We started the morning with a hearty breakfast from the Tawow resort owners. Cakes as thick as steaks with delicious sausage. Full bellies until lunch time!
We started the day out on the road from the lodge to Hwy 6- absolutely filled up with orchids in the ditches. Very awesome way to start the morning. The first one we saw was cyp passerinum, a lovely little white jobby with a pleasant fragrance.
A little further down the road, some yellows:
Here is what I see when we stop at a particularly cool specimen:
So much attention paid to one plant. This trip is definitely focused on photography!
Josh was super pumped to find "his plant": Cloudberry!
He even convinced Steig into sending him some Cloudberry seeds direct from Sweden when he returns home. What a con artist, haha!
We finally left Herb Lake Landing and drove for a while...I slept a bit...then we stopped for lunch at ___. lunch already, didn't we just have breakfast?? Regardless, we still ate, and managed to find some really nice gneiss. Gneiss is a really nice (haha) rock which is very compressed granite and forms very tight banding, resulting in striped rocks!
The campground we lunched at had a "swimming beach". Obviously the water is a little low:
Josh got some nice shots of a little yellow plant which is fairly arctic just chilling out on some rocks here.
Back on the road again, and Lorne always leads the 4-car caravan. Suddenly he hits the brakes and whips a U turn. We of course are wondering what the heck he saw, so we follow and park on the shoulder. Here is what he saw:
A yellow form of wood lily! Not very common so this was a photo opportunity. And we lucked out and had 2 to photograph in this area.
Onward to Pisew falls, quite a cool waterfall!
Josh spotted a really dense black spruce broom:
About the size of a regulation football, very cool.
There was a nice suspension bridge to go across the river, donated by the Thompson rotary club.
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
We finally arrived in Thompson, the (paved) end of the road! It's actually the third largest city in Manitoba if you can believe that. Here is where we get on the train to Churchill.
Beer is a commodity in the bush, so they load up on it whenever possible and ship it up.
Bye bye Thompson!
Josh's favorite pastime, roadside botany, has turned into rail side botany!
Our first actual stop, Pikwitonei "The Pik".
It's tiny. This is the station.
The community dogs get really excited and go bonkers when the train arrives. The crusty old guy sitting down there was hobbling towards the hut and was basically tackled by the dogs. He smacked them with his canes, it was actually pretty funny.
(insert dining car experience and pic)
Here's a keen observation of train life on this rail, and I mean this in the least racist way possible: the natives are all drunks. Not kidding. Even the teenagers. I guess they have nothing better to do, or it was Canada Day? There was a group who were in our car that were very rowdy. One I'll call the shrieker, was pretty drunk and was screaming something about her husband and swearing lots. Made it a pretty pleasant 2 hours. They finally got off in Ilford. I put in my headphones and watched monsters Inc and listened to N2 of 2010's Alpine show. Audio bliss. All it takes is a little Dave to make a situation better.
10:57 and still light enough not to need lights... I love this. See you in Churchill!
12:46AM: Stopped at the true "end of the road" in Gillam.
This is the last real stop until Churchill, which is almost another 8-10 hours ahead of us. This is an unbearably long train ride! I wouldn't want to have to do this very often.
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