Invariably, as we enter deeper into the fall and season, and Thanksgiving Day approaches, a flurry of people, their small children, and their dogs, increasingly enter the forest for a brief reminder of the natural beauty accessible to them not far from where they live in a landscape that they seldom find time to explore because of the time-press of ordinary life.

The result of which for us is that we come across teens, adults with toddlers and/or dogs making their way through the woodland trails whom we will seldom see again. It's a large urban forest contained within a sprawling ravine system and it has room for any number of people to mosey about and re-introduce themselves and their youngsters and their dogs, to unaffected nature within a larger sprawl of an urban centre.

They won't be familiar with the seasonal changes that reveal themselves constantly, but they will be exposed to a snapshot impression of what the ravine looks like as an early autumn landscape, impressive enough. As for us, viewing these changes daily, they still come as a surprise to us. The change from a fully crowded forest floor hosting all kinds of wild vegetation some identifiable, some not, to a vegetation-vacant forest floor is startling.

Not so for Jackie, who finds it an assist in his daily spurts off the ordered trails in hot pursuit of squirrels since the vacated vegetation makes for excellent sighting enabling him to follow the little creatures as they swivel and skirt, leap here and there to evade Jackie, and finally lose him as they swiftly mount a tree trunk, leaving him puzzled, behind.

Jillie satisfies her curiosity by watching her brother in his dizzying run-offs here and there, and then hauling herself off down the trails ahead of us until Jackie, propelling himself swiftly in reverse, rejoins her. We come across people we've known for years as hiking companions valuing the incomparable green venue as we do, to greatly enhance the quality of our leisure hours and our mental and physical health.