Wild things big and small seen this year

 

We had some interesting wild visitors at the cabin this summer, including this Goliath of a caterpillar. 

We also saw two black bears, a cow moose, a whitetail deer, a lynx and several grey-cheeked thrushes which used our clearing for a stop on their migration to the Far North. 

A really unusual feathered visitor that we heard, but didn't actually see, was a whippoorwill, right next to the cabin.

Before anything else, buy a fire pump

 

For sprinklers, attach pump to a large gas tank that will last days

We started planning for our cabin five years ago by buying a fire pump. It wasn't just a hedge against climate change but a tool that we would never think of being without in the Boreal Forest. We are in a sea of fuel and it can only take a spark to set it off. That spark could accidentally come from us -- from a chainsaw or other machine. And, of course, it could come from a lightning strike. The pump isn't for fighting a major forest fire; it's for preventing a little blaze from becoming an inferno.

Sprinklers at work on our dockhouse

We set up our pump on the dock as soon as we get to the cabin in the spring. I pile the hoses on top and cover the whole works with a plastic garbage can to keep everything dry. If the weather gets hot and dry I attach the hoses and stretch them out with the nozzle on the end hose. If we're past danger of frost I go ahead and prime the pump. We can be spraying hundreds of gallons of water a minute with one pull of the recoil rope.

After the fire flap of last summer we also have added a sprinkler system. We have two sprinklers on the gable end of each building. These are attached to garden hoses that are in turn attached to a fire hose fitting called a water thief. This fitting goes between the lengths of the canvas fire hose and has two places to attach the garden hoses. A handy configuration is to have 50-foot lengths of fire hose and 50-foot lengths of garden hose. 

When we fire up the pump the rotating sprinklers soak everything for about 50 feet around the buildings. It would be best if there were no large trees in that radius, especially conifers. It will be years before we achieve that but in the meantime the sprinklers give us some chance of surviving a forest fire.

During our years in the camp business we were fortunate to get some fire survival tips from NOTO, our industry organization that held an annual conference and trade show. A group called FireSmart had some eye-opening videos of how cabins ignite from forest fires. It happens well in advance of the actual fire. Embers from the main blaze come blowing along the ground at great speed caused by the wind that the fire generates ahead of itself. These glowing bits of wood go beneath the cabins and build up in the floor joists. If there is firewood or lumber piled down there then the embers ignite that as well.

They also hit the walls of the cabin and are funneled by the wind into the eaves and gables. They accumulate there like a glowing pile of barbecue briquets until the building ignites.

The lesson here is to enclose your buildings with skirting all the way to the ground and with metal fascia on the eaves and gables. 

This is what we are doing on our cabins and shed. And as an added precaution we are using steel siding and roofing as well. 

Here's what it is like to live near two half-million acre fires. It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon on what would have been a bright sunny day except for the dense smoke

 

Fishing was spectacular, at least for me

 

Here's what mega-fire Red Lake 77 looked like July 6, the day after it started

I was so intent on cabin building that I took little time off to fish; however, Brenda and I were also hungry for some fish dinners. On my first cast from the dock I caught about a 24-inch walleye. That's too big to keep for eating so I kept tossing out my 1/8-ounce Beetle Spin. Pretty soon I had two smaller walleye and kept them for the frying pan. Four or five days later I tried the same thing. In quick order I had a nice eating-size walleye and a northern pike -- all we needed.

After a week I tried again and this time got one pike. We needed another so I got in the boat and headed down the shoreline. To my surprise I caught an enormous smallmouth bass. I think it might have weighed four pounds.  I released it. Then I got the pike I was looking for and headed home. 

Another week passed and I decided to try fishing for pike right where I went daily to get cellphone messages, on the way to Trout Bay. One cast and I had a 24-inch pike -- all we needed. The next time we wanted fish I made a bunch of casts with the Beetle Spin and didn't get anything so I switched to a 3/4 ounce Five of Diamonds spoon. One cast and I had my pike. I started for home but part way back slowed down and thought I would troll back to the dock. I just let out the spoon behind the boat. I was in about 50 feet of water and didn't expect a bite until I got nearer to shore. Almost immediately I hooked something enormous. It was fighting like mad and with the deep water and all I figured it must be a lake trout. When I finally got it to the boat I couldn't believe it but it was a whopper of a walleye.

I carefully measured it without lifting it from the lake. It was 32 inches, by far my biggest. It had bit a five-inch long spoon on a six-inch steel leader. Without a weight to sink it the spoon probably was no more than six feet from the surface in a spot that was 50 feet deep. I let it go, of course, and just to see if this had been a fluke retraced my path and started trolling the spoon again. I was still letting out my line when another fish hit. This one seemed much smaller but I measured it anyway -- 26 inches. 

I only fished one more time after that, again in my cellphone bay. It was evening and the water was still so I tried a handmade jerk bait. I did so reluctantly because every time I have used these lures by Dwayne Kotala, my neighbour in Nolalu, I have caught a lunker of a pike. This time I wanted a smaller pike to eat and didn't want to risk killing a trophy-size fish. I picked a small version of Dwayne's pike-musky wooden bait. One toss and I had my eater pike but I wanted to fish a little more so I cast it out again. Sure enough, I tied into a 45-incher. It would have been over 20 pounds. Fortunately, I was able to release it OK.

All told I fished about four hours last summer and in that time I caught my largest-ever smallmouth bass (also my first from Red Lake), largest walleye and largest northern pike.

A summer of heat and fire but no sun

 

The dark clouds on the evening horizon, as late as Sept. 29 when this photo was snapped, were still smoke clouds

As I plugged away on building our new cabin at Red Lake this summer, the thought occurred to me that I might have made a mistake. Maybe we should have bought an RV for our retirement instead, something that we could roll to a more habitable place. This was the second time in three years when summer at Red Lake was something to endure, not enjoy.

Baking heat and choking smoke from forest fires -- again --seemed to say, "Welcome to the ghost of future climate change."

A million acres were on fire to our west in Woodland Caribou Provincial Park and just a bit farther, in adjoining Atikaki Provincial Park in Manitoba and areas to the northwest, a similar area was ablaze. These were the colossal fires but there were many others as well. In fact, at one time there were 100 fires going just in the Red Lake district. It was like Armageddon.

Remote northern communities were being evacuated everywhere. These were mostly First Nations. Summer evacuations have become so common for them it is getting hard to remember when they weren't forced to spend months in a cramped hotel room or on a cot in an arena. Red Lake was put on evacuation notice. Seniors and hospital patients were taken elsewhere. Sprinklers were put up completely around the town's perimeter.  Many residents stayed inside much of the time to escape the heat and smoke. The hardware stores brought in window air conditioners by the pallet-load. 

As bad as it seemed we knew we were fortunate. Out in British Columbia people were dying by the hundreds from the heat. One mountain town -- Lytton -- set a heat record for Canada at  49.6 C or 121.3 F. That was just before the whole place caught on fire and burned to the ground.

The fire season in Red Lake began in May and just got worse and worse. It was hot and dry from the get-go. By mid-June the smoke was so thick boaters were finding their way by GPS to the west end of the lake where we are building. You couldn't see the shoreline. It wasn't obvious where the fires were because we couldn't see a darn thing, sometimes not even a pale sun.

And in a really weird weather phenomenon, there was no wind, day after day, week after week. When you looked at the smoke forecasts on weather sites like FireSmoke.ca the smoke blob over the Red Lake area moved around like a lava lamp. The smoke blanket prevented the lake water from warming up as much as you would expect from the 36 C (97 F) daytime air temperature.

The smoke was so thick that water bombers and helicopters couldn't fly. Those enormous fires just west of us us went untouched for about a month, from the time they might have been extinguished until they had grown too large to control. It is a policy in Woodland Caribou that forest fires which start naturally from lightning should be allowed to burn. At least, that is the policy for some areas of the park. In other areas the new fires would be extinguished by the MNRF. As it turned out this year, the two mega fires began in areas that could have been fought. They weren't, apparently because firefighters were overwhelmed by all the other blazes. And it was too smoky to fly as well.

We never saw a water bomber this summer. Once the crisis had abated, at least somewhat -- we had one pretty good rain -- helicopters attacked the fire just beyond Trout Bay from before sunup to nearly dark for weeks. 

It was obvious to me that the situation this past summer represented a paradigm shift in fire intensity and in weather. We now need a similar paradigm shift in firefighting strategy. For starters, now that climate change is happening exponentially from one year to the next, we need to scrap the policy that lets fires burn anywhere in Northern Ontario, be they in the wilderness park or in the Far North. We just can't be sending billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere any more. This means a war-like expansion of our firefighting capability. We don't just need a dozen more water bombers and fire crews, we need hundreds, and they need to be positioned way up North as well as in road-accessible communities like Red Lake. 

Besides the CO2 liability, forest fires are killing us with their smoke. It isn't only people with asthma; it's all of us. 

Is this going to cost money? Of course, but there is no alternative. We have done nothing about climate change up to this point and this is the price we must pay. The Amazon Rain Forest was found this year to be a contributor to CO2 rather than a sink. The Boreal Forest is about to do the same and then we will have hell to pay.