Minnekhada Regional Park, 5 May 2013

We revisited Minnekhada a couple of years ago and enjoyed it enough to put it back on to the “to-do again someday”. We needed something fairly gentle to warm up with and settled on re-revisiting the view from the High Knoll. We met Merewyn and her new car at Tim Hortons in Port Coquitlam and headed out in convoy to the park. It was a warm bordering on hot day so we just took it really easy, wandering along the trail at quite a leisurely pace. That gave me plenty of time to case out flower shots, but for the most part we were a little early. We spotted a frog on our ascent up to High Knoll so I could go home happy with a wildlife sighting!

The view from the knoll was as fine as ever, and as busy as ever. We found a shady spot away from the crowds (why do people insist on sitting in full sun with their overheated black dogs?) and ate lunch. On our way down I decided to look for a clear view towards Golden Ears but came back empty handed. A couple of peek-a-boo glimpses but not much else. I caught up with Merewyn and Maria and this time we were feeling so lazy we just opted to miss out Low Knoll and the trail around by the lodge, and took the short cut back to the car.

That turned out to be a pretty good decision in my books as we caught sight of two beavers swimming in the marsh! We stopped and watched them for a few minutes, taking more than a few photos. Wow! I was more than happy with my new wildlife sightings. We chatted with a couple of others who’d stopped to watch and they told us they’d seen three bears just at the parking lot. Well, knowing our luck with bears we thought that was interesting but ah, well, we wouldn’t see any.

Wrong – on our way back along the final stretch of the trail to the parking lot, we heard some rustling in the salmonberry thickets to my right that stopped us in our tracks. We peered into the bushes and could clearly see a black nose, two eyes and a pair of furry ears looking back at us. I got as far as picking up the camera when the bear turned and disappeared into the undergrowth. We could clearly hear it from time to time, but we caught no further sight of it. Well, now I was more than more than happy with our wildlife sightings for the day :-)