A cold, bright morning

Riverside path through New Edinburgh Park

The river sparkled as I walked beside it to the shops on Beechwood Avenue this morning; the north wind was bitter cold, and not many people were out of doors. I did pass a little group of small children from a nursery, out for a walk along the river bank with their minders and all holding tight to their tag straps, held in line.

The rocks of Rockcliffe

Driving eastward round the bends of the Rockcliffe Parkway this morning I was aware of the crumbling shale cliffs (on my right) and the cliff edge over the river (on my left) that's presently being reinforced with a retaining wall, and not a moment too soon, because the sidewalk on that side looks as if it threatens to subside into the river. The ice builds up on these surfaces in winter and the pavement heaves and generates potholes in the early spring. Cyclists, beware!–– before the holes are filled in, the roads round here are full of hazards.

A geological assessment of Manor Park mentions the ...

...vertical cliff along Rockcliffe Parkway where it curves up escarpment west of the Ottawa-New Edinborough tennis courts: Cross-beds are inclined at low angles to the main, near-horizontal bedding to form wedges that are visible from the pathway across the road ...

Further down the page, the geologist reminds us that at one time there was a sea, rather than a river, here:

... limestones were deposited in a shallow (mainly < 10 m) sea on a continental shelf, or within an intracontinental basin. The limestones vary from fine-grained to coarsely crystalline and include accumulations of shell or skeletal fragments broken by wave action and marine currents.

So this is how this part of the world would have appeared during the retreat of the glaciers in the Paleozoic era; what is now Canada's National Capital Region was once under the western end of the Champlain Sea:

The thought of that big melt puts our present day springtime thaws into perspective!

Transformed

The rain washed the remains of winter away from the Rideau River and this week's unprecedented heatwave from Winnipeg to Halifax did the rest. There's no ice left now. On Petrie Island, on the Ottawa, families have been building sandcastles on the beach. Our local riverside parks, suddenly full of people picnicking on the park benches and running along in shorts, were muddy at the start of the week; the mud is drying up now. The buds on the maple trees have burst open; maple syrup yields are reportedly much lower than usual this year as the sap rising season was so short. Frogs and butterflies have been spotted and the migrant birds are settling in for the summer. Dust is settling too, all over the city.

The end of March is predicted to be back to normal.

Fog bound

Last weekend thick fog hung over the city in the early morning and till midday along some stretches of the Ottawa River. My husband, planning to fly his plane to Quebec on Saturday, had to wait patiently until it lifted or shifted enough from the runway at Rockcliffe Airport before he could safely take off ... at lunchtime. On Sunday morning a visibility reading of  0 statute miles was reported at nearby Gatineau Airport; that is very unusual indeed.

OTTAWA/GATINEAU/QC
SPECI CYND 181249Z 00000KT 1/8SM FG VV001 RMK FG8=
SPECI CYND 181230Z 00000KT 1/4SM FG VV001 RMK FG8=
METAR CYND 181200Z 00000KT 0SM FG VV000 01/01 A3018 RMK FG8 SLP222=
METAR CYND 181100Z 00000KT 0SM FG VV000 01/01 A3017 RMK FG8 SLP219=
TAF CYND 181238Z 1813/1901 00000KT 1/4SM FG VV001
BECMG 1813/1814 3SM BR FEW004
FM181500 22006KT P6SM FEW030
RMK NXT FCST BY 181800Z=

Catching people's attention

My attention was caught by this shocking picture (!) and article on the front page of Ottawa's free Metro paper, last week. There is raw sewage in the Ottawa River after heavy rainfalls and we (tax payers) have to be willing to spend money to do something about it. The City of Ottawa's Ottawa River Action Plan lists plenty of proposals to deal with the problem, but they don't come cheap.

Winter's coming to an end

Waxwing (RSPB image)

It rained on the melting snow and ice last week and now there's a freeze again so that the Rideau River has a smooth sheen. The "keys" (blocks of ice in the shape of a keystone) cut by the icebreaking crews stick out of it, some of them deformed by the thaw, and the amphibious excavator is working slowly upstream past New Edinburgh towards Vanier. The sky is bright.

This was a sight worth seeing yesterday: waxwings, a woodpecker, a chickadee, several migrating fieldfares and an American robin, all foraging in the trees and bushes between St. Patrick Street and the Rideau River.

Don told me yesterday that he'd seen geese flying north.

A month away

The latest winter storm has blown through, the sky has cleared, and they are blasting the Rideau River near our house today. I wrote about that, this time last year.

Camellia bushes on the riverbank, Tokyo

Kiyosubashi, a bridge near our hotel in Tokyo

Police boat and cruise boat on the Sumida

Shinohashi Bridge, Tokyo

Footpath beside the Sumida River, Tokyo

Since my last post I've been away beside several overseas rivers, one of which, the Sumidagawa, flows into Tokyo Bay. It is actually a 27km canal through the city, with a whole series of impressive, attractive bridges. More often than not it seems to be full of waves, perhaps because of the speed the riverboats sail at, causing a turbulent wake. What I liked best about the river was its recently landscaped banks, lined with neatly trimmed trees, bushes and flowerbeds. The pansies and camellias were already in bloom. In the summer it would be pleasant to sit on the park benches under the arbours that have been constructed, entwined with wisteria. Runners use the riverbanks for their jogging routes and I thought these promenades would be a good way to walk through the city from A to B without getting too much pollution in one's lungs, although on several stretches a motorway runs above one's head on concrete stilts and the noise of the traffic is noticeable. These road bridges keep homeless people out of the rain, so they have built their shelters there out of tarps or cardboard boxes, carefully tied up with string while they're not sleeping in them. I've never seen such neat and tidy street people. Their self-discipline in that regard was one of the things that amazed me about Tokyo. Behind the walkways, factories, office blocks and apartment blocks line the river on either side with hardly a metre of space to spare between them.

The River Avon at Bristol, UK 

The Avon quayside

Other rivers I encountered on my travels last month were the Avon in Bristol, the Taff in Cardiff and the Thames at Reading (we walked along the Reading towpath on the afternoon of Feb. 21st after sitting in an aeroplane for 12 hours––that's an invaluable cure for jetlag!) and Kingston(-upon-Thames) in both of which towns we saw swans taking off heavily from the water. In Kingston we watched them, as well as rowing boats, kayaks and canoes, from a window seat in the cafeteria at the John Lewis department store with our daughter and family.

A nice variety of rivers and experiences to remember! It was good to see flowing water instead of ice and snow for a change, this winter. Any day now we'll see the water flowing freely down our local rivers too.