Walking the Saw Whet Trail with a Camera

I promised myself that I’d walk the Saw Whet Trail again, and soon, so yesterday I drove out to Lumsden and parked at the trailhead. I’m finding the return to full-time study stressful and thought a long walk would ease my nerves. This time, though, I remembered to bring my camera.

By starting at the Saw Whet trailhead, I avoided the long and not very interesting walk out of the village. I was a little late starting and thought that if I had extra time, I could walk to the end of the Deer Valley Trail. And that’s what I ended up doing.

I saw a few bootprints where the trail had been wet this week, but like last weekend I was the only person walking. Maybe this trail is one of those “best kept secrets” but it deserves to be more traveled.

 

The trail crosses the divide between the Qu’Appelle and Wascana Creek valleys, and then it follows Wascana Creek for a while. I think I like the hillier part of the trail better than the flat valley bottom. I was thinking about that, walking along the chokecherries that screen the creek from the trail, when I hard something crash down the bank and splash across the creek. I looked through the bushes and saw a big white-tail buck climbing the bank on the other side of the creek. We stared at each other. Then the moment was over and he ran for cover while I fumbled for my camera. He was gone before I was ready to take his picture. The moral of the story: even the flat parts of the prairie can surprise you.

He wasn’t the only creature I saw. What last weekend I had taken to be toads on the trail near Wascana Creek turned out to be leopard frogs. I was surprised by a couple of garter snakes and thought about the Emily Dickinson poem about the “narrow fellow in the grass.” I saw a pair of hawks, too. I don’t know if they were the same ones I saw last weekend. This time they were less interested in me and more interested in finding rodents in a field of flax.

The Saw Whet Trail isn’t very long, just about six and a half kilometres from one trailhead to the other. The Deer Valley Trail is another five kilometres. I walked it to the very end. It winds around the Deer Valley housing development, over the native prairie that remains between the houses and the golf course, and ends up at what used to be a bridge over Wascana Creek. The bridge was washed out during a storm in the 1950s, but you can see what’s left of be the road between Lumsden and the Number One highway. The Deer Valley Trail is okay, but it suffers in comparison to the Saw Whet Trail. It’s not as well marked, and the footpath tends to peter out between waymarkers. And walking through the subdivision is less interesting to me than walking over hills and through valleys. I called the houses “jerrybuilt McMansions” in my last post and I was thinking that sounded rather judgmental and petty until I noticed that one of the houses there has been abandoned because of a structural failure. I did enjoy walking through the prairie; the south-facing hillside was covered in one of my favorite grasses, little bluestem. I noticed, though, that weeds introduced when the houses were built are starting to move into the prairie, and I wondered what the future will hold for that remnant grassland. Nothing good, I fear, as more houses are constructed and more weeds introduced. One thing I’ve learned from my own small attempt at restoring a native prairie: the weeds always win.

It was a great walk, and at the end of it I was tired, in a good way, and happy. Christine says she’s going to come along with me next weekend. I hope so; it would be fun to walk the trail with someone else.