A beautiful day here. Finn and I went out with our friends Paul and Calder Stewart to steward some trails on Mount Gardner. We were working on Hand Logger's Trail which runs from the top of a cul-de-sac of West Side Road over to where a trail ascends from the end of Windjammer Road in Bluewater. Hand Logger's Trail is part of a trail network that encircles the mountain at around the 400 metre level, meaning that it is relatively level for most of the way. We were out today clearing some branches that had fallen during the winter, moving around some bucked up timber and working on a couple of really wet spots that benefited from having the water channelled to avoid it pooling on the trail. We built a small new section of trail around a persistent swamp and started to clear a new trail beside a significant creek that flows on the west side of the mountain past the old mine shafts.

Calder and Paul have been stewarding the trails around there for the past few years. It's a quiet job they do, largely out of the sight and knowledge of most anyone who uses those trails, but you can really see their work on sections of the path that seem welcoming, or especially aesthetically lovely. We're not slashing and burning roads up there, but rather working in concert with the land itself to build very natural places where flow wants to go, whether that is the flow of water or the flow of feet and bike wheels.

It's just a gorgeous way to spend a Sunday.

On the way home as dusk was falling, the spring air rang out with the referee whistles of Varied Thrushes calling to one another. Spring is truly here.

A warm and wild wind blew through here last night and today the skies are clearing today. It is spring now and the news from the hatchery is that the chums have started to emerge. If you want to see them in the wild, trek down to the base of Bridal Veil falls and see if you can spot the little ones in the pools at the bottom of the fish ladder. They're not easy to spot, but it's a lovely sign of spring when you can see baby salmon.

The stupidest fence on Bowen Island is the one at the end of Whitesails Drive where the trail down to Cape Roger Curtis starts. It's just about 100 meters of chain link fence that doesn't go anywhere and is basically the security version of pissing on a fire hydrant. It seems that its only function is to hold up a couple of "No Trespassing" signs.

Out for a walk this afternoon. SInce I am spending so little time here these days, I'm taking more time to walk deeply in the forest around my house, to visit the land and sea and stay quite connected to the rhythms of this place. So for your edification on this misty late winter afternoon, here are a few things I noticed...

• A few early signs of spring, including new growth on the salmonberries and some skunk cabbage growing in the swamp.
• An accounting of some of the carnage of the winter storms which felled hundreds of trees in Crippen Park, including these three giants.
• The fallen trees will open up much new light in the forest and allow for more growth of food plants like berry bushes and ferns. I was lucky to harvest these licorice fern rhizomes from a fallen maple log. You can see in this photo how thick the moss is that they grow in. So lush. After picking through the moss my hands smelled like rich, wet life. Fantastic!
  

Perhaps in the grand tradition of naming years after the things that happen, this year should be called "the years things got paved." It would be more true to say that, starting in this past summer, parts of Bowen heretofore previously composed of gravel and potholes got a good coat of black top. It started with the sidewalks in the lower Cove and then around Christmas, the parking lot at the United Church got a coat of pavement too, and a curb and a fence to stop people backing out on to the blind corner on Miller Road. Now today, home after nearly two weeks on the road, I see that the parking lot at the Catholic Church, where the residents o Deep Bay stop to collect their mail, has had it's lakes and rivers filled in with sealed asphalt. Ah progress...

And in related "improvement" news, it seems that he Bow Mart renovations are proceeding along. The Bow-Mart was a Bowen institution, an exclusive preserve of a certain generation of island men, who each claimed a stool at the lunch bar and were served coffee and conversation until they died - some of them actually dying right there on their stools. It was the kind of place that defined an older island mentality - open and embracing of long time residents, but suspicious of newcomers, meaning anyone who had arrived in the past generation or so. That kind of thing is largely gone noe, although it survives to some extent in public meetings about zoning issues (!) but with it went a part of the island's character.

Now the Bow-Mart, under whose new ownership I cannot say, is sporting new, brighter coat of brown paint and a new deck around the outsides. It looks like it will reopen as a diner and it seems like the name s being kept and the plastic, occasionally illuminated sign on the post out front seems to be staying, a heritage marker if ever there was one.

It does seem like throw back week around here. The Queen of Capilano has finally gone for her refit - an event that usually happens every year, but didn't happen in 2006. She's off to get herself tuned up and refitted so that she doesn't take logs into her props and suffer the kinds of damage that has sidelined her the past couple of years. At any rate it means that the Bowen Queen is on duty until the beginning of April. She's a smaller and much older boat, having been built in the early 1960s, and whenever I ride her, I have a lovely sensation of actually living on an island. The Cap is nice, but she lacks the charm and inconvenience of the older boats that serve most of the inner islands. This one is rusty and cluttered, with pipes and cables exposed along the ceilings and a powerful diesal engine rumbling beneath decks. Her shabbier appearance belies the fact that she is actually a faster boat than the Cap and when the crew needs to make up time, you really feel it.

My work these days carries me far and wide and around this continent, but I am discovering that such sojourns make me eyes clearer and my heart sing more sweetly when I return here, no matter how fleetingly.

Another winter blast last night. Before midnight a lot of wet snow started falling and by the time I headed down to the Cove it was about 5cms deep, hard to walk on and very wet. There were lots of branches coming down and a power outage a couple of minutes after I knocked my alarm off at 6:30am.

The Snug, however was hopping. Young Will had hooked up a generator and we enjoyed warmth and coffee huddling in the cafe.

Power outages and storms are great for me. They make things inconvienient, and that is why I moved to Bowen in the first place. It seems with the crazy weather that we should expect these things to be more and more common. I travel everywhere with my wind up flashlight now, and today, as a result of the mess everywhere I got to meet a long time islander who I had only seen in passing for six years.

So if you're thinking of moving here, remember that things move slowly in the winter, and it's a good idea to learn to enjoy that.

Not much posting lately obviously, what with christmas and a holiday on Maui during wqhich another wind storm knocked things about here.

We've had a couple of days of light snow lately and colder weather, and the water is clam and flat and even a little thick looking. Into the depths of winter, after a stormy fall.