The Beach of Dead Trees

Last night a friend took me for a ride on his dirt bike. It is the first time I have ever been on one, and it was AWESOME! Yes, I know what some of you are thinking, and it is dangerous, but, as I'm sure you are now well aware, lots of things I do with my time are dangerous, and there are ways to mitigate the risks with proper gear and by making sure to leave your ego at home. I used to ride on the back of a friend's street bike years ago, until my parents told me that I had to move out if I kept it up, so I had him start picking me up on the corner of our street rather than directly out front of the house. He ended up crashing his bike one day, without me on the back, thankfully, and that was the end of that.

Yesterday I took the students out to our last Lillooet swimming lesson of the year, and I brought my underwater camera for them to use during the free time part of the swim. They took some amazing shots which we will put up on the GBCS blog early next week.

Here's a picture of an eagle taking flight that I captured during one of our Lillooet drives. Liam calls it the "stalker eagle" because it seems to be sitting in the exact same place each day, which reminds me of the lamppost hawk in North Van that perches on a streetlamp by the exit for Lynn Valley.

Last night my friend and I watched two bald eagles chasing a squawking Canada goose down the valley of the La Joie reservoir. They dipped and dived at it, and then when it was just a pinprick of movement amongst the dark trees on the opposite shore, the sound stopped, and the eagles circled high overhead.

The beach we went to was amazing, in a this-is-what-humans-do-to-the-environment kind of way. It reminds me of the photographs of Edward Burtynsky: hauntingly beautiful scenes of resource extraction.

Decades ago the river that flowed through the valley was dammed and therefore flooded, which means that the remnants of the forest that skirted the river are under water for the summer and fall months after the yearly snowmelt. During the spring the water level is at its lowest, meaning the exposed remains of the forest are left visible like bones of a carcass that has been picked over and finally left to the earth to reclaim. Towering logs protrude from the ground, and roots lift from the surface of the earth like spidery sculptures, the silty sand having long been washed out from under them.

There was one stump that we calculated to be about four-hundred years old.

A clearcut was just up the hill from us as well, with a single tree left standing in a tangle of leftover logging debris and bushy new growth.

We had a fire and revelled in the quiet solitude, the mating calls of a nearby grouse starting up and stopping as we watched a haze of precipitation enfold the distant white-topped mountain peaks. Life is good here. Quiet and slow.