Horrible photo I know but it was a pine marten at my campsite on the petawawa river. First time I had ever seen one before.

Nice photos, Lenny.  Where'd you get the Walter, in the river or the big lake?

Very nicely done!! I'm still jealous of your epic fishing on Louisa. Can't beat catching lakers right from the campsite! That smallmouth on the canoe paddle is a monster as well.

Swift Fifteen- Walters were caught on the Petawawa. Crazy that according to the MNR's fish consumption guide there's more contaminants in a Petawawa walleye than an Ottawa River or Rideau River walleye. 

Last edited by Lenny (1/18/2018 4:37 pm)

I only got into the park twice for a few nights each time.  Was not able to land a huge number of fish but I got some good quality.

Peek wrote:

Lenny wrote:

Crazy that according to the MNR's fish consumption guide there's more contaminants in a Petawawa walleye than an Ottawa River or Rideau River walleye. 

Railbed. Guaranteed.
 

Yep agreed. I'd like to see it cleaned up and turned into a hiking trail. 

Swift Fifteen wrote:

Lenny wrote:

Peek wrote:

Railbed. Guaranteed.
 

Yep agreed. I'd like to see it cleaned up and turned into a hiking trail. 

Great idea but who's going to pay for the clean up of the contaminated ballast, not to mention the creosote laden ground from the pre existing ties. Once you begin a clean-up on a rail bed it never ends like the feasibility studies suggest. I haven't walked that rail bed in many years but i suspect it's the same as any other.

Agreed it will probably never happen in my lifetime and may never happen. I don't think it's unfeasible remove the creosote and cap the railway with asphalt and cap the side slopes with geotextile and add topsoil and a native seed mixture. I've seen it happen before but on a much smaller scale.
 

Surprising, if I read the chart right, most of the contamination in Algonquin is Mercury and PCBs.  Possibly left over from pulp processing?  I was expecting Louisa to be contaminated with arsenic.  It was Mercury and PCBs at Louisa. If you go to the MNR site,  they have a map with clickable fish telling you why fish are not edible in each area or the limit you should eat. There are several lakes within Algonquin, every one I checked had the Mercury code. Some had the pcb code. Maybe from coal plants burning farther south?  I am guessing. I am completely uneducated on pollution travel and movement.

"There are several lakes within Algonquin, every one I checked had the Mercury code."

A reason why there are possibly toxic mercury levels in APP fishes is the low pH of the lakes... the lower the pH, the greater the mercury uptake in the food chain. Lakes in limestone bedrock won't be affected much since the calcium-bearing limestone buffers the water and limits acidification, keeping pH higher. Most APP lakes are typical shield lakes without much calcium buffering capacity so pH can be low resulting in acid lakes.

The bigger-picture trend isn't good as you might have gathered from the news reports recently... decalcification of shield lake watersheds from acid rain is reducing buffering capacity and logging further decalcifies watersheds by removing calcium-bearing wood biomass where in the natural condition, the trees would fall and decay into the ground, returning calcium to the watershed and waterbodies

Resolving the effects of the rail bed from the bigger-picture decalcification isn't something I'd want to make a decision on in government... IIRC, both government and CNR have stated that they don't own that land and so aren't responsible for cleaning it up. One way to decide if rail bed remediation money would be spent wisely is to judge whether the rail bed remediation would actually result in any measurable improvement in toxin levels relative to the ongoing, bigger-picture decalcification and acidification trend. Not easy to do, probably, and needs money, which most likely isn't available at the moment.