Northern Ontario

I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute to this blog of wanders; I was inspired by the Wombat wanders, and have enjoyed all the others posted here. I suspect my posts will be mainly nature walks, both because I don't get out into town on foot very often, and because there is not a vast amount of architectural interest in the town of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. But I hope I will manage to find a few places of interest, to myself at least. In the meantime, I will start by posting our Good Friday walk through one of the local conservation areas:

Although we've had lovely weather for the last several weeks, everything's still in early spring greyness (except the evergreens, of course). The pines are always beautiful, though:


There was still ice in the shady spots, in the ditches by the side of the path:


There were a few spots of colour, though:


There was evidence of recent beaver activity:


They must have been using the birches for their dam:

And here's their lodge:


We could see traces of their work all around (look for the pointy stumps):


Then we passed this bridge, over a little stream, small because of the beaver dam just upstream:


A few shots of the typical Canadian Shield landscape (though the predominance of birches, rather than spruce, is partly a result of the deforestation caused by the pollution of the Sudbury refineries in the last century; the reclamation and regreening process has been amazing, but the soil is still very thin in many places, and it's still at the stage of the fast-growing birches):


And a final picture, particularly appropriate for Sudbury: some slag from the nickel refinery, used as fill for the construction of the path through the conservation area!


It was a lovely day, even though the signs of spring were few and far between. Maybe later in the season I'll be able to show some of the beauty of the reviving greenery.