Long Lake Yarns

Click here to listen at the Cornell ornithology site for the drumming of a ruffed grouse.  Click here to listen to what the lake was doing today.  As the ice cracks, especially with temperature changes when the sound isn’t muffled by a lot of snow, the entire surface of Long Lake becomes an acoustic membrane. [...]

It hasn’t been a rough winter so far.  No extremes of temperature.  Less than the usual amount of snow.  But it is still late January and there are months of wintry weather behind and ahead.  The lake is beautiful, in its wintry ways. Somehow the snow pulls both sides of the lake more toward the [...]

The only place I make time to do an occasional jigsaw puzzle is at the lake.   This 550 piece loon puzzle made for a fun quiet day at the coffee table.  Until.

Sealed-in-plastic puzzles never have pieces missing, do they?  Once, when I was a child, we got a thousand-piecer with one duplicate piece and [...]

Hoover, the cat.  He is one, so it always seemed best to leave him home.  Around his stuff.  Where he knows where his everything is.  And isn’t.  For more than three years now, we’ve always left him home.  He likes, and we like, his reliable cat sitter.  But we decided Hoover might like the lake house.  [...]

This is a section of the north branch of Thunder Bay River, just northwest of Long Lake, north of County Road 628.  But I didn’t tell you that.  It’s way too pretty a place for many people to know about.  A rickety wood plank bridge is the only way to get over the river at [...]

Long Lake is surrounded by a mix of pine, birch/aspen, cedar and assorted hard woods, including  maple and oak.  This means our fall is a combination of yellows, oranges, and reds, all anchored by the steady green of the pines.  The fall colors were spectacular this year.
Today, November 7th, the deciduous trees are mostly bare.  It was [...]

You look at the flames of your little firepit.  You look at the sky and the sky reflected in the lake.  Everything rattling around inside your head quiets.   Soon we’ll spot the first bat of the night.

Steve took this photo as we entered Ghost Bay the last weekend in September, early, just after sunrise.  The mist had mostly cleared from the water. The sunshine was spilling through the trees, painting this splash of gold on the water. I didn’t want to disturb the scene by paddling through it. Can you imagine [...]

I know.  We should probably stay off the water when the fog is thick.  But it was very early, on a cold September morning, and no one else was out on the water.  Our kayaks are neon orange and bright yellow.  Steve was wearing his blaze orange cap.  I was wearing my most amazed expressions [...]

This past Saturday, early in the morning, the fog was just beginning to thin when we headed out to Ghost Bay.  The light was filtered through the fog remains and everything was looking very  golden. There was no breeze.  Like so many fall mornings, there were no other boats or paddlers on the lake.  Not [...]