The 6th of October was the Friday before the (Canadian) Thanksgiving long weekend, and I had an appointment to see my chiropractor in Abbotsford around noon. I decided that, since I had no meetings that day, I would forgo work altogether and just head east from Abbotsford after my appointment, starting an extra-long weekend.

I was going east to look for American Pikas, a small furry bunnylike animal. I'd never seen a pika before, but I'd read about them in some of my books. Pikas make their home in talus—rock debris—that doesn't get too hot (pikas like their cool weather).

Now, it turns out that there's a mighty big pile of rock debris in the rather cool Cascade mountains near the town of Hope. That pile is known as the Hope Slide, and it's the result of a 1965 landslide where something like 130 million tons of mountain face came rumbling down. It was the largest landslide in Canadian history, and it now provides a tremendous amount of habitat for pikas. So I was headed to Hope and the Hope Slide.

But first things first. I had my chiropractor's appointment, and then headed east from Abbotsford. The next town east of Abbotsford is Chilliwack, and Chilliwack has a small airport, and that small airport has a small cafe. None of this would be particularly noteworthy if it were not for the fact that the small cafe in the small airport in the town of Abbotsford is famous far and wide for its pie. It was lunchtime, and I was nearing Chilliwack, and so the inevitable took place: I headed to the airport for lunch and pie.

I had their sugar-free apple pie with sugar-free ice cream, and I couldn't really tell that sugar was missing from anything. (I'm diabetic, so the sugar-laden pies, tempting as they were, are supposed to be off-limits to me.) Lunch was filling and pie was fabulous and it was a great start to my weekend.

Suitably sated, I drove on towards Hope. Hope isn't that far away; maybe an hour from Chilliwack or two hours from New Westminster, where I live. So I soon found myself at Hope. At this point, the weather, which had been overcast, was starting to clear. I stopped in Hope to scout out a motel for the night, and ended up liking the view from one of the main drags of Hope enough to take a landscape or two. Here's the best one.

Since the weather had turned nice, and the slide was only about 10 kilometers away, I decided to pay it a visit before choosing a motel. My plan had been to wait out the overcast by overnighting in Hope, and then visit the slide in the morning...but far be it from me to refuse a gift of sunshine.

There's a little rest stop at the slide, and I pulled in and kept my general-purpose lens on the camera, so I could take photos of the mountain that had given way. The lens didn't really get as wide an angle as I would have liked, but it did a decent job.

As I took these photos, I noticed that there was a welcoming committee over by the lone picnic table at the pulloff. This committee consisted of a couple of Stellar's Jays and some little critters on the ground. I was pretty sure that the little critters were chipmunks, and so I hurried back to my car to put my long lens on. I've had only two chances at chipmunks with a camera, and that was with my previous camera, last summer near Osoyoos. Chipmunks would be a good and unexpected development.

It turns out that I really didn't need to rush, as the committee wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere. As I got close, it was clear that I did indeed have chipmunks—Yellow-pine Chipmunks to be exact. Here's one of them, who stopped to sit on a nearby rock and contemplate life.

And this was at 3:30 in the afternoon. An animal that eats breakfast that late—now that's an animal that I can respect. Chipmunks have just gone up a notch in my books.

Here's another shot of the left guy from above, right as he gets the last little bit of his fruit loop in...he's such a cute little feller, with neat and dextrous little hands.

I took a few more chipmunk shots, but now I was getting primed for finding pikas. I still had a few hours of sunlight left, so I headed out across the talus field.

It was interesting terrain, and I was always stepping and scrabbling up and down as I traversed it, scanning around for pikas. I found what looked to be a bit of a trail, and followed it as it went down the side of a talus hill until I reached a point were there was less rock and more vegetation; there was eventually enough vegetation to make the trail impassable without a machete. (I don't have a machete.) At this point, I had been out for more than an hour, and hadn't seen any pikas. The time had passed pretty quickly, though, because my surroundings were so interesting. The rock was quite colorful, with oranges and reds and purples predominating. Occasionally I would stop and take some photos of it.

I turned back and headed towards the parking lot, still searching for the elusive pikas. After almost two hours out on the talus, I was getting a little disappointed with my pikalessness, and wondering how difficult my search was going to be.

But just then, I rounded a big rock, and spotted my quarry.

No, wait...sorry. That wasn't my quarry. That was someone else's quarry.

My quarry wasn't a quarry, it was a little mammal. I did soon see some movement up ahead of me, and I pointed my camera and shot the motion, without really being able to pick out the shape of what was moving with my eyes. I was able to get three photos off before it moved behind a rock.

After it disappeared, I looked at my photos on the little screen on the back of my camera, and by zooming in, I was able to tell that I finally had found and photographed a pika. The shots were far off, so there wasn't going to be great detail on the animal, but at least I had found one.

I waited about 15 minutes for that pika to reappear, but it didn't, and so I continued on back to the parking lot. The Stellar's Jays were still hanging around, and now that I had gotten a pika, I didn't mind devoting some time and photographs to them.

It was around 5:30 and I could tell that I probably had another hour or hour and a half of light left. I decided to head out in a different direction on the talus, to try to find more pikas. I ended up walking and climbing for another hour before returning to the parking lot, without finding another pika. This pika-finding seemed pretty difficult.

As I returned to the parking lot, I went over to the picnic table, where the chipmunks had been. The chipmunks were all gone, but about two meters downslope, I saw a pika out in the open chewing on some grass. What a little prankster...making me walk all over the debris while he chows down right at the parking lot!

Because of the fading light, I cranked the ISO on my camera up, and went to circle the pika, so as to be downslope from him. When I first went down, he hopped under a big rock, but I sat and waited for a while, hiding most of me behind another big rock, and he reappeared. At first the sound of my camera made him wary, but I took it slow and easy and he even got somewhat used to that.

Soon he wasn't bothered by me at all, and was hoppin' around looking for grass to graze on.

Pikas are in an order of mammals known as Lagomorpha, which is Greek for "bunny-like". ("Lagos" means "hare", and "morph" means "form".) The only animals in Lagomorpha are pikas, hares, and rabbits. When I was in school, I learned that rabbits and such were rodents (i.e. in the order Rodenta), but it turns out that zoologists saw a problem with that about a century ago, and since then, lagomorphs have had their own classification, separate from the rodents. It's strange that that particular change hadn't yet filtered down to the school textbooks when I went to school. Perhaps it has, now.

But the lagomorph in front of me wasn't particularly worried about how he was classified. He was too busy munching on the grass. After he had eaten a little, he seemed to relax a bit, and we became friends. I even managed to talk him into posing for a portrait for me.

This would invariably cause me to laugh. The game was great fun, but we never did come up with a good name for it.

Anyhow, by staying behind a big rock, and presenting only my head, arms, and camera to him, I managed to get several good photos of my neat new friend as he went about his pika business.

But soon the afternoon light was reduced to evening gloom, and I started to get chilly. I tried using my flash and it turned out that pika eyes reflect flash pretty badly, so my photography was truly over for the day. I headed back to Hope to download my photos, have dinner, and sleep.

I had already found the target of my trip, but I was worried that my use of a high ISO would cause my photos to be too noisy. So I decided to return to the slide the next morning to try to catch pikas in full sunlight...but that will be the subject of my next entry.

Only slightly beyond Hope,
Tom