Much better weather for this month’s hike, winter is almost over. Our February hike did not take place because of icy conditions in the Milan area. Waiting for us as we arrived at lock 22 were: David and Nancy Stover from Geneseo; Mary Ericson from Galva; and Sherri Whitmer from Tiskilwa. They took the 1^st shuttle to bridge 23. They said they were slow hikers and we would catch up to them. Jane Yesinowski from Oglesby, Kim Jalley from LaSalle, and myself, Ed Herrmann form Spring Valley, made up the 2^nd group. All the others that came turned out to be fishermen that headed to the lock to try their luck.

We spotted our first group far ahead of us, they had a fifteen minute head start on us. I believe if we hadn’t took time to pick up cans and bottles we would have caught up with them. We did have a lot of company along the way as pairs of geese had already staked out their nesting areas. They would go swimming along ahead of us for blocks and then take off flying back to where we met them. Beaver had done their dirty work on the bike path. They had burrowed into the bank and under the path. Five spots in one area collapsed into their hole. Steve Moser has sent out a crew to do the repairs. In the past weeks I have noticed that they have been very busy this winter repairing banks and clearing fallen trees along the canal. Does anyone know where the largest cottonwood tree can be found that line the canal route? Looking at a picture we took with one of them on this outing you can realize how huge some of these are.