A Wonderful Ending
This week I had may last ever experience as a Carleton University student. This final bid experience was supposed to be my final exam on Monday and this was a bitter sweet experience because I was extremely glad to have finished all my exams and to not have to study anymore but I was also really sad that I would never really be back to work at this wonderful university again.
However as I said this is what I though my last activity as a Carleton student would be instead I was invited by my lecturer in the exam if I wanted to come on a field trip on Thursday. Of course there is only one answer to the question do you want to have a free trip into the countryside to play with rocks and GPS and that is yes! This unfortunately did mean that on my first day of what was essentially my summer holidays I had to get up at 7am drive two and a half hours to play in the mud. It was brilliant. We arrived to a hillside just outside a tiny town with nothing much but a convenience store, a gas station and a few houses. We drove bumpily along a narrow forestry trail until we couldn’t get any further in the van because beavers had built a dam across the road. I was pretty excited to see the dam whereas everyone else was just annoyed at the inconvenience. To Canadians a beaver dam is irritating but to me it is crazy new and exciting. The dam was surprisingly sturdy looking and holding back allot of water that sat a foot and a half deep on the other side. All around trees were gnawed into pointed stumps where the beavers had chewed through them in ways I thought was purely the invention of cartoonists.
We spent a pleasant day mainly surveying the site to help make base maps for the second year field camp and spent our time scrambling through the overgrown forest, climbing hills and wading knee deep into the bogs to get the exact location of all the buildings and mine pits in the areas. It was a beautiful day as summer seems to have arrived and we are having hot clear sunny days. We sat on the crest of one of the hills to eat lunch overlooking the panoramic view of the incredibly vast country side. Bellow us stretching out for what seemed like forever were trees and fields and rivers, scattered with the odd building and criss-crossed by the winding maze of roads.
On the way back tired and muddy we stopped for ice cream at a tiny roadside diner off highway 7. The sun was setting over the horizon stretching out before me casting an orange glow over the scenery. As we sat laughing and talking in the cooling evening sun I realised that it was a beautiful and perfect way to end my time at Carleton University.
