Mckenzie Creek Spring

Here's a different take on the lovely creek pictured yesterday. The photo above is getting to be a fairly cliche way of dealing with moving water but it has been a challenge for me to learn how to achieve this misty, silky effect and capture the sun dapples at the same time. Often, in fact, working through cliches is how I learn - I see photographs I like and then try to reproduce them. Sometimes I succeed but I whether or not I succeed I always learn more about my camera and about photography.Click here to see what this creek looked like in January when the water was higher and it was a cloudy day. Mckenzie Creek is in Thetis Lake Regional Park.

Reflections

On another photo mission this week, Benjamin Madison and I revisited Mckenzie Creek to the north of Upper Thetis Lake. It is truly a magnificent spot, well worth the extra bit of bushwacking to get there. I took some okay pictures which show the area's beauty but it's this one, with it's almost abstract or painterly quality that really was the winner for me. Photographing water is a challenge, especially when balancing on a mossy rock mid-stream! -Fern

Thetis Lake

Thetis Lake Regional Park is a favorite place to swim, hike, walk dogs, and run for many on Southern Vancouver Island. In another couple of weeks the wild flowers will start blooming too!

Visiting With Giants

Walking through a temperate rain forest like Thetis Lake Regional Park is like being inside a complex network of immense and ancient beings whose interwoven muscles and sinews provide the steps and hand holds along the paths. One is completely surrounded and immersed in this living web. I always find myself speaking in a whisper so as not to profane the profoundly slow and peaceful conversation of the forest.

McKenzie Creek

Much as I complain about the weather I always try to keep in mind the fact that this cool wetness is exactly what our temperate rain forests need to thrive. And when I visit places like McKenzie Creek in Thetis Lake Regional Park I willingly accept the cold drizzle that characterizes this climate for much of the year.

Mushrooms

I decided that rather than share my lame guesses as to the id of the various mushrooms I encounter I will just leave them nameless until I locate a good, easy-to-use field guide and can feel a little more confident of my identification. This group was one of several having a slow feast on a huge fallen tree out at Thetis Lake Regional Park.

Mycena Genus

I spent some time yesterday looking for a field guide for fungi, unsuccessfully. This morning I decided to see what resources are available online. I finally settled on a database program called "Matchmaker: Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest." Fumbling my way through that I came up with a tentative id for the above mushrooms as members of the genus Mycena. I Googled that and checked out the images until I found one that matched and decided to call it quits for this time around. I suspect my identification of fungi will never be more than approximate or hopeful. There are many, many different kinds and often, precise identification involves spore prints and other activities that I prefer to avoid. That, however, is not going to stop me from mushrooming (defined by Mykoweb as "the pursuit of mushrooms") and continuing to try to identify what I find. I will welcome any suggestions.

Wonderful

After yesterday's promise to try to identify the plants in my photos, I have to confess I have been unable to find out what this mushroom is called. I need to find some good field guides so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. As for the moss, I'm pretty sure we're looking at a species (one of the 350 or so) of sphagnum.

Mosses and....

I selected today's pair of rather junky photos to illustrate something I'm just beginning to realize: I usually ignore anything I don't "know" and since I don't "know" most of what's in the environment, I generally ignore most of what I see. I originally selected the photo above in order to write a little about moss because the forest around Thetis Lake is luxuriously coated with mosses. (When I took the photo I was thinking only about the stream, surrounded by some green and brown areas....) The closer I looked at that big glob of moss the more I realized that there were actually three or four different kinds of moss growing there, not just one moss. When I started to look more closely at some of the other photos I'd taken that day, like the one to the right, I realized it's not just a photo of some orange mushrooms. There are at least three kinds of moss, a green slimy fungus and four or more different kinds of lichen. Some, like the strange coral-like lichen in the upper right corner are even more interesting than the subject of the photo - that dramatic pair of orange mushrooms. So, while I can't promise to identify everything I photograph from now on, I'm going to try, since it is a good way of beginning to see clearly. How many of the plants in today's photos can you identify?

Thetis Lake Regional Park

Thetis Lake Regional Park is about a twenty minute drive west of Victoria on the very edge of the greater Victoria urban area near Langford. I posted a few photos of the beach area about 18 months ago but I didn't spend any time in the surrounding forest park during that visit. I regret that omission now since yesterday I had the pleasure of exploring this wonderland a little. There is a wealth of trails around the lakes (there are two - Upper Thetis and Lower Thetis) and several ecological zones, ranging from lush, rainforesty swamp to drier, sparser Garry Oak meadows. But at this time of year the overall element is water. Even though it wasn't raining during my visit, there was water dripping off most of the leaves and mosses and squelchy pathways underfoot. It's a fabulously rich environment. I was reminded again that one doesn't need to go to the bottom of the oceans or exotic tropic lands to stumble upon extraordinary and unique sights. I'll be happy to share some of what I encountered there over the next few days.