Numquam desistas!

I think I have an addiction!

I’m mapping again… This time with the help of some quaternary geology maps (thanks, Ontario). According to that, the area I’ve been exploring is all fine sand. I know, I know: why didn’t I look there before wasting all this time? Well, simply put, it’s not 100% reliable and shit happens. For example, DeepMushTrail is located in an area described as “undifferentiated igneous and metamorphic rock, exposed at surface or covered by a discontinuous, thin layer of drift.” This doesn’t strike me as translating well to “3 foot deep sticky grey clay with occasional pebbles.” TruckHoleTrail is described as “undifferentiated carbonate and clastic sedimentary rock, exposed at surface or covered by a discontinuous, thin layer of drift.” Same difference, as far as I’m concerned.

So I look for stuff described like “Glaciomarine and marine deposits: silt and clay basin and quiet water deposits.” There’s lots of these areas east of me, as mentioned previously. I found one spot I can stick my car for the day and explore in the area and it seems a more reasonable expectation to find what I seek here. Cross your fingers for me this coming weekend, assuming my car survives the trip!

pretty-colors

I’m also strongly considering purchasing a Garmin eTrex 10. Cheapest of the eTrex series, with the least features, but miles better than my stupid vehicle GPS. I checked out my current GPS’s track (it tracks movements so you can backtrack or run the same course again) and it showed me going in circles around and around for like 2 hours the other night… And the interwebs confirm it’s totally not designed for hiking like the eTrex units are. So all I need now is gobs upon gobs of cash.

I think it’s time to go looking around to see if I can find an updated list of water levels. With the levels so high this time of year it really makes hunting difficult. You think there’s nothing there and go back 2 months later to find that you missed 2 months worth of excellent conditions due to the water level falling… I know a few spots where I can get a rough idea of, at least, whether the water is higher or lower at the time… Perhaps that will suffice for now.

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This is so not working for me :(

Man oh man. What a disappointing weekend.

OK So one spot I was playing around at isn’t going to work. It’s very fine sand. No silt or clay… So, while it stirs up real nice, it settles almost immediately so I’m not gonna waste any more time with that and risk being caught.

So I drove my poor old car to some other places I had marked on my handy dandy little map. One spot was a really nice muddy looking place. Deep. But all organic. Not the horrible stinky kind, thankfully, but not the kind that hides good mud 3″ below the surface… The fun little spot I was using last year is under water for now… So all that gas wasted and precious miles driven that I wish I hadn’t.

So tonight I thought I’d go check out the creek. Well my GPS apparently is designed for driving, not walking through the bush. So between getting rained on, the GPS not being able to decide which way I’m actually going (I walked in circles for over an hour thinking the GPS was at least pointing the right way when it wasn’t at all!), and the creek’s water level being much higher than when I found it last month, I am so discouraged I doubt I’m going to be wasting any more time looking around.

During my tour of the local forest, I’ve noticed that this entire area is pretty much dominated by this fine sand. Useless. Absolutely useless. Too much grit. Doesn’t really make mud, just wet sand. Maybe I’ll explore east of here some more, and maybe I won’t. I am much more confident that I’ll find finer, more ‘mineral’ and less ‘decayed plant’ soils if I go that way.

It seems my only real choices are to spend a lot of money (I don’t have a lot of money), use spots I’ve already established (because they’re on an existing route), or risk being found out by some angry land owner.  I would much rather look at this in a positive way somehow, but I think it’s safe to say my options are not so great. I feel like this year is going to be nothing but a waste. I know I’m only in the early stage of May, so I really hope I can get some better luck going forward.

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Sunshine and happiness?

I oopsed. Yeah. Since we’ve sort of skipped the spring season and went straight to mid summer temperatures, I’m remembering why day spots weren’t such a high priority before: Carrying 30 lb of supplies in 30°C of sunshine is not enjoyable. Carrying 40 lb of wet and muddy supplies back to home base is going to be even less fun. So I am seriously considering changing ‘day spot’ to mean ‘evening spot.’

There are two areas I’m hoping to explore soon. One is within walking distance of my home, so it’s feasible to walk to the spot when the sun starts to go down, and having some fun, clean up, and return home just as it’s starting to get dark. This puts me in the shower around 9:30 or 10pm and gives me the option to avoid waking my neighbour up while giving me lots of time to play.

The second area I have to drive to. There’s a few spots I want to explore in this area. One being a bit close to the road (and therefore requiring a nighttime trip), and the others being down a trail.  The entire area is on crown land so I don’t have to worry about any trumped up trespassing charges.  It’s a bit further down the road from a place I frequented last summer, which is a fairly short drive and gave me the option of going there in the late evening and setting up while there’s still some leftover sunlight… And it was just far enough from the road that I didn’t have to scramble too hard to get out of the way when headlights approached…

I have no idea what to expect from either place. When I checked out the creek earlier this year, it was pretty soggy but offered some depth. It didn’t smell bad so probably is a pretty safe place to play, but this was while the ground was still pretty frozen. Now that everything’s heating up drastically, this could end up being the biggest disappointment of 2015.

Hmmm. Last year I found a spot I wanted to check out, and I went back a while later and checked it out. Funny I don’t see a post about it on here, since I’m certain I did mention it at least once… Anyway. It was this nice expanse of what turned out to be this incredibly deep and soft silty stuff. I took a wrong step, and sank to my waist without even trying. Took me like 10 minutes to get my foot unstuck (I had shoes on, and I came very close to losing one of them!)… I am pretty sure I took some photos.  The only problem was the smell was so horrible I decided not to go back. It would’ve made a beautiful day spot. 🙁  Now, the water levels here have been pretty low the last few years, so it’s possible the situation has improved somewhat, but I think I’m still worried about potentially harmful bacteria being present… I’m gonna go try to find those photos…

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Unpatented Land

It’s another day of mapping stuff!  OK So I’ve learned today that ‘unpatented land’ refers to land that is crown-owned and not available for sale. I’ve also learned that my handy dandy mapping tool will assign a happy blue color to parcels of land that fall into this category.

What does that mean? It means I can determine which trails I can use and in what areas I can happily get my wam on without actually trespassing on some violent gun owner’s precious land… This also exponentially increases my chances of finding a suitable day spot. Yes, a day spot. My prime goal for this year. Now if I could just fix my car…

I am happy.

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>go east 

Digging here reveals nothing
>go east
You are beside the trail in a province-owned forest.
There are trees on both sides of you.
A few feet in front of you is a crystal clear pond.
The ground here seems very soft.
>dig
I think you found something!
>

… I went back to the place I shouldn’t be going. The ground is much warmer now, so yay. And yeah the mud I found there is interesting. It’s got this red/orange color to it. I’m not exactly sure what it’s made of, but I’m guessing it has to do with iron content… That might also explain how this mud tends to settle when left alone, so if I leave it for a day or two, it will return to being hard ground with water on top, and I have to dig it out all over again. I think what I’m in here is some sort of iron-rich fine sandy stuff. It’s makes OK mud, albeit a bit gritty. It’ll do in a pinch.

I yanked up the nice satellite imagery we have for this area (very recent, and much higher resolution than Google [Earth|Maps]), and I see there’s a publicly accessible tract of forest nearby with some OK looking spots that aren’t too close to public road… It doesn’t give me much indication of what the soil is like, but it’s east of here, and I’ve noticed as I go more east I get finer soils…

So I’m going back to where I know all the glaciomarine clays are. DeepMushTrail is this type of clay mixed with some silt and/or very fine sand, and a few small rocks… One of it’s most endearing qualities is that if I leave the spot for a week or two and return to it, my first step ends at the same depth that my last step did the month before.  The more east I go, the finer the soil particles get, so now I have some sort of focus to my summer travels. 🙂

Aside from all this… The other day I received a message suggesting I enable comments for individual posts. First off, thanks for your kind feedback! Second, re-enabling comments is definitely on my to-do list, however, I am very hesitant to allow public comments because of the never-ending spam problem, and I’m not interested at all in allowing account signups.  I have, in the past, allowed comments, which were heavily moderated. I may allow this again at some point, but there is not likely to be much ‘development’ work on the site until the summer is over… Stay tuned!

The first order of business when I do return to heavy development is to update my (years old) theme to current standards. This will be quite a bit of work, but I will end up with a really nice responsive theme. I’ve noticed I get a lot of traffic from iOS and Android devices, which seems really odd to me since I find web browsing on phones/tablets to be very cumbersome.

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Happy Monday!

So it’s Monday again. It was a beautiful warm weekend and yet I managed to not take a single walk… A while back I found a little mapping tool that shows the temperature of the ground at (I think) the surface. I see in our area we’re approaching a solid 60°F… But I imagine it’s still pretty chilly once you get down a foot or two. I remember last year at this time we had a nice warm night and I went for my first night-long romp of 2014, and ended up having a good time, aside from the rain-fueled shivers…

I really want to go back to that DeepMushTrail hole, but I’m really kind of scared to because I made a noticeable dent in the ground there, surrounded it with footprints, and hid in the tall grass, which eventually got mowed down. If they didn’t know what was going on there before, they sure did by the end of the summer.  If I can find a more hidden spot to park my wheelz, I think it’s more than worth a kilometer or two hike to visit this hole again sometime in the summer. Once I get my car all fixed up, I’m gonna tour by there one evening and see what the place looks like, and I’ll try to decide whether it’s worth trying to discreetly visit or not.

Oh and in other news, I’ve started sort of a glossary page, which I quickly learned really doesn’t need to exist… But I was bored, and this blog is sort of my current pet project. Maybe I’ll update it and maybe I won’t. It would make more sense to have definitions relevant to this blog, rather than generic every day normal words like ‘clay.’

I’m also considering some sort of simple little rating system so random visitors could quickly click a 1-5 sort of rating on any post they read… I am interested in adding more interesting subject matter, because I don’t think very many people are really interested in what I’m doing in my spare time… But I don’t know. I can’t recall even so much as a single piece of feedback on my dinky little feedback form.  I experimented briefly with a basic Facebook ‘Like’ button, but it didn’t really jive with the rest of the page… It’s something I think I’ll revisit some time, tho.

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Stones and weeds

You’d think with all the little quarry/pit operations we’ve got happening around here I’d be able to find at least one nice silt pond to play in… I see these gigantic open spaces with this glorious looking, really, really creamy silty/clay kinda stuff and I’m so incredibly envious.

Then there’s funny expanses of river sediments… I see them all over the world, and I’m literally surrounded by lakes and rivers here, and I see nothing remotely resembling these places. Sure, some of them are in the rainforest or whatever, but you’d think I’d find something locally. On the other hand, the part of the graben I’m living inside should contain massive quantities of sediments left behind from the ice ages… Or so the geologists say…

Seriously… Look at this guy…

happycroc-crop

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy to not have crocodiles in my mud pit and all that… But it’s really nice looking mud and I’d love to romp around there… I have a long multi-day road trip planned for later this summer, and I expect I’ll encounter a few places to check out… Especially if the water levels stay low. Wish me luck finding a spot without an audience!

I’m tempted to create a ‘mud test’ to test the consistency and composition… The following photo is probably from one of those ‘silt ponds’ that I can’t seem to locate locally… That’s a real nice little splat, huh?

Long after the rock hit bottom, the splash remains on the surface of a mud pit in Paria Canyon.

What really stands out in these photos? No. Goddamn. Stones. Zero. Absolutely smooth. Smooth and creamy as the smoothest, creamiest peanut butter. Probably just as sticky, too! *drool* I’ve found a few spots around here with practically no stones that I’ll have to get some photos of this summer. The two spots I do have photos of are OK but do contain some stones… But hey I’m always on the lookout!

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Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud!

Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud! Warm weather makes me want to play in the mud!  Continue reading →

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Nope!

Despite the frigid half-winter/half-spring temperatures lately, I took a brief stroll through the fun looking mud place near my house again. I apparently missed this before somehow but there’s a 6-foot-high pile of dirt off to the side of the trail near one of the spring ponds. A closer look revealed it’s a nice looking silty-clay kinda dirt, which is always a nice find. Once the mini pond’s water level drops I’ll most likely take a tour there again and shovel some of the dirt into the pond, which should make a nice big and deep play hole…

It also seems that someone has actually visited the site since the last time I walked through. Whoever it was only took their vehicle part of the way because it’s still pretty soft… But it confirms that there actually is someone using the area for some purpose. So for my own safety, I will not be returning any time soon.

I am hoping this weekend turns out to be nicer than the weather service is predicting because I really want the ground to warm up already! I am very much looking forward to returning to the creek area I found a few weeks ago.  This past week has been cold and rainy, and my feets were still frozen numb from wandering around last night. C’mon with the +30 sunny days already!

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Playing with SEO!

Yeah so today I’m playing with some SEO tools. Not that I’m really all that interested in being the highest ranked site for the term “squishy mess” and yet I am… Hopefully I’ll learn something useful to use in sites I create for others in the future!

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