The long Easter weekend from Friday to Monday gave us a little bit of everything; cold, wind, rain for the first half, then moderating temperature, lighter wind and heavy overcast, to prepare us for the crowning day, which dawned sunny and became wonderfully warm reaching a temperature of 18C. And that was Monday, today.

Sunday was that in-between day. Weather far from ideal, but good enough not to restrain us from our daily ravine walk, so off we set. We came across Sheila with hers and Barry's three Border Collies, and she told us that when Barry took them out on Saturday, Carter, the largest of the three siblings, got 'lost'. He was there one minute, the next gone. A mutual friend came along while Barry was looking for Carter, to anxiously ask if he was all right.

Yes, Barry responded, he was fine, but Carter was lost and he'd looked everywhere, gone back over the trail and he was nowhere to be found. Then Susan told him that Carter was stoically waiting for him beside the car where he had parked it before entering the ravine with his little pack. Evidently, realizing he had lost sight of Barry and the other two dogs, Carter tracked back to the car parked on the road to await Barry's return. What's most interesting about that is the fact that there are four different streets Barry and Sheila park on, deciding where they plan to enter the ravine and which part of it they plan to trek.

Susan had tried to persuade Carter to come back into the ravine with her, but he wouldn't budge. Then it occurred to her that something might have happened to Barry and he was in trouble. She set out with that in mind, to find him, and find him she did. Her concern was what occasioned her worried query whether he was all right.

In turn I told Sheila about the three Mallards we'd seen down in the creek the day before. When the drakes had a set-to challenging one another for the affections of the female. There are always little news bits to be talked about whenever we meet. I'd meant to tell her about the cache we'd just passed of neatly stacked fir cones in a little 'pantry' on the forest floor that squirrels had stocked for winter repasts, looking as neat as cigars in a humidor, but it slipped my mind.

We had seen the same thing in the fall, in the same place, only the stack was much more modest; it had been added to over the late fall months until winter fell and snow completely engulfed the pantry. Now that snow and ice has receded it has been revealed, and we spotted it under a copse of trees on the forest floor, other similar stacks not far off.

And the snow really is receding. It seems to take forever before the snowpack relents and starts to withdraw, filling the creek with meltwater. But once it begins, the annual ritual of spring's arrival ensures it accelerates to the point where we can hardly credit how swiftly it has all gone. The bridges are now almost clear of the snow and ice that has been packed down hard on their surface over the winter months.

The trails are about sixty percent free of ice, other than some trails that stubbornly hold onto the icepack because they rarely get hit by the sun and the depth of the ice is sufficient to insulate itself from the warming ambient temperature. In those areas, while the rest of the trails in the ravine free themselves from the embrace of ice, it will remain for an additional month before finally departing.