Drove through some jeezly big puddles to the trailhead in Westbrook with the dog. The ravine has transformed since last Sunday. Gone is the soft snow on the trail, replaced by grey, needle-strewn ice. Even with this brilliant weather we’ve been having (it was 11C yesterday), there is still heaps of snow off-trail, and Maggie was determined to eat it, play in it, and get stuck in it. She found her inner puppy this afternoon, and will most likely pay for it tomorrow, but I was glad for her company, and her enthusiasm.

We only passed one other person in the ravine, and yet in spite of the solitude, it was anything but quiet. The birds, also channeling their inner chicks, were madly chirping. The ones that weren’t chirping were raining flakes of wood on the snow, or jumping from crackled branch to branch in search of whatever birds eat at the end of winter. There was a lot of activity, and the creek, frozen over last weekend, was a raging brown current slicing through a newly yielding bank of snow and ice.

2:00PM/4C