Spring Thaw

A few weeks back I was snowshoeing in MacGregor Point Provincial Park with a friend from Toronto. He was up for the weekend and convinced me to try ‘snow walking’ for the first time.

It was a magnificent day, cold, clear and crisp. The sky was an unbelievable blue. The ice was on the lake out to the horizon. The snow was soft and deep, I didn’t have the proper poles, but we swapped back and forth, and I managed. We left the marked trails and wandered freely along the lake edge in areas you wouldn’t dare walk without the ‘bear paws.” All in all, it was a liberating experience.

As we trudged along what used to be the beach we saw three swans swimming in a small not-yet-frozen pool close to the shore. We couldn’t help but wonder what they thought they were doing there. 

Since then, we have had a thaw if you want to call it that. In short, we’ve lost most of our snow. Grass is visible everywhere , fields are flooding, the river lost its ice and the roads are finally bare. Yesterday, N and I went back to MacGregor – without snowshoes. We wanted to see what the thaw had done.

The Skating Oval was closed. Small ice crusted streams ran down to the lake. Most of the snow in the bush was gone, what remained on the trails was hard packed and made walking difficult. The trails were, for the most part, bare to snow packed blocked with winter fallen trees waiting for the chainsaw. It was a mid-February thaw and we wondered if Spring was close enough to become a reality.

Along the shoreline, the beach reappeared. There were footprints in the sand where we had left snowshoe prints.

The swans were gone though.