Much would be missing from our lives if we were deprived of our daily rambles in the woods. When we first contemplated the purchase of the house we've lived in now for 25 years, it was with the thought that a stone's throw beyond where the house stood was the presence of a woodland. All of our lives together, from the time we were together in our mid-teens to the present time, exposure to nature was important to us.

When our children were infants Toronto was experimenting with the creation of natural woodland settings surrounding the city, buying up land and converting it into parkland and areas where forest settings invited people to use for recreational purposes. That was over a half-century ago. We made use of those wonderful areas for just that purpose, most often finding ourselves alone in the vast expanse of the acreage open to all.

When we moved to the nation's capital at a time our children were entering their teen years there was very accessible Gatineau Park, a great preserved forested area in Quebec that took a mere half-hour drive to get to, and there we and our children experienced the pleasures of hiking, berry-picking, picnicking, canoeing and snow-shoeing. There wasn't a week in the summer where we wouldn't hie ourselves off for a long hike, and we became familiar with lengthy old trails whose markings had long since faded.

Needless to say we'd be the only people on those trails; it was but rarely that we would come across anyone else. We had the pleasure of seeing deer and raccoons, all types of wonderful birds, snakes, toads and frogs, squirrels and porcupines. We all treasured those excursions; sometimes after my husband returned from work we'd load the canoe onto the car roof, take along a picnic dinner and set off for the evening at one of the lake sites; Meach, Philippe or la Peche.

Now, we seldom make the trip to the park. It is invariably stuffed with people on popular trails. Not the distant, long and little-known remotely accessed trails we used to take which now present too much of a physical challenge for us, but those nearby, and relatively short. We have an alternative now, in the Bilberry Creek Ravine forest a two-minute walk away from our home.