Gatineau Fall Colours
Well, it is, after all, Thanksgiving week-end, so when better to scan the colours up in Gatineau Park. The entire week-end has outdone itself in producing perfect weather; milder than normal for this time of year and with wide, clear skies, not one cloud punctuating the clear blue. It had been months since we'd been up there for a hike and we were anxious to renew our acquaintance with that long-appreciated venue.
Driving along the Eastern Parkway is a treat in itself, as far as fall colours are concerned; the deciduous trees are at their apex of beauty with brilliant hues of reds, oranges, yellows, lime-greens wonderfully set against the backdrop of the dark greens of the conifers among which they nestle. The Parkway is a favourite haunt for many people, a long stretch of manicured lawn and trees alongside the length of the Ottawa River.
Lots of strollers there, families enjoying picnics, young couples walking their dogs, bicycle enthusiastics using the many bicycle trails that the National Capital Commission, tasked with ensuring that the National Capital Region remains people-friendly and environmentally sensitive does its best to maintain and protect.
Further on the equestrian park belonging to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hosts its own attractions, as people park their cars full of equine enthusiasts, including any number of enraptured children, to watch the homogeneously-coloured and body-conformationed horses whose sleek flanks shine in the sunshine, as they crop nearby, or saunter then break into a canter reflecting their own enthusiasm for this day's splendid weather.
There's an inordinate number of cars parked in the huge lot of the Aeronautical Museum, just off the Parkway. Ottawa has a surfeit of various types of museums, this is just one, and a relatively new incarnation of the old building attracts even more tourists and curiosity-seekers than ever before. Children love the opportunity to see the old airplanes and to scramble about them.
We cross the interprovincial bridge, drawing closer to the Gatineau Hills whose curvaceous presence - which can, from certain vantage points in Ottawa, be seen from the distance - becomes clearer as we approach. The hills hump the horizon, in a blazing patchwork of colour, emphasized and clarified by the cloudless blue sky.
At the Village of Chelsea all the chic little cafes bedecked for fall with cornstalks and hay, sunflowers and pumpkins, are working overtime to provide countryside dining experiences for all the Yuppies and Guppies whose idea of working the countryside on such divine days will not be complete without being seen by the right people at the right time, all similarly inclined.
The perimeter of the park, as we drive closer is dense and bright with colour reaching out to grasp our memory-lapsing sightlines. We've decided this time to hike the Skyline Trail, assuming, foolishly, that most shopping centre devotees will be too busy doing what they enjoy most to come out on a Saturday morning. But horrors! the parking lot is full, the overflow lot is almost full. No matter, we never park there anyway. We old-timers long accustomed to making the most of what this nature preserve offers have long memories.
Then we traipse up the long road to access the hiking trails which radiate out from the main road, and we have company, lots of it. It seems half the population of Ottawa and at least that many of the city of Gatineau have apprised themselves of our intentions and thinking it to be a fairly good idea - hurried out to accompany us.
The day begins to warm up; we did, after all, have a ground frost the night before. We shed light jackets, haul Riley's halter and little tee-shirt off him, and begin our hike. Brief acknowledgements are made in passing groups of people intent in doing just what we are doing; appreciating the day, stretching our hiking legs, appraising the colours. Who can blame them? These are experiences generally beloved by all.
It's those others who seem intent on following us, pestering us, those colossal nuisance types we just cannot seem to shake, no matter what we do. Expressing our annoyance with their presence bothers them not at all, threatening them elicits no response whatever; we have to accept we can do nothing much about their presence. This is, after all, their environment, and they lay claim to it.
They're not exactly biting, those bloody blackflies, but they are nibbling. They appear in dense black fogs of tiny, pestilential, blood-sucking, flesh-crippling intent. We wave our arms about in self-defence, move along more quickly, try to ignore them, struggle to outdistance them, scratch them under our fingernails out from behind our ear lobes, the hairlines at the backs of our necks. Nothing deters them.
The colours on the interior are more muted than those viewed from a distant exterior; we have shades of crisp browns, yellows, oranges, russet, and occasional scarlet surprises. Impossible to begrudge the presence of others anxious like us to view the changing trees, shuffle through the leaf piles, clamber up hill and down, view the far-off images of the fields far distanced and below the trail, and the far-flung reaches of the city.
This is a rite. A yearly ritual. One we embrace with full enthusiasm, eager to re-live the experience, the visual sensations, the fragrances of fall.
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 08, 2006
<< Home