Last year Keen Canada had a promotion for the Bruce Trail. For every photograph of boots a person sent to them they donated $5 to the trail. The promotion was a fabulous success. Upwards of $50,000 was raised. Keen held a marvelous gala event at Limehouse Conservation Area, invited everyone and a good time was had by all. It was very effective marketing.
This year Keen again has a promotion. It has been running since August 1 and will end on October 31. There are 10 locations on the trail. For each picture taken at a location Keen will donate $10. To date, and this is the end of September, they have yet to reach the $3,000 mark.
I still think it is excellent marketing. I like this year's format better than last year's. After all, this year we have to work a little. We have to get out there. It worries me that even though 4 of the locations are within easy reach of the GTA so few have gone and participated.
For us, traveling as we do, 8 of the shots were within easy reach. The two on the peninsula were a little far out for a day trip so we decided to go camping on the last weekend in September at Bruce Peninsula National Park. Well and good, only the forecast was dismal.
Dismal is not a relative term. Weather-wise it involves drizzle and, on occasion, a fair bit of rain. It's colour scheme is grey and it's theme is damp. Dismal is one of those unequivocal things, especially when the forecast has not budged for 5 consecutive days.
Fall being what it is, the weather tends to get colder, not warmer and we only had so many free weekends, many of them being tied up in our actual end to end hiking. Also, dismal is, in actuality, kind of a relative term for us. We spent 8 of 14 days camping in dismal during the month of August. We knew that daily highs of 18 with lows of 12 were not impossible to deal with and, hey, if it was REALLY wet then we could come home on Saturday. We rolled the Pro vs. Con dice and came up with good numbers. No one was going to end up miserable and damp, well, hey, we were used to damp.
I packed the van on Friday during a period of drizzle which was better than packing in the actual downpour. Johannes came home from work in good time. We flowed into the car and headed west.
In Owen Sound the rain and drizzle was sufficient to talk us out of cooking along the way. We hit up a McDonald's. Much of Owen Sound appeared to be doing the same although, to be fair, perhaps they were mainly tourists.We tourists are a veritable plague on occasion.
After Owen Sound the clouds really began scudding across the sky. Unfortunately, our "clearing tend" looked to be removing layers 18 and 19 of a very heavy cloud cover. The rain did not stop. The rain made it known that it was settling in for a while.
We've camped coast to coast in the rain. We've struck camp in the rain. We've pitched the tent in the rain. Once we draped our soaking wet tent over the van to help it dry out a bit before actually putting it up. That was in Buffalo Pound Provincial Park, Saskatchewan. We're not strangers to rain.
On the other hand, we've usually made site-fall when it was still light. In this case dusk tumbled eagerly into dark. On the site next door our friends were hunkered down in their tent. They'd been in since around 2. Clearly it had been a wet time. Nobly, they emerged to help us struggle with tarp and tent. Up both went. We had a hurried discussion while our kids played on the rocks in the dark. Saturday was supposed to be marginally better than Friday had been. No one was miserable. Things were very damp. Someone had dug a trench around the tent site. We deepened it to canal-like proportions.
In the night there was wind. It was high-in-the-treetops wind. It was encouraging wind. It made going out to re-jig the tarp so that it would not dump water directly onto the tent kind of fun. The wind held promise. When, around 4 in the morning, peepers sounded in the swamp, well, things began to seem drier. The night was pitch black.
Morning dawned. The wind had died but so too had the rain. The park is well treed so it is kind of hard to judge the mood of a day at 7a.m. This is the latest one can hope to awaken when camping with 6 excited kids.
Much of the early morning we spent suspending 2 tarps over the cooking area and near the fire-pit. After all, Saturday's forecast had promised rain in the late morning to taper off in the late afternoon. So we figured that the key to drying out post hike was to have seriously good tarping.
Now, in my family an odd phenomenon happened once upon a March. Babi, my grandmother, set out to marry Mark, my second grandfather. The date was March 15th, 2000 and it was the only beautiful and spring-like day of the entire month. Mark died in 2001. He was a beautiful person. If ever a soul was bound for heaven then it was Mark's and to this day we ascribe good weather in the face of all indications to the contrary, to Mark.
It became clear to us that Mark was working overtime.
Saturday was sunny. Saturday was warm. We slithered down to the Devil's Monument and did the boot shots. Then we returned tot he park and the three oldest kids went swimming in The Grotto. Post Grotto we went to scrabble over rocks on the White Beach until the sun began the September plunge and we deemed it advisable to return to camp. All the dark mutterings of Friday had been worth it in spades. We were having a wonderful time.
Sunday was a repeat of Saturday weather-wise. We were able to pack up dry. Our kids filled in the Parks Canada Xplorer books. These are rather neat. For each park running the program they have activities to do. If completed then the kids receive a certificate and a small token. We had a number of these already from the out east trip. Notably, not one of the Bruce Peninsula activities was even remotely connected with the east, or cliff-like, side of the park. Slide down the rock chimney into the grotto, for example, was just not on the list. Even so, our kids filled out their books and received zipper pulls from the visitors center in Tobermory. This, I might add, is a very nice visitor's center and absolutely chock full of information and good times.
After that there was the Boundary Bluffs boot shot, a lovely picnic in the September sun and a return home. Bruce Peninsula National Park is quite beautiful. On the west side at Dorcas Bay is a lovely beach and not one single life threatening cliff. On the east side, well, there you have the Grotto and all the excitement a plunge off a cliff into freezing cold water of indeterminate depth can offer. However, just north of Wiarton is another campground run by the Ojibway First Nation and, from what we saw, this too is quite beautiful. We will return one day to camp.
Eh voila, we went camping for a Cause. More accurately, we braved dismal weather for a Cause. That the dismal turned into splendid, much as a grub becomes a butterfly, this was the Luck. However, even without this boon we'd have been OK. This we knew because, after all, we know weather. We know ourselves. All the caveats we weigh before a hike were employed and mulled over. We had it covered. Tarps are wonderful things.
Encouragingly, we saw many young people and even a few families out camping that weekend. Some had come up on the Saturday. Some had been there for Friday's rain.The Grotto was far from deserted. Many people lazed on the White Beach. Two parties came by the Devil's Monument, though Boundary Bluffs was deserted.
Not all of them were taking Keen Boot Shots. Some of them were not out there for a Cause. Some were simply having a good old fashioned selfish time. I'm all for that. After all, it's the good times that we pass on to our children.
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