Waskahegan Trail Association

This hike followed the section of Mill Creek Ravine south of Whitemud Drive, starting in the Silver Berry neighborhood of Millwoods. Some of us remember when much of this land lay outside the Edmonton city limits.

Today it is a well-established, largely multi-use trail, that criss-crosses the creek numerous times on bridges. The scenery on the trail varies tremendously, from deep deciduous woods, to stretches alongside elegant homes with landscaped backyards, to a few quiet meadows.

At this time, the paths are lined with the blooms of fragrant wild rose shrubs, snowy white Canada anemone, bunchberry, and wintergreen.

In the forest next to the Moravian Cemetery, we found this huge patch of pink wintergreen (6 inches high) and several stands of spotted coralroot orchids (18 inches high). From these pictures, they look like they should be related, but biologically they are quite different.

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Ten people took part in the hike. Lunch was at the park next to the Millwoods golf course. It was good to have park washrooms open again.

Thanks to Johanna for leading this hike. You can find more photos on Flickr.

For this hike, we went deeper into the country than we had since spring, into the Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area in the heart of the Beaver Hills Biosphere.

The trail from the Waskehegan Staging Area (not related to the Waskahegan Trail—note the difference in spelling) had been scouted on Thursday.

So the eight of us knew exactly what was in store for us. Although the rains had made a mess of some of the trails, the lushness of the vegetation and the filled-to-the-brim ponds more than made up for it.

The humidity and the mosquitoes were no match for us. Especially when we were treated to these water calla in full bloom. There were mounds of these in almost every pond.

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Thanks to John for scouting and leading this hike. You can find more photos on our Flickr album.