The White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire is a true geological jewel of a landscape awesome in its scope and beauty. We no longer summit the mountains we once climbed with our children decades ago. But we still haunt some of the old trails that we got to know and appreciate in those years, trails that still deliver gasps of delight from us, making it well worthwhile for us now in our later years of enjoying life, able to negotiate our way around.

Invariably mountain trails through dense forest come complete with ascents, however modest in comparison to clambering up a mountain slope. They also, many of them come with other furnishings, such as mountain streams. Those streams barrelling down mountainsides do so at a formidable clip, raising mist and keeping the nearby forest well irrigated.

Invariably, many of the trails we're still able to negotiate are quite humid, hosting an array of mosses and and the kind of vegetation that thrives in such moist conditions.

In the spring we travel to the Waterville Valley so we can re-acquaint ourselves briefly with the trails and then it is that we delight in a variety of spring-blooming wildflowers, always avidly on the lookout for Ladies Slippers, those wonderful wild orchids, while still appreciating other old standbys like bunchberry, trilliums and straw lilies, among others.

But in the fall it's a different story altogether; the wildflowers but for fall asters and goldenrod, have exhausted their presence and in their place, the obvious outcroppings of fungi with the onset of fall's rainy season augmenting the natural moist-laden atmosphere adjacent mountain streams.

This is when fungi come into their own. All shapes, sizes, colours and decorative touches, so many of them outstanding in their formation and creative natural artistry. Nature, after all, is the original artist whose exquisite designs and patterns humans attempt to emulate as best they can contrive to, but never coming close to the originals in beauty.