mortality rate comes when health care systems are overwhelmed and can't treat everybody, exactly what is happening in Italy right now.
Let's look at the worst-case scenario -- 80 per cent get sick and three per cent die. In the U.S. that would mean 7,900,000 deaths. That would compare with 419,000 deaths in the Second World War.
Here's the numbers for Canada: 910,000 deaths as compared to 43,600 deaths in the last world war.

It is catastrophically worse than seasonal flu deaths

But that is the worst of the worst case. The other end of the worst-case prediction was that 40 per cent get sick in which instance all the numbers above are cut in half. It's still horrendous.
All of the above, however, is what is estimated could happen if no measures were taken, if we just carried on as usual. Fortunately, we are taking measures. We are self-isolating, we are social-distancing, we are quarantining sick people, we are stopping people from moving around.
Although we can't stop this from spreading entirely we can drastically slow its spread until a vaccine is developed. Once everyone gets vaccinated, we are home free. Or at least all but the anti-vaxxers will be in the clear.
Meanwhile, we can keep the hospitals from being snowed-under. We can increase our capability to look after the very sick with more beds, more protection equipment, more ventilators.
These measures are all that is keeping the situation in the realm of the possible.
We can prevent millions of deaths. Just by staying home and staying away from each other for a couple of months.
If you live in a place where politicians or anyone else is considering relaxing restrictions, call them up and chew their ass off. Tell them to prove the sincerity of their convictions by first getting sick with coronavirus themselves. Then they can tell the rest of the population how harmless it is.
There is one other myth that needs exploding, that young people don't get seriously sick. The facts show that people ages 20-40 and 40-60 are as likely to need hospitalization as those over 60. They just are less likely to die as those over 60. But in a full-blown pandemic, the hospitals are over-run. It won't be possible for many of those younger people to be hospitalized and their death rate will increase substantially.
Stay home. Stay the course. Tell stupid politicians what you think.
We only have one chance to get this right.

Our medical friends are riding into battle

It is now the eve of the biggest battle our friends and family in the medical field have ever faced. It is difficult to find words to express our admiration, our respect, our love for all of you.
If you were on a train, we would come to see you off, waving flags, waving hats, waving our hands until you were out of sight.
We would organize marching bands, sound our horns, beat our drums, twirl our batons.
If you were on buses we would crowd every overpass, cheering as you passed beneath.
We would rain confetti upon you, shoot off fireworks.
We would do whatever we could to give you courage, to give you strength, to steel your resolve for what lies ahead in the next few months.
We know that you are not fighting for glory. You are fighting for us.
Doctors, nurses, orderlies, nurse practitioners, receptionists, paramedics, dentists, first responders, police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, pharmacists, diagnostic technicians, lab workers, medical students, retired people from all the above and every other health care worker. You are standing up for us.
Thank God for you all.

The world needs more Saw-whet owls

Cork and I heard something last night that I haven't heard in years -- a Saw-whet owl.
These are the coolest little raptors. For one thing, according to the Cornell Lab All About Birds website, their main prey is man's nemesis -- the Whitefooted Deer Mouse. Go owls go!
The Saw-whet is just tiny, not much bigger than my hand, and if it wasn't for their perplexing call you could easily not even know they exist since they are strictly nocturnal and incredibly elusive. I once found one dead and I have heard of another that flew into a window. That's the total of Saw-whets seen in my experience.
However, I have heard their calls a couple of dozen times. Click on the Cornell Lab link above and listen for yourself. Their main call sounds like the back-up alarm of a vehicle.
The Saw-whet that I found dead seemed to have died of a heart attack. I found it years ago in the winter right after a fresh snow. It had been sitting about eight feet off the ground on a balsam branch and had fallen into the new powder beneath. It never even fluttered its wings.

Recognizing light through the gloom

It was a grey day here, maybe around the world, but then the clouds parted

When I was a little kid, maybe 10 or 12, I was returning to camp with my dad when our outboard clunked out. We were at Middle Narrows, exactly half way between the town of Red Lake and Bow Narrows Camp. It was 10 miles in either direction.
Today you could just flag down the first passing boat and ask for assistance or even pull out your cell phone and call for help. But this was the early 1960s and not only were there no cell phones then, there weren't other boats on the lake either. You could go for days without seeing anyone.
So what to do?
Dad tipped the motor up, and took off the cowling. I don't know what he checked but a quick examination told him this wasn't going to be a quick fix.
"How do you feel about paddling?" he asked me.
I grabbed one of the two paddles and moved to the stern. There were two seats there, one on either side. I sat on one and started paddling with the J-stroke which allows you to paddle in a straight line.
Dad sat on the other. He brought out his mechanics tool box. It was about the size of a lunch kit and held every mechanics tool he owned. He ever-so-carefully started taking things apart on the 35 h.p. Evinrude. This was a delicate operation because there was an excellent chance that any dropped part would end up in the lake. It was made all the riskier by my dad's fingers which were the size of bratwursts.
Our boat was an 18-foot cedar strip Nipissing skiff. It was loaded to the gills with gasoline barrels, propane tanks and lumber. We were heavy and while that made paddling the craft more difficult it did have the advantage of keeping us low in the water and out of the slight headwind we faced. I stroked along.
We were too far from shore to gauge any progress I might be making but by watching bits of algae in the water I could see that the boat was actually moving forward, just very slowly.
Every half hour or so Dad would put everything back together and I would climb over the stuff in the boat to the bow to allow him to pull-start the engine. Dad was a powerfully built man, a former heavyweight boxer, and still, it was difficult for him to pull out the recoil rope. He would give it a dozen tries then chuckle.
"Well, now we know one more thing that wasn't the problem!"
Then he would point a finger toward the sky.
"Trial and error!"
I would move back to the stern and resume paddling and dad would go back to work on the engine.
We did this off and on for hours.
Eventually I paddled all the way to Wolf Narrows which was half the distance back to camp. It might have taken three or four hours to get there. Dad grabbed the other paddle and said, "Well, with two of us paddling we will fly home."
Then something occurred to him and he went back to work on the motor. Again, he pulled the rope.
Putt!
"Hey!" I exclaimed. "Did you hear that?" It had been just one putt, just a tiny change in the sound of the cylinders being rotated by the starting rope.
He looked at me sharply. He had not heard it but he knew that my young ears were far more sensitive than his. He stared at me for a couple of seconds, then back to the engine he went.
This time, the engine sputtered, almost caught and died.
"Well, well, well!" he smiled.
Back to the engine.
Now it sputtered and caught and gasped and shuddered and died.
"I think we're going to be back in the boat business," he said.
Back to the engine.
This time it started and ran terribly but kept going. Dad fiddled with something and the engine picked up rpms.
He put it in gear and we moved ahead but at perhaps one-quarter of our normal speed.
"It's running on one," he yelled, meaning only one of the cylinders was firing.
Thirty minutes later we were home. Mom met us at the dock, wondering what had happened.
"Ahh, we had a bit of motor trouble, but we eventually figured it out," Dad said.

My point here is we need to always be alert for signs of light in the days of darkness ahead. They are there. They are always there, and in them we will find the way forward.

Lemming spotted in Nolalu, Ont.

My first evidence of the little creature came from a set of tracks in the driveway. They showed a scurrying animal, weaving left and right from one side of the driveway to the other and often reversing directions. That's odd, I thought. It had gone all around the house, a couple of times.
My guess was it had been a star-nosed mole. These chubby creatures occasionally come above ground and snow and since they are practically blind, seem to wander aimlessly.
Then, a few hours later, I saw the animal, this time on top of the snow right in front of the house. It wasn't a mole at all. With binoculars I could see it had the short-nose and tiny ears of something like a meadow vole or meadow mouse but it was browner and had a longer furry tail. It occurred to me I had seen this creature once before, at camp. Outside worker Ben Godin and I one spring were flipping over boats that had been stored for the winter in the yard and there were a half dozen of these meadow-mouse-like animals running around our feet. They weren't afraid of us and unfortunately, we accidentally stepped on several as we moved the boats down to the lake. Our best guess was that they were lemmings but aren't they only found in the Far North? We were just too busy to research the question.
But now I have more time and sure enough there is a lemming species in the southern part of Northwestern Ontario and the northern states. It is the Northern Bog Lemming. There is also a Southern Bog Lemming in more southern areas.
There are no bogs near our home in Nolalu but there are some a few miles away.
I wish I had gotten a photo because my research on the Internet showed that photos of this mysterious rodent are practically non-existent.
The way the lemming in our yard was behaving -- running aimlessly around above the snow -- would not bode well for his survival.  I expected to see a hawk or owl pick him off at any moment.

'Holy mackerel, this is slippery!'

"Hey Dan, can you do something about this before a deer falls and hurts itself?"

"What's that you're doing? Spreading wood ashes? Will that help?"

"By golly, it works! Now a deer can get a grip. Thanks."

History of Red Lake, camp, mines, fish

I gathered from my old Bow Narrows Camp blog a list of postings that dealt with history and thought you all might like to review them. Just click on the heading to view the complete post.

How Red Lake got its name

Pictograph at Artery Lake, west of Red Lake

DB Dowling left his mark here in 1893

Initials carved in soapstone at entrance to Pipestone Bay

 Remembering First Nations peoples of Red Lake

Ojibwe men who guided for Bow Narrows Camp

Which fish species are the oldest?

Lake Agassiz

West Red Lake Mining Museum

Home site of Bill Brown, Red Lake's first postmaster

 How long have people lived at Red Lake?

Middle Narrows pictograph about 1,200 years old

  Stromatolites made life as we know it

Bob Leis with book and stromatolite

Jim Paishk: pipemaker, master storyteller

Jim Paishk

It just didn't seem possible

Guide Jimmy Duck with hunter couple

 

The lone man in the canoe

This is how it all started

The Trapper's Cabin. Who was the trapper?

The cabin at the east end of West Narrows

The camp telephone back in the 1960s

Bill Stupack and my mom, Del, with CB-style telephone

Refrigeration system 50+ years ago

Ice house at Bow Narrows Camp 1948-1967

Traveling on thin ice a half-century ago

Frank Paishk and canoe

Bow Narrows Camp back in 1961

Bill Stupack, my mom, Del, and me with bear trap

Lime kiln last remnant of '26 gold rush

Lime kiln in Hall Bay

Things you discover while hunting

Finding answers to the climate crisis

"As I travel in Canada from coast to coast to coast, people are always asking me: 'Dave, what is the answer'? And I say the same thing to them all: What is the question?" -- the late comedian Dave Broadfoot, a member of the Royal Canadian Air Farce.

Ten years. That is how much time is left to cut our carbon emissions by 50 per cent. How are we going to do it?
I am reminded of a line by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore in his ground-breaking movie An Inconvenient Truth. It was something like, "We not only need to find new answers but also look at things we know for sure that just aren't so."
Transitioning toward a carbon-free economy is a challenge, for sure, but remember that opportunities are always disguised as problems. The biggest obstacles to solving any problem are inertia (we don't  like change) and psycho-sclerosis (hardening of the attitudes.) Change is always frightening unless it is goal-oriented and attitudes aren't something we are born with.
We know our goal -- cut fossil fuel usage 50 per cent by 2030. An attitude that we need to change in order to reach that goal is that this is all someone else's responsibility -- the government, for instance. Governments, unfortunately, are reactive, not proactive. Politicians must get re-elected and so they wait to see what a majority of voters want to do before they decide to "lead."
So it is up to us, average guys, to take the bull by the horns. When enough of us do it, "suddenly" the government will get involved.
I started the ball rolling, vehicle-wise, a couple of weeks ago when I got a call from my Nissan dealership in Thunder Bay. This was a new salesperson who wanted to introduce herself and say she noticed my Frontier pickup was now 12 years old! Wouldn't I like to trade it in on a new model?
Well, I said, it is still low-mileage and runs great. Anyway, I added, once we pay for our other vehicle, a Grand Caravan, our next vehicle will be an EV. I'm pretty sure I heard her gasp.
Ninety per cent of the miles we put on our vehicles is commuting from Nolalu to Thunder Bay and return, I explained. Round trip is 100 kilometers (60 miles). We can easily do that with an EV and charge it at home.What we hope happens in the next couple of years while we pay off the Caravan is that someone will come out with a higher EV, like an SUV. Automakers don't seem to have twigged to why so many older people prefer SUVs and vans -- the seats are higher off the ground and thus are far better for those of us with bad backs. There are hybrid SUVs and vans -- the Pacifica -- out there right now, to be sure, but they don't have the all-electric range of an EV.
I hoped she passed on our conversation to her boss and then her boss to Nissan Canada. We need to start stocking EVs.
In other news here we have succeeded this winter in reducing our propane usage by about 50 per cent, just by using a woodstove. The furnace only comes on after we go to bed and the stove runs low. I am surprised that this stove, a Napolean high-efficiency model that is rated for 1100 square feet, heats our 2,000-square-foot home easily. It isn't even located in the home proper but rather in a wing in the sunroom. A small, quiet, fan moves the heat out of the sunroom and into the main house.
Up at the cabin on Red Lake we already have a solar refrigerator and starting this summer will have a solar water pressure pump. We will still use propane to cook with and heat hot water, however, I hope to eventually pre-heat the water with a solar system (a black tank sitting in the sun).