Opinion: Pollinated beaver

If you’ve ever been around river otters, they make an unmistakable watery grunt sound. I could hear that sound as I walked along Trout Lake early Saturday morning, but I couldn’t see the otters. They were close, though, and I scanned the water, which was no easy task.

It was covered in yellow pollen, released by the thousands of conifer trees that surround the lake. To be honest, the forest isn’t doing all that great. Thousands of trees have been wiped out in avalanches and tossed into the lake and others are suffering from disease and drought, brought on by climate change.

The trees that were hit by an avalanche made for a good otter den, apparently, as I caught a glimpse of a female grab a kit and haul it back into the myriad of logs.

It was too fast for any sort of a picture, but just before that I saw a most peculiar thing: A big beaver, maybe one of the biggest I’ve seen in awhile, just floating amongst the pollen.

I took a few photos of it, covered in what looked like scum and contemplated posting it on Fakebook that it was, indeed, pollution.

But I changed my mind and explained the photo.

People said the beaver looked like an alligator at first glance. A very furry one, perhaps. All in all in all it was a fairly pleasant walk as we spent the night at Arrow Lake up the drainage.

It was warm, but cloudy and windy for the most part, but no badly needed rain. We waded across Camas Creek on June 6, which is unheard of in most “normal” years. It was about thigh deep, but certainly “doable.”

Sometimes on these trips the journey is more fun than the destination. Arrow is kind of a boring little lake, so we wandered around quite a bit. We saw a live moose, a very green moose skull complete with antlers, a trumpeter swan and some other cool birds.

At any rate, need to get the adventures in as much as possible this month.  I fear we’ll be very much on fire by July.