For some reason we cannot fathom, last year the municipality public works department, parks and recreation conducted a survey that concluded the bridges in our neighbourhood ravine, no more than six years old at that point and conforming in construction to highways safety standards, were safety-compromised, their footings no longer secure. So at first rigid wooden barriers were put up across the bridges, a precaution that infuriated regular ravine users because as far as we were concerned the bridges remained stout and reliable. Some enraged walker kept tearing off the barriers and throwing them aside; as often as he or she did that, the municipal workers replaced them.

Until a compromise was reached and the wood barriers were replaced by chains with the same warning signage, but which made it somewhat easier to clamber over to continue using the bridges as usual to get from one trail to another, one height and then plateau to another. This has become the 'norm' over the past year and more. And finally, the municipality has decided to take action and replace the bridges.

During our time living here and using the ravine on a daily basis for our physical recreation and woodland appreciation, we've seen three sets of bridges, and now the fourth is in process of construction. When the last bridges were installed, replacing others that appeared secure enough, but obviously not meeting the standards that the municipality felt would leave them free from possible injury-related lawsuits, (if you're going to use such an area it's your choice, why then take legal action if you come acrop accidents that might have been avoided with care or simply use-avoidance?) there was ample damage done to the environment.

At that time we were amazed to see trucks entering the ravine, using pathways clearly not meant for them, and destroying many trees in the process. That changeover of the bridges was done incrementally, one bridge at a time, and didn't really interfere with our daily rambles. If memory serves, the entire process took no more than perhaps a month and a half. Rumours flew the circuit this time that all the bridges were to be removed at one time, making access to regular trail circuits neigh impossible.

And then a small newspaper article in the local paper informed that the $250K enterprise would remove all the bridges or at least the four major ones in one fell swoop, and the estimate of completion of the project would be December. Shut out of our ravine for three months? Not likely, we scoffed, then planned alternate routes in our minds to get ourselves across and around and through the dilemma.

Yesterday we encountered a work crew -- more likely the work crew - and when we queried, we discovered that they would proceed logically, just as had been done previously, removing one bridge at a time, constructing the new one, then moving on to the second. In the process, another partial trail would be built through the sloping woods above the creek, to enable access to one of the bridges where the banks of the ravine kept slumping into the creekbed, leaving a narrow trail for egress to that bridge.

Trees were felled, and those, along with the perfectly healthy mature trees that had come down during last Friday's intense thunderstorm activity has transformed parts of the trail; where formerly we had maintained a specific cache-route for the peanuts we leave daily for the squirrels and chipmunks and birds, some of those places have now disappeared.

In any event, though we feel it's an unneeded waste of tax funding to replace those bridges that we are certain would last for at least another decade, the work is underway. This time the footings will be planned to counteract the deleterious effect of the soil throughout the ravine and in the creek bed comprised mostly of water-soluble clay and sand. Previously, rock-filled mesh caissons had been tried, and wood- and metal-beam footings as alternates and both appear to have failed. Now the favoured method is to be concrete pilings as footage, and let's see what nature has to say about that.