This past week's rush into winter, leaving us with sub-zero daytime temperatures, high winds albeit with full sun on some days has meant that the ground had frozen and the hitherto-wet-clay foundation of the trails, even blanked by the snow that has also fallen, is now moderately usable by us in remaining over on our side of the ravine where all the bridge reconstruction is taking place.

To be sure, we felt that work would have been wrapped up, uncompleted, as soon as snow began flying and the temperature dropped; a formula unkind to outdoor construction work. But we were wrong, the crews, while having been mysteriously absent for weeks at a time when the weather was still relatively moderate are now daily on the job, driving their front-end loaders and diggers and other large tracked vehicles meant for the heavy-lift work of transporting dirt away from the bridge sites and gravel toward them.

A late December finish date had been announced in a more or less casual manner when the bridge demolition had been announced, and I was personally convinced that the finish date would far more likely be spring, perhaps late spring, given the long absences with nothing being done, and the weather closing in to winter. But there they are, those hardy men and their machines, working away. We can hear their muffled mechanical sounds from where we live when they're working closer toward our end.

While the weather was still tolerable, ensuring that the trails, mucked up by the tracked vehicles became impassable, we were crossing the main street to attain the other end of the ravine. An area that is breathtakingly beautiful in some of its spaces, but nowhere near capable of offering us the lengthy trails we're more accustomed to. But it's quiet and accessible and represents an alternative we're grateful for.

In this frigid week of extreme cold and brutal winds we were returning to our own side of the ravine since the freeze-up has made the tracked trails amenable to our passage. Unable to take our usual routes, we must backtrack and bushwhack to arrive at the circuit we had always taken, but without the usual option of returning through the avenues of our choice; some longer, some shorter. The end result being a much longer trek where we're out for closer to two hours rambling in the ravine than the hour or hour-and-a-half we're accustomed to.

At some junctures it's impossible not to come across a tracked vehicle with which we must share the trail, so we step aside to allow it to pass, each of us waving, the driver and us. The last time this happened the driver pulled his vehicle over, though we had stepped safely off the now-widened trail, and shut the engine off. We apologized for his inconvenience and he laughed, saying no bother at all; after all, he said, he gets paid by the hour, chuckle.