March 16, 2014 Daylight Savings Time Begins......

After a gorgeous sunny day yesterday, today is rather a let down.  The time changed and I was going to take advantage of it by heading to the shore bright and early for sunrise photos....now that my trail is packed out to the "spot" so Toby and I can move right along.  Well......I awoke to grey and windy.  The weather forecasters were wrong.......   However, it was 20 degrees out instead of barely above 0 as it was when I went to bed.  It was also clear at that time.  I thought we were to get a whole weekend of glorious sunshine before the grey and snow and whatever.....if it hits 40....hit!  Oh well.....

This is a photo of the Devil's Kettle on the Brule River.  It, and the others in this post, were taken yesterday.  The top one is of the upper falls which is just a bit below Devil's Kettle.  I have been wanting to hike up here all winter.  With a stiff wind on the shore again....and a beautiful day out.....it seemed like a good day to do it.  I had taken the traditional vertical view of the Devil's Kettle also.  But, there was a lot of shadow already and I decided this was more interesting.

Here's the big view of the upper falls of the Brule.  It looks so pretty with all the clean untracked snow.  There were some otter tracks going here and there.  You can see some of them mid photo.  There were also alot of deer tracks walking the edges.  It was rather nice to see running water too!

My sister-in-law and her dog came along.  The dogs were having too much fun on their winter adventure.  That dog is Toby's best dog friend and they love to have adventures together.  You can see he is having too much fun to want to sit by "mom" and pose!  :)  Someone had snowshoed down the river previously, so rather than head up all those stairs back up the trail, we opted to try walking the river down.....no snowshoes!

Here's Toby in the trail on the way down the river.  By now, we were mostly walking on deer trails.  An old snowshoe track was barely visible but mostly drifted in as we headed down river.  Not too much farther past here, we ran out of any kind of trails.  I guess the deer know better than trying to walk in the canyon stretch coming up.  I had had thoughts about that myself.  So, we got on the deer trail and headed up the steep bank and back onto the main trail.  That was quite a workout.  However, the alternative would have been walking all the way back up to the upper falls and having to negotiate those nasty, snowpacked, slick stairs.  So.....we had a fine outing.  I was wishing I could have gotten a shot of the lower falls.  However, because of the angle and all the snow, we really couldn't see it from below on our side of the river. 
It has been really fun walking some rivers the past few days with the nicer weather.  Who knows.....we might make it a habit.  There are a lot of rivers on the North Shore, after all.  :)