Our beloved ravine represents a wide-ranging series of hills and valleys. To traverse the ravine is to stroll along forest trails that intersect and bring one abreast of climbing challenges, never more so than in winter when snow and ice complicate passage while producing beautiful landscapes. It is a landscape, moreover, that is geologically not only diverse but unstable. Built on Leda clay, known for its fragility and instability under certain conditions.

Such as when too much liquid is introduced into the clay base which then turns the clay into a kind of liquid itself, prone to collapse. And collapse it did, mightily, a few years back after a very wet spring that inundated the area with more snowmelt coincidental with copious rainfall alongside than the Leda clay could cope with, so its molecular structure changed, and the hillsides gave way, taking the forest trees with it, to collapse onto the creek running below through the forest at its base.

The beavers that lived upstream were delighted. They swiftly re-located themselves to make the most, in the brief time before remediation took place, of a new pond that developed when the creek was unable to forge its way onward, pooled instead and a small lake began to accumulate the dammed-up water. Eventually the beaver were relocated and heavy tracked machinery was brought in to excavate the muck that had once been a vigorous forest hillside. Stabilizers were struck down to bedrock, and a refashioning of the hillsides began.

It took months for specialized remediation construction crews to fashion an alternative to the landscape chaos that had emerged, and when winter arrived they still weren't completely done with the gigantic project. Once spring returned, work resumed, though not at the intensity of pace that was formerly required to address the stabilization of a hill where private housing stood nearby, leading to fears that homes would be threatened with collapse.

Many things were changed in that localized part of the ravine. Among other things, a new entry to the ravine was devised, off a main street that intersects the ravine. The forested ravine that regular woodland hikers like ourselves thought of as our very special, and often very private getaway eventually became of interest to others who had never before  entured into this shared treasure, and we were soon joined by more casual hikers who limited their excursions onto the trails, while in their own way appreciating the opportunity to share its recreational and aesthetic natural presence.

Today when we were out in the ravine with our puppies there was a  young family with a five-month-old infant in one of those modern, rugged strollers that can go almost anywhere -- at least the flat, upper portions of the forested trains. The baby looked quite content, its bright eyes searching everywhere on the unfamiliar landscape.

And soon afterward Jackie and  Jillie were introduced to two small dogs, one their size another about double their size, but enjoying the opportunity to be out in a natural setting, and with them two little boys of around six and eight who obviously delighted in their own good fortune to be there. Bright and curious they ran about happily, asked us a few questions, then awaited the arrival of their mothers, poking along behind.