Canoeing the Beaver River

Nearly a couple of months ago we headed out for my second paddle of the year, canoeing down the first segment of the Beaver River, just north of Kimberley.  The Beaver River changes a lot over it's course; this part is a slow meandering river through an extensive Silver Maple Swamp of several thousand acres.  Earlier in the spring you could canoe in among the trees!

There were 6 of us, and we had a perfect day for paddling - cool and a slight breeze, which kept away the bugs, but bright and sunny the whole trip, about 3 hours altogether.

This river is a designated canoe route, with signs, maps and put-in/take-out points, all advertised in one of the County's tourist brochures.  But this section of the river isn't paddled much because there is fear of log-jams, and at times there have been a lot of them.

This day the river was calm and placid, with great reflections, and a crew from the local canoe rental company had been down with chain saws to open up a passage through all the logs.

Beautiful reflections of trees along the bank.

This is the sort of log jam you come across, especially in the first half, but a gap has been cut at the left so you can glide through.

We did have to slip under some more recently fallen trees.

At one point we saw two Canada Geese.  The female (left) quickly paddled off to shore, presumably back to the nest, while the male led us on down the river for quite a distance.

Trying to distract us from the nest.

We saw a number of White Egrets, but they all flew before we got very close.  This one landed in a spot where I could at least get a distant photo.

And we saw one large beaver lodge, a big pile of sticke at the edge of the river.  We're still only half-way down the trip; more tomorrow.

Linking to: