Yesterday, school buses were cancelled, the city's light rail transit system broke down and tens of thousands of people were without power as an ice storm and high winds invaded the region for the day. Looking out our windows or the front door was impossible, they were all heavily sheathed in ice. It was nothing like the ice storm that lasted days and devastated forests from Ontario to Quebec, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire over twenty years ago, but yesterday's storm caused its share of road accidents with glare ice covering all surfaces. Not a day to be out, and people were urged to stay off the roads.

When we went up to bed yesterday the temperature had started rising from the -0.1C it seemed stuck at all day. All the trees were covered in a slick sheathing of ice, glimmering in the night lights cast by nearby lamps. Before darkness fell, though, little Benjie, our wild rabbit neighbour came by as he does daily for his carrots.

By morning today, the ice rain had stopped. Hoar frost covered everything, and a bright, opaque ice fog hovered in the atmosphere. The forecast was for milder temperatures and that eventuated; by the time we set out for our hike through the ravine -- the thermometer had nudged up to a surprising 8C and the sun had indeed emerged, though a high wind persisted.

My hair was tousled by the wind as we walked up the street to reach the ravine entrance. Although there are still high mounds of hard-packed snow and ice on peoples' lawns, they're clearly diminishing. The snow in our backyard is quickly disappearing, perhaps another week and it will be gone. Not so the front lawn where the snow piles are deeper and tend to take longer to melt into spring.

Descending from street level into the ravine it was soon obvious that the forest had sustained damage throughout the course of the day yesterday. We clambered over a tree downed across the trail, and there were substantial piles of cracked conifer limbs fallen from some of the giant pines in the forest. The hardwood suffered losses of striplings, the conifer branches with their green needles intact found the weight of the ice deposited throughout the day too burdensome to sustain.

Jackie and Jillie wandered quizzically about the trails, focused on the detritus that had fallen. We were challenged by the slushy ice and snow that infused our progress with an excess of energy output to climb hills. The creek is swollen beyond its normal spring runoff capacity, detritus from the storm swirling through the turbid waters roiling their way downstream.

But the sun was out and illuminating the landscape. In the ravine, the robust wind gusts seemed to confine their activity to the forest canopy, leading the steeples of trees to sway and clack. Then the sun began interacting with incoming clouds, and before we left the ravine on our completed circuit, darker clouds had entered, screening the sun as though another storm was giving due consideration to a command performance.