I’m sure the Gabriola RCMP has a lost and found box, but this is the method I prefer: upon finding a lost thing in the woods, the finder hangs it on a tree. Next time you go by, you’ll see your glove, hat, or whatever waiting for you, right where you dropped it.
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This tree came down a while ago in the Gabriola woods, right across a path. It’s on the trail between the twisty antlers and the single antler. I thought I’d mention it here in case the tree-moving trail angels feel like doing something about it. Update, March 22nd: all sorted out! See, now it’s like [...]
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Gabriola’s spiral triskele puzzled a number of us last summer. Who made it, and why? In that blog post I showed you a photo of the triskele, and some of you added information about triskeles in the comments, and guesses about this one. But we were still left wondering about the Gabriola triskele. The mystery [...]
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I’ve been back and forth looking for the cable trailmarker, but it seems to have vanished altogether. Where’d it go? Did you take it? Or is it just that I am seriously disoriented?
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When Gabriola Land and Trails Trust volunteers have work parties, they don’t mess around. Here’s what they did yesterday afternoon: transformed a wickedly muddy section of trail into this. It’s a corduroy road – or, well, a corduroy walkway, anyway.
Filed in Gabriola Island,trails 7 Comments so far
This caught my eye, because it’s not typical of Gabriola. It’s a poinsettia leaf, floating in a stream in the middle of the woods. Hmm. How odd. You might remember that I found a poinsettia plant in the Gabriola forest last year, but it was dead when I came across it. I’ve had a feeling [...]
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Do you see the trail there, Gabriola? I don’t either, though we’re looking straight at it. But this is good, right? You wanted extra exercise and extra adventure. Tramping through snow piled on top of salal is just the ticket, and is far more fun than some silly routine at the gym. Extra points if [...]
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This stump in the Gabriola woods has come to life with salal hair and shocking white eyes. (See also: Gabriola’s forest monster and Cladonia creature.)
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Just next to the washing machine in the Gabriola woods, there was a old car tire, nestled in the salal. I know that tire has been there for at least five years, and I’m guessing much longer than that. But what do you know? Somebody has fished out that tire, and used is as a [...]
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This appeared just a few days ago in the Gabriola woods. Rather striking, isn’t it? There are several deer skulls in use as trailmarkers on Gabriola. (These ones, those ones, and some others, too.) What’s odd about this deer skull is that the antlers have been sawn off. Why would anybody do that?
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On walks, the dog thinks I am dense: how can this human possibly miss all the great smells? How can this human walk right by the place where deer romped, and ignore the route deer took into the Gabriola woods? How stupid is that? And then snow comes, and I can see where the deer [...]
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Say you’re coming from Descanso Bay and heading to Twin Beaches. A block before Twin Beaches Mall, King Road is on your right. If you go to the end of King Road, the large field behind Twin Beaches Mall is on your left. Ahead is a non-paved road which devolves into trails, and connects rather [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island,trails 12 Comments so far
In the middle of the Gabriola forest, somebody left a poinsettia plant on a stump. It makes an awfully useful trailmarker, I must say: before it arrived I often missed the obscure trail nearby. Not since! It’s not far from the forest vase. I think it was February when I first spotted this plant – [...]
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In the middle of the Gabriola woods, far from any trail, here we have it: a section taken out of a log, presumably so that a hiker can walk through the log instead of clambering over it. (In the summer I found a similarly modified log on a different part of the island.) Who took [...]
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This is one of the moss-covered stumps in the Gabriola woods. (It’s on the trail that leads down from the log bridge towards the antlers on a cedar tree and then on to the antlers that are turning green.) The branch has just appeared in the last while.
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Gabriola has all sorts of splendid trees, but I think these two are at the top of the list. See? They’ve grown together, and one tree has absorbed the other tree’s trunk. And yet they both grow on!
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I wondered about trees like this — they’re here and there in the Gabriola woods. Why does the moss grow in horizontal stripes? Well. It turns out that the space between the bands of moss is where the trailmarker tape was, years ago. And then the tape fell off and left this pattern. It’s a [...]
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Last January I blogged about tree number two, which stands in the Gabriola forest, apparently just to perplex me. Well. Now I’ve found the next tree in the series, I guess – tree number three. It’s 420 metres from the tree number two, and not on a trail… unless you count an old logging road [...]
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