The Waterfall
Quiet Secluded Nature Stuff.
Yes, there really is a waterfall. Now it's not Niagara or Victoria or Angel or Mongefossen or Nohkalikai Falls by any means, but after a heavy rain or during the spring melt it does run at a pace and we can hear it from the cottage. It only drops about ten feet off of a granite ledge into a pool that drains into our lake. But the burbling and splashing does add to what this place is for us - a retreat from the busy world back to the more natural one.
Disconnected Wilderness
The cottage sits on eight oddly shaped acres and has about thirteen hunderd feet of shoreline on Little Round Lake. The southerly boundary of the cottage lot is the northerly boundary of ther waterfall lot on the other side of the lake. So the properties are kitty-corner from each other, separated by about five hundred feet of shallow water. In the winter, when the ice is in, it's an easy walk to get to the waterfall lands, but the rest of the year we either canoe across or run the ATV around the road and up the unopened road allowance to park at the southwest corner of the waterfall lot and then walk the trail to the waterfall. Because it's right there but not terrifically handy, we don't spend a lot of time over there. We should though. And this year might be the year we spend a little time improving the walking trail and perhaps making some new ones...
So Why?
We bought the waterfall lot across the lake for added trails, added privacy, added firewood, and as a destination. It's another plot of land to explore, to wander around, or just sit quietly in and see nature.
Finding Corners
Property corners and the monuments that affirm their locations can be elusive. Even when you know approximatelty where to look and what to look for. Enlisting the assistance of our neighbour who is a retired OLS we set out to establish the northeast corner of the waterfall lot in the fall of 2019. Surveying in the bush is generally a more pleasant experience when the leaves are off the trees and the bugs have died off in anticipation of winter.
Since we knew the line across the lake was the production of the southerly boundary of the cottage lot, we set up the transit over the iron bar marking the corner on the shore of the lake and sighted back east to the other iron bar marking the southeast corner of the cottage lot. My neighbour flipped the scope to produce the line across the lake and then patiently waited about twenty-five minutes for me to ATV around and walk in to where he was looking.
After clipping some low dead branches off a pine tree that was blocking the line of sight, I searched up the steep slope at what I thought was roughly the forty feet the iron bar had been set back from the water's edge. No luck. Nothing indicating that a human being had ever set foot near where I was standing. So we reset. I walked back down to the water and my neighbour kept me on the line and I poked around directly in front of me and three feet on either side. It would have been much simpler with a metal detector, but as I was looking for a rock plug (an iron bar cut down and set in the bedrock) which generally are sitting proud out of the ground by a few inches I was surprised at how not obvious it was. Could someone have removed it? Was the line we were producing off? And then I noticed at a distance I thought was well past the forty feet from the water a little pile of stones. Stones don't pile themselves. This was a good sign. Underneath the stones and under a layer of rotting leaves I found the the rock plug.
And it was on the line. So I walked back out to the ATV to run around the road and pick up my neighbour and we then both went around the lake and walked the entire depth of the waterfall lot and set up the transit on the newly found corner. After sighting back across the lake to set zero, and flipping the scope again to produce the line west into the woods, we started to cut the property line so that it was clear for five feet on either side. We had about 1,500 feet of line to clear to get to the northwest corner. We made it that day not quite 300'. The rest of the trek would need to wait.
We returned in the fall after the Land Across had been acquired, since now there was a much more clear path to produce the line to the west.
What's There
An old pickup truck. A fern grove. Very old trees. Rock outcrops. Streams.