Nutimik At Night
The original plan was to take a canoe trip up a chain of lakes in Whiteshell Provincial Park to a place called Sailing Lake. There’s a beautiful island there where I have camped out before and wanted to return. Even though we finally got some much needed rain in the last week, it wasn’t enough and there is still a ban on backcountry camping. As an alternative, we booked what was basically the last campsite available in the north Whiteshell area for a few days. That just happened to be at Nutimik Lake. I had never camped there before, but spotted a “Blueberry Hill Trail Head” on Google Maps. Arriving after dark, we drove up to the area and walked around on the rocks without much success. I was still able to capture the Milky Way, even if without any decent foreground.
It wasn’t until the next morning that we checked in at the campground office and got more information about the trail and how to access it. I went up that afternoon and lined up the composition I wanted to come back for at night. I marked the exact location on Google Maps and took a few pictures of where my tripod was set up to help my orient myself later in the dark. It pays to plan ahead. Locking in this composition was no problem and it was just a matter of taking a few shots I would use later to blend together to increase the image quality.
Beyond that, I left my camera on the tripod taking continuous photos for a few hours. When I got home, I just painted them back in to the main image.
We were fortunate to see a number of creatures during our trip. The night we climbed up to Blueberry Hill to watch the meteor shower, we saw two pairs of eyes reflecting back at us on the trail. They approached to within 20 feet of us before scurrying off into the bush. It was a pair of foxes.
After returning to the tent and tucking in for the night, I woke suddenly to some strange noises. I sat up and shined my headlight out the tent window just in time to watch a racoon climbing out of our fire pit and another running passed on its way to the next campsite. Luckily, having grown up in Scouts, I was well versed in the principles of leave no trace camping and leave no food around at night. This makes me a bad target for critters such as these.
If you think I got some much needed sleep after that, you’d be wrong. During the pre-dawn hours, it started raining pine cones from above. Thankfully the culprit stuck around to let me take a few shots in the morning as I was cleaning up camp to leave. It was eventually chased off by a more feral looking squirrel.
Capping off our trip, we paddled on the Rennie River into Heart Lake. Along the way, we found some interesting aquatic plants including wild rice. I wasn’t too keen to shoot due to harsh mid-afternoon lighting conditions, but when I found these little white flowers, I had to give it a shot.
