We've long been accustomed to thinking of the month of November as the sullen month, lacking grace and given to petulant outbreaks of bad-tempered wind, freezing rain, and the occasional snowfall, heavier in some years during that month than others, heralding December and the onset of winter.

The landscape, by the time November rolls into place, is invariably sere. Gone all the greenery, the bright colour of flower gardens or wildflowers flaunting their cheerful presence, as every growing thing begins the process of diminishing itself in preparation for the cold wintry blasts to come.

We don't expect much of November, not as we do for October. In November the trees have all shed their foliage, the canopy of a forested area is bare, but for the blessing of the evergreens within them. When it rains, absent the leafy canopy, the cold and the wet drizzle seep through everything. For us, the trails in the ravine become a soggy mess.

Visually, one looks hopefully for landscapes to please the eye. They can be found, as long as expectations are lowered to recognize that suddenly what was bright and vibrant has become more of a monoscape of greys, blacks and browns, not the most cheerful shades in the colour spectrum. It's almost like looking at a natural landscape through the prism of an eye measured in sepia tones. All the more so when just a short few days earlier, it always seems, the perky presence of bright yellows, oranges and carmines were still to be sighted, here and there.

But there, in the ravine, there remains shelter from the wind raging above. And in the ravine our legs find reason to stretch beyond the immediate vicinity of the trail we sight, in anticipation of its elongated presence, twisting up hills, down into the valleys, coursing beside the grim-looking creek whose clay bottom renders it quite unpicturesque and at the same time sterile for aqualife.

It could have been a gloomy ramble this morning in the ravine. As we entered the woody confines just off our street we came across three municipal workers who voiced their concern that we be aware that the bridges crossing the creek and its tributaries have been removed. One had been left, and we had been making the best of that one remaining bridge for the past several months to bushwhack our way in unaccustomed places to join up with our long-familiar circuit.

This would be the last day we could make use of the bridge, they informed us grimly ... until the new ones were built in replacement. They were in the process of dismantling it, they informed us. Their orders from the municipal engineering department were to do so. Having established that the foundations of the bridges built a mere six years earlier to highway safety standards were now judged to be unsafe.

So, from this time forward, until the bridges are replaced -- at least three of the four that have been taken out -- we will be challenged to scour the woods for likely approaches to join up with the trails no longer accessible in the straightforward manner we have long been accustomed to. It is why now so few people in the area now seek out the comfort and leisure to be found hiking there. The reality of the situation is it is unlikely the bridges will be replaced until spring.

But although it's inconvenient and physically tough to gather ourselves down long forested slopes to then seek out other places where we are able to mount the slopes in reverse form, it's worth the effort, and we have, truth to tell, become accustomed to the inconvenience, treasuring the opportunity ongoing to make the most of the ravined forest that is of such immense value to us.