Snow Day!

Sorry for the posting delay, I've been distracted by snow! We're in the middle of the Artic airflow that's heading towards Vancouver and Friday night we got a 'big' snow (big to me anyway, probably 6 or 7cm) and then we were blessed with sun all day Saturday!

The possibly now familiar view from my sliding door

Trees and wires and snow, oh my!

So after a nice long sleep-in on Saturday (due to some debauchery and dancing in the local bar on Friday night) my three roommates and two of our good friends geared up and headed out to hike the mountain behind our house. I use the word mountain very lightly.

Off we go!

The entire hike was just stunning

We started out like good little hikers on pretty well groomed trail but abandoned it quickly in our ongoing search for monumental old-growth trees. One my roommates, T, took the lead and unwittingly lead us into a new growth Hemlock area so we bushwhacked our way through the snow for quite a while, mostly walking on top of the old fallen trees and bush as much as we could. We failed to find much old-growth, we think we weren't high enough up the hill, but there were some spectacular streams and we stumbled upon a deer stand where we had our lunch. 

We even managed to cross all the water we encountered without anyone falling in!

Deer stand. Deer are invasive species here and doing a lot of damage to the existing silvaculture of the forests.

Today is less sunny and thus more conducive to working, which is good considering how much homework we have! Goodness me. Couple of presentations coming up this week, plus tomorrow night the HGHES (Haida Gwaii Higher Education Society, the group that runs this program) is doing an evening event to introduce us to the community and a couple of us, myself included, have been asked to talk a bit about why we're here. Add to all that to my 'work-work' and I've got myself a pretty busy day lined up. We're in for a very cold snap this week, someone said the temperature should be around minus 7, and I unfortunately just broke the zipper on one of the two pairs of pants I brought and the other pair are in the wash. Time for layering long underwear!