After last night's series of thunderstorms we were greeted by sun this morning, a very welcome visitor. Since it was such a lovely day I decided to take our puppies outside and give them their usual haircuts there, and that worked out fine. They were none too impressed, it's not a routine they're fond of, but their haircoat grows so quickly they really needed to be groomed. Truth to tell it's not one of my favourite activities either. But they do look a lot better afterward.

After that ordeal, we took ourselves off to the ravine for our daily walk. The last few days without rain and full sun had begun to dry up the forest floor. Now it's once again cluttered with standing pools of water. But it's a relatively cool day and breezy, which makes for excellent woodland hiking conditions and we made the most of it.

We decided since it's a Saturday that we would go off the beaten track as it were, to access the restricted zones where the construction is taking place to remediate the hillside slumps threatening the stability of the houses beyond the ravine. A little diversion. We noted that most of the heavy machinery is now absent, only the steam shovels remain in place. So if we're lucky the shrieking sounds and house-shaking related to pile-driving metal stakes into the forest floor to bedrock may have been completed.

We made our way around the restriction fences and carried on up an alternate trail that looks over and across at the slumped area, another rise opposite the one where the  houses back onto. There, the vista is enlarged; the entire area is about 1/5 of a mile in length comprising a minuscule portion of the forested ravine. But it's there that the natural collapse occurred and there that the work is being carried out.

As we drew closer to the part where the trail gives out onto a major thoroughfare (with the ravine itself carrying on across the highway), looking down over the work that has been done so far, the area width stretches quite substantially. It also encompasses another street beyond the one we live on. And there, at the conjunction of the two streets and the thoroughfare we saw a group of immense pumps and giant hoses used to divert the stream from its natural course to enable the heavy construction machinery and the workers to conduct their work without getting drenched.

The stream has been redirected  with the help of those pumps and hoses and large pipes temporarily planted into the earthworks, diverted through a bit of a smaller, natural forested valley that meanders and eventually reaches the streambed itself, and there the water is disgorged.

The project that was estimated to take a month, and then two months has been on the go for four months and there's little sign yet that it's about to wrap up in a hurry. Rumour has it that the municipality has invested $7-million tax dollars into this remediation project.