While the weather held, Chris wanted to spend the afternoon flying and I was in the mood to go with him, so up we went for three quarters of an hour. There's a distinctive look to the sky when freezing rain is on its way, with thin grey stratus cloud at about 4000 feet above the ground, great clarity below that and a black and white look to the landscape: fuzzy dark grey wooded hillsides, white lakes, with occasional hints of pale colour where the sky is reflected in the patches of water not yet frozen over.
Cracks in the ice that's now forming make crazy patterns like a small child's scribbles.
We flew north, keeping the Gatineau River upstream, on our right, to Wakefield and thence to Low where the dam is, before swinging round to the east and then returning south over the hilly and mostly uninhabited ground back to the Ottawa River at Gatineau. I revelled in the scenery today because we weren't distracted by any turbulence in the air, a rare treat.
Even the home stretch from Orleans to Rockcliffe looks mysteriously different in these conditions, with the patterns made by roads, trails and other man-made features of the landscape very distinctive.
The lumber factory on the Quebec side of the river opposite Kettle Island is another location where rust red buildings and pale brown heaps of sawdust relieve the monotony of their surroundings at this time of year. The steam from the chimneys was rising straight up when we set off but blowing east to west when we came in to land. A wind picking up from the east is another predictor of rain in the near future.
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