I recently joined about 30 other people in a snowshoe under the stars guided by volunteers from the Friends of Gatineau Park. There are more of these events coming up in the future so check the schedule if you’re interested.
We met at the Visitor Centre in Old Chelsea and for the price of $10 for “Friends” members, $15 for non-members we were lent snowshoes if we didn’t have our own. Our guides Andrée-Anne and Jack spent 15 minutes talking about the winter woods that we would be snowshoeing through. They showed us pictures of otter tracks and slides, beaver cut trees, snowshoe hare tracks and snow fleas or springtails; all of which were things seen in daylight along the trail that we were about to embark on. Before leaving on our walk they generously gave everyone a Werther’s Original candy but cruelly told us not to eat it.
You can hear some of the pre-departure chat here in not-quite-ideal audio.
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We broke into a Francophone and an Anglophone group each with a pair of “sweepers” assigned to pull up the rear of the line of people to be sure no one got lost in the woods, and headed into the night. We started by walking from the visitor centre past the sugar shack and across the bridge to the sugarbush trail, nipping across the Meech Lake Road quite safely with Jack in his highly reflective emergency rescue jacket. This brought us to the joint start of ski trail #1 and snowshoe trail #60. Only there did we strap on our snowshoes.
Many of the people participating in the outing had never snowshoed or been out at night in the winter woods before. Putting on borrowed snowshoes for the first time in the dark can take a little patience but fortunately it wasn’t too cold so people’s fingers didn’t get frozen and groups formed around people with headlamps as we helped one another buckle into our racquettes.
Our first stop was at a tiny piece of open water where a stream is visible at the edge of the path. Earlier in the day Jack had been out to scout what could be seen and here he’d noticed otter tracks. The warm weather had degraded their sharpness and it was harder to see them in the lamplight but the proved a good stimulus for discussion of how otters survive the cold weather in the water and on snow. One of the interesting things about otters is how they enjoy themselves. Being a water-creature there is no reason for them to climb up to the top of the hills that surround the lakes and streams of Gatineau Park, but they do; and the reason they do it is just for the pure fun of sliding down again. They launch themselves more sleek than an Olympic bobsled (maybe skeleton racer is more appropriate since they go head first) and steer themselves through the trees gracefully on their bellies.
As we strode up toward a second stopping place I noticed how noisy a sport snowshoeing is. Modern snowshoes do kind of resemble a drum-head and as all of us thumped and clattered through the hard packed trail the din was surprising. That’s one of the reasons why when Jack showed us some coyote tracks and talk turned to wolves and coyotes, no one freaked out when someone voiced their realization that there were coyotes and wolves in the woods around us.
Jack talked to us about the fact that fresh snow is about 97% air. (You’ll note that Jack has a lot to say in my narrative because he led the Anglophone group. It’s not that Andrée-Anne was mute, I just wasn’t with her group to hear her. In fact the Francophone group took some time longer to circle trail #60 and return to the sugarshack for hot chocolate so I accused Andrée-Anne of actually talking more; she denied it. Perhaps it was that old bane of translators that French takes something like 20% more room on the page to express the same content.) …more than 90% air. His point being that snow is an excellent insulator and that even when it is a bone chilling -40°C above the snow there are mice and shrews and the like running around in crystalline tunnels above the leaf litter beneath the snow and having a fine old time of it. This is important for their survival since their teeny bodies have a relatively teenier mass-to-body-surface-area-ratio and can’t retain heat very long when they come to the surface. This is where we were invited to take out our Worther’s Original candies because each of these weighs about 5 grams and the little beasties beneath the snow weigh in at 2 to 6 grams.
Snowshoe hares were explained to have such a light touch as they bounded over the snow that they exerted a mere 12 grams per square centimeter on the surface. This compared with 100 g/cm2 for a housecat, 34 g/cm2 for a lynx, and an unthinkable pressure for we snowshoers. Which explains why we had drum-heads tied to our feet.
Hares were also said to eat their own poo. Jack demonstrated by popping little pellets from a baggie into his mouth. Why would hares do such a thing? Why would Jack do such a thing? Hares do it because they aren’t cows and they don’t have numerous stomachs to pass and repass their food in an attempt to extract as much energy from it as possible. Thus digesting for a second time requires them to gobble up their own pellets. Jack did it for dramatic effect. What a dedicated nature guide! Oh, they were glossette raisins – maybe that’s why we were being guided in the dark.
Hares and other winter adapted animals change colour in winter not only so that their new white look gives them camouflage. It turns out that a white surface has a lower emissivity for heat loss and just by being white keeps these animals warmer.
We talked of birds; of how ruffled grouse dive under the snow to use its insulation qualities; of how they sometimes burst, flapping loudly, from a seemingly unblemished blanket of new snow, killing the passing snowshoer by giving them a heart attack. Of course the poor bird hiding in the snow was likely near heart attack itself as it heard the thundering snowshoer approaching.
A tree festooned with huge gaping holes showed evidence of the pileated woodpecker (pileated: pronounced “pie-lee-ate-ed” or “pill-ee-ate-ed” equally correctly; from Latin pilleatus meaning “wearing a felt cap”). How big are those birds? Guesses ranged from the size of a chickadee to the size of a chicken (my submission having seen the monsters) but Jack claimed they were the size of a crow and may be the biggest woodpecker species in North America (the ivory billed woodpecker might be bigger down Florida way, but then again it might be extinct.)
Eventually we all galumphed back to the sugarshack for hot coco and I asked people what they thought of the outing. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves and some said they planned to bring their kids back for a similar daylight tour.
Events like this are run both by the Friends of Gatineau Park and by Gatineau Park itself. The fees collected by the “Friends” are used to fund grants for research projects that take place in the park; such as Carleton University’s Jeff Dawson’s project on bats or the Canadian Museum of Nature’s André Martel’s investigations on clams.
You can join the “Friends” for $15 a year and support their work.
