The Buttle Lake road

I had a free afternoon, so I drove out to Buttle Lake, just exploring. It's a long lake, 23 kilometres long, 1.5 across; more like a slow, wide river than a lake. A narrow road winds down the west side; it only connects to the highway on one end. I usually sail right past the entrance, on my way to Gold River. This time, I drove on in.

Buttle Lake runs down the centre of the Island, halfway between Campbell River and Gold River (the towns, not the rivers).

I had to keep stopping to look at the view and to poke around rock faces, so I only made it two thirds of the way down the west side of the lake before it was time to turn back. Even so, I saw many places that I must return to, with more time available; trail heads, shore access, mossy rocks, waterfalls. And at the end of the road, on this west bank, there's a mine site to visit and then Myra Falls. I'll be back.

At my last stop, Auger Point, I followed a short trail down to the shore, then poked through the bush, looking at mushrooms. (Photos, next post.)

BC's bush is challenging, at best. Here's a photo from Auger Point, taken from the trail, as shot, uncropped, with only a bit of sharpening added.

18 mushrooms, yellow, white, beige. That I can see from here. There will be more under and behind everything.

Late early mushrooms

I've been looking for mushrooms since the rains started, but with little luck. So I looked at the last two years' posts; in 2016, I was finding many mushrooms around here since the last week of September, earlier on visits north and west. But in 2017, they started to show up near the end of October, and in greatly reduced numbers.

This year, it looks like we're following last year's schedule. I found a very few last week; half a dozen puffballs in a patch that is usually thick with them, three small brownish ones on Tyee Spit.

And finally, this Wednesday, a short walk near Woodhus Creek turned up a crop of varied 'shrooms.

Down in the moss, a brown mushroom with purplish stripes. With an unidentified critter poking his head out from behind.

One puffball, already gone to spores. There were two others in the vicinity.

Mushrooms often grow in the shadiest, dimmest parts of the woods, and even there, they hide under logs or in the shelter of deep moss. The camera doesn't like this; there's not enough light to get a clean photo. But you can't use flash; most of the light-coloured mushrooms concentrate and reflect all the light, so that everything but the mushroom comes out nicely, but the mushrooms are a featureless glare. Puffballs are the worst. I was lucky to find one in a ray of filtered sunlight.

Tiny, delicate, pinkish mushrooms on a log. With a young sowbug. There were many of these.

A foot-long piece of burnt branch with a topping of moss, nurtured these tiny tongues, most under 1/2 cm. long.

Getting down close. The bases are a greyish blue, the tops pure white.

No mushrooms here. Leaf lichen with fruiting bodies on a dead twig, and Oregon grape leaves.

I met another mushroom hunter along this trail. He was looking for chanterelles, that he has found in large quantities here in previous years. Not this year; he hadn't seen one.