The busiest weekend of the year

The park was sold out again this year as campers headed to southwestern Nova Scotia for one of the last great camping weekends of the season. On Friday there were traffic jams in Caledonia, as lines of trailers snaked their way up Highway 8 towards the park entrance.

The weather held and the colours were beautiful, and campers got involved in activities ranging from cooking turkeys over grills to carving pumpkins.

People love Kejimkujik and keep coming back for more. When winter comes (and it will, it will), numbers of people will get out to the park, for hiking and cross country skiing – providing there is snow this year. For the rest, there now is a good way for people to indulge in their Keji fix even if they cannot get to the park.

Last June, for my birthday, I got a copy of a new book called Keji: Rips and Riffles. It is a book of gorgeous photographs by a photographer named Dale Wilson, who lives in Dartmouth but who grew up in the small community of River Hebert. That gave him a love and understanding of nature.

The book shows that passion. The majority of photographs are stunning in terms of colour and composition, two of my favourites being a photograph of the Kejimkujik Seaside Adjunct at daybreak and one of Kejimkujik Lake from the Peter Point Trail.

A former military man (he joined when only 15), Wilson left the military in 1990 in order to pursue a career in photography. In 1992 he became a contributing editor of Photo Life and since then has written dozens of articles on photography for a variety of magazines.

One of those articles appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Canadian Camera. In it, Dale Wilson called the assignment of creating the book a job he wanted to do because it felt right. When I say it was an assignment, it is because he was asked to do the book by the Friends of Keji Cooperating Association, as a fundraiser for park projects.

Wilson said in the article that he has, over the years, become more and more vocal about the effects of some types of forestry on the Nova Scotia landscape, and that it was therefore invigorating to spend time working in a relatively pristine environment.

He said he knew that a large percentage of the 50,000 visitors to Kejimkujik each year were repeat visitors, so he wanted the book to appeal to those already intimate with the park, as well as to casual visitors who might never dip a paddle into its waters.

He loaded a canoe to its gunnels, including a pack filled with food, and took 200 rolls of different types of film – noting that he is old-fashioned in that respect. He said that he set out on an adventure that was everything and more than he could ever have imagined.

That adventure included a mother bear with a pair of cubs, but in the article Wilson does not go into detail, preferring instead to publish a sample of the photographs in the book (included in the samples is the Seaside Adjunct photograph). Wilson notes that all proceeds from the sale of the book are going back into the park, in special projects and in species at risk research programs run by the Friends of Keji.

Copies are available in the high season from the By the Mersey gift shop in the visitor centre at Kejimkujik, through the Friends of Keji website, or from shops like the Bookroom, in Halifax.

For those following the saga of high speed internet in the northern part of Queens County, this column is being sent to The Advance via broadband internet. I have been hooked up again, and because I do a lot of work and communicating through the internet, the relief I feel is huge. It is fast, reliable and does not tie up my land line.

I am officially part of a trial which EastLink is running until the system is operating without bugs. That will continue for a while longer, at which point the company will establish costs, finish signing up the old TDC Broadband customers, and then take on new ones.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com