Reflecting on Adventures, Inspired by Nature's Mirror

by guest blogger, Elmer Prather

My most recent puzzle is a 1000-piece titled Nature’s Mirror by Travis Melin. Before I spend time putting a puzzle together, I must have a connection to it. My connection to this puzzle is the lake. The lake in the puzzle picture reminded me of my favorite fishing lake, Clearwater Lake located just outside of the Pas, Manitoba, Canada. Clearwater Lake is one of the few “true blue” lakes in the world, being the clearest lake in Canada and the second clearest in the world. It is a glacier formed lake and is renowned for its large lake trout.

Clearwater Lake is two thousand miles from my home in Georgia. I have had the pleasure of fishing in this lake on three separate occasions. Three of my best fishing friends and I made these trips in a Volkswagen bus. Once we left Atlanta, we drove 24 hours a day stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks. I prepared sandwiches and other food items for our meals while one of my friends was driving us along. We camped in a campground on the lake where we could walk from our campsite to the lake to fish, but we usually just drove a short distance and fished off the jetties.

Clearwater Lake measures eight miles in one direction and twelve miles in the other direction making it an oval shape. In the mornings, the lake would be very calm and around 10:00am it would have whitecaps. We towed a 12-foot Sears runabout boat with a 9.4-horsepower engine on the first trip and rented a boat from a local marina the other two times.

Besides my love of fishing and putting puzzles together, I am also into photography. Every photo tells a story. When I see the picture of the puzzle, I am putting together I try to imagine the story the artist was trying to tell when the photo was taken. The picture in this puzzle displays a pristine lake with a few stratus clouds meandering across the blue sky overhead. In the background there is a lush green forest reflecting onto the lake. With the reflection glistening off the surface of the lake the title of the puzzle, Nature’s Mirror, is perfect. The wooden canoe shown in the photo looks new. It appears to be a cedar strip canoe made from narrow strips of cedar glued together. The rocks laying on the lake shore and under the canoe reminded me of the rocks that were used to construct the jetty from which we fished at Clearwater Lake.

After a little checking, the lake pictured in the puzzle is Bearskin Lake in East Cook, MN. It's 493 acres with an average depth of 31 feet and a max depth of 78 feet. I would like to someday fish in this lake.

During our fishing trips to Clearwater Lake, we caught quite a few lake trout. We took our cooking utensils with us on these trips and used them to cook some of the fish we caught. To prepare for our evening meals, we would fry some of the lake trout we had caught that day and hushpuppies we made from a mix we purchased in Atlanta. On these three fishing trips, we all felt that we were ‘living the life.”

Elmer Prather
Canton, Georgia
U S A