paddling with a camera

Last Sunday (08/05/07) I paddled a loop around the reservoir: ~7.5 miles in 2 hours with a longer stop at the inlet of South Boulder Creek. I launched my Thunderbolt kayak at Osprey Point which was quite crowded even before 8 am. You can check my GPS track. The water level was much higher than in the Google satellite image.

When driving, I stopped at the boat house parking, but the road leading to the lake was closed. According to a ranger it is a quarter of mile of walking downhill along that service road. Some paddlers are using kayak/canoe carts there. Next time, I may try to carry my Thunderbolt.

I drove to the Gross Reservoir from Boulder through the Flagstaff Road, but returned back from the Osprey Point taking the route towards Denver via highway 72 and then back to Boulder. The second option is much longer but it seems to be faster than the more scenic but windy Flagstaff Road.

As usual, I had a longer photo session at the creek inlet. I had unusual encounter with a lonely duckling there. Or gosling? Can somebody help me to identify that baby bird? It looks like a duck on my pictures here, but, for some reason, it looked to me more like a baby goose at the lake.

The duckling adopted me as its mother. It followed my kayak, jumped into my spray skirt for a while, took a longer ride on my stern deck. It's not so easy to take a picture of a duck sitting on your lap. All what I got was an out of focus shot of big beak.

You can compare the 9 pictures above with my shots from previous paddling on the Gross Reservoir in summer and fall of 2005. Most of them are taken from the same spots. All pictures were shot with Pentax Optio W10 camera.

Related posts:

• slide shows from paddling Gross Reservoir: July 2005 and September 2005
• Gross Reservoir - Fall Paddling in Colorado Rocky Mountains
• Gross Reservoir - A New Paddling Destination in the Front Range
• 20 Paddling and Photography Destinations - Wayfarer Trip Index