Waskahegan Trail Association

By Jerry Shaw

Most of our prairie herbs, shrubs and trees flower in the spring months. Some are still flowering in late July. By mid August most flowers except for asters, goldenrod and several composite flowered ground plants, have finished flowering and are starting to show enlarged seed pods or fruit, some with attractive color patterns.

By mid August this year at the Ministik bird sanctuary and around the east side of Saunders Lake one could spot some of these colorful seed pods along the edge of the just-maintained trail. These include

• Solomon’s seal—maroon strips on green
• Fairy bells—bright red dime-sized balls
• Dogbane—long green,  turning bright red, bean-like seed pods from the sweet smelling flowers around a high ridge around a beaver pond experienced in June.

Do the colors help in seeing distribution?

Many leaves of lilies with their characteristic venation were found also.

Within 100 feet of the sign of the Caernarvon Farm at the north east corner of Saunders Lake, we found Jewelweed with its orange flowers—Impatiens capensis Meerb forma citrina (Weath.), according to Grays Manual of Botany (8th ed.). This is the first time I’ve seen it in western Canada.

I would be interested to know if others have seen this in southern Alberta where there may be poison ivy. Sources on the Internet say that you can crush and rub jewelweed over poison ivy contact spots to denature the plant’s uroshiol poison.

One cannot hike Miquelon North without being reminded that it was a St. Francis Xavier Biology 30 class that put in the section of Waskahegan Trail from Miquelon Lake Park to just beyond Horseshoe Lake in the 1970s.

To commemorate their hard work the students, under the guidance of their teacher, Vi Sunohara, student Gary Hnatko, and our Pat Bourque, hauled a sharpened 4×4 post to the highest point on the trail. The students skillfully carved into the post “St FX Waskahegan Lookout.” They also had the foresight to bring the tools required to pound that post deep into the ground.

Some 40 years later, the landmark is still there and we talk about the great citizenship shown by the St. FX students and their teacher. (As evidenced by the Waskahegan Trail Guidebook: Our Millennium Edition (2001, p. 136), the students made quite an impression: “In line with the friendly bantering that went on between the class and Pat Bourque, the Waskahegan coordinator, Pat suggests that the sign on the hill should have read “St. FX Look Out!”

As we walked the trail, we imagined what a great education those students had so many years ago as they travelled the same route. Did they notice the standard summer flowers like the goldenrod, asters, sow thistle and yarrow? Or were they really keen to notice the less obtrusive Indian Pipe and Wintergreen? Were they scared silly by a pair of Ruffed Grouse like Anita and I were? Did they look up occasionally, like we did, and marvel at the zeppelin-like pelicans happily swirling with the wind currents above the lake? And was Erickson’s large culvert (a prominent landmark) still channeling massive amounts of water? Or did it look out of place then, as it does now, in the mostly dry, boggy pasture?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in the day, Miquelon Lake was much nicer for recreation, and the students likely took less time to eat their lunch and more time to frolic in the lake. We, however, were not tempted to go for a dip in the murky, shallow lake of today. As we enjoyed our lunch at a shady spot near the boat launch, we checked out the pictures that Vivian had already taken and gave our own student representative, Marco, the GPS so he could accurately determine our distance travelled.

 

The route back was delightful The wide open meadows were teeming with wildflowers. During the hottest part of the day, we appreciated even more so the generous assortment of mushrooms growing in the cooler shaded areas of the bush.

As we walked along the varied terrain we could not help but appreciate the hard labour of our own trail maintenance crew that, like the kids of so many years ago, still battle large trees fallen across the path, dense slough grass, thistles, large boulders, thick shrubbery, cow patties, huge ant hills and plenty of mosquitoes. We were thankful to be able to hike on a very clear and extraordinarily well-marked trail. Total distance travelled, reported Marco, was 9.9kms.

View these pictures and more on Flickr