Conditions of ice-melt and the snowpack gradually receding leaving behind the usual muck on the forest floor, but particularly on the slopes between the hills and valleys appears to have kept a lot of the regular ravine trekkers from coming out this past week. Quite a few people don't own the kind of cleats we keep strapped over our boots all winter long and well into spring.

Without those cleats we'd have surely experienced many a fall, some slight and some capable of doing considerable physical damage to our bodies. We have, in the past, slipped often enough and had falls. And, as said, some were trifles though we'd come away from them well slopped in mud, and others caused enough damage that we suffered the consequences for weeks, even months afterward. So, for us, caution is the best solution.

On yesterday's walk we did come across a whole whack of people we know, including some we have never before seen. At least at a rough estimate, eight people, singly or in pairs out walking their dogs, and themselves on a perfect spring day with a temperature high of 14 degrees, a slight breeze, and plenty of sun gliding in a wonderfully clear sky. We saw a pair of Mourning Cloaks, the first sighting of those early butterflies this spring. There'll be more to come.

We're familiar with those parts of the ravine where the snow and ice on the trails will take much longer than other areas to finally melt. The creek is running flat-out with the milder temperatures and the occasional rainfall, so it shouldn't be more than a few weeks before the forest floor is sufficiently clear of snow and ice to enable us to shelve the cleats for another year, and that'll be a relief.

Jackie and Jillie, perhaps puzzled at first when they noticed the receding snow, now take it for granted; perhaps they recall previous springs, perhaps not. They're only two-and-a-half years old, after all. But they're revelling in their own new freedoms; lighter sweaters (mostly in an effort to keep them as free of mud as possible) and lighter harnesses.

A plenitude of delightful (to them) odours emanating from the winter-long accumulation of all manner of organic detritus -- and I mean all manner, including the absence of manners that seem to strike dogs in the depths of winter when the snow has built up to great heights and they defecate on the trail and people fail to remove it.