They're a little conflicted sometimes about going out on their early morning walk. Pre-breakfast. So the consolation is giving them little cheese treats before we leave the house and bringing along a little baggie of diced apple bits that we dole out while out on the forest trails. They wore little light tee-shirts again against the penetrating cold, and it was cold, around 7C, with a freshening wind. But not overcast! Today broke the days of heavily overcast cool days with pending rain. Sun so bright it's a good idea not to forget to take along sunglasses for those brief but dazzling times of exposure under the forest canopy.

After we had mounted the first hill taking us up to the spine of the ravine just where we descend again to the second bridge fording a stream tributary, Jackie and Jillie espied ahead one of their large white fuzzy friends coming up apace. Hard to keep them in check, they're so driven by excitement. There are some regular trail hikers we haven't seen in quite awhile, not since we gave up taking our forays into the ravine in the afternoon hours.

We had switched to early morning to avoid afternoon heat during the summer months. But we've become accustomed to the earlier morning hikes and enjoy them and see no reason to switch back to afternoon hikes. For one thing, a weather pattern had emerged that saw most afternoons enveloped in rain, so we've been bypassing that, too.

We were hauling ourselves up another long hill when we saw a familiar figure ahead. It was Dennis whom we see most mornings, a regular trail-blazer like us, and he was crouching down gathering gravel, placing it in a bag and we realized though we should have known that he was the one who was filling a gap at the end of one of the bridges where soil had washed away from all the heavy rain events. And we thanked him, a man well known for the efforts he takes in the ravine. We call it altruistic, though he responds that he does it for his own satisfaction. One and the same thing, as it happens in this instance.

On the lookout for those pinhead-sized bright red mushrooms we'd seen a few days back, we noted that they're now grown to maturity and in their fully grown state they're now the size of half of a very small pill. It's the eye-catching intensity of their colour that's impressive, along with their size of miniature fungi, vanishingly small against even a small white mushroom.

There's also plenty of fly agaric around, one in particular that we saw very well nibbled, signalling that some creatures of the forest must now and again trip the light fantastic. Obviously these mushrooms though poisonous to people and to dogs, may not be quite so to squirrels other than perhaps headache-inducing once the euphoria of its psychotropic properties have diminished.

It was such a beautiful morning we decided to keep going and to extend our circuit this morning. With the expectation that we'd be seeing wildflowers not in evidence alongside the forest trails now that foliage is at its fulsome height before fall denudes the trees, and where insufficient sunlight penetrates to encourage the bloom of the wildflowers.

Alfalfa

Further on, there's semi-open fields at the edge of the forest, and there all manner of wildflowers flourish, irresistible to anyone interested in flowering vegetation. We saw lots of pink, purple and white clover in bloom, some pilotweed still blooming, alfalfa in bloom, and a hefty colony of purple loosestrife.

Purple loosestrife

 Then we made our way alongside the creek for a bit, to see the proliferation of Black-eyed Susans along the bank of the creek, a profusion of bright gold and orange centres with dark brown eyes,  against the dark green of the foliage.