Hello everyone on this nice sunny autumn day!  It’s mid afternoon and still sunny, that’s not bad at all.  It is 63F or 17C, which is cool, but wearing a jacket makes it a nice day anyway.  So I decided to head out for a walk along my forest path down to the river once again.  I have to grab each nice day as it comes along since we are getting so many rainy days now.  This has been a very rainy fall so far.  That often means a very snowy winter. And winter’s with lots of snow are also very long.  So that’s another indicator of another long winter for us.  But I’m still hoping for a long fall and short milder winter.  Okay, maybe I should say, “dreaming”.  Oh well, nothing wrong with dreaming sometimes.

So off I go for my walk.  There is a lot of water along the path for the first little while.  Right on the path.  And beside the path.  About 6 inches (15cm) deep.  Hard not to get wet feet on that first part.  Oh well.  It’s a nice day anyway.  And my feet are always getting wet one way or the other.

  Quite a few new mushrooms were out today, I thought there would be.  Sure is a big variety of mushrooms around.  Always interesting to see what else is going to show up. Came across a flock of thrushes obviously heading south.  They will be gone tonight.  There is a lot of white-throated sparrows around now.  They usually stay until late September, which is nice.  Sometimes even later.  Sometimes.  Not often.

Spotted a flock of chickadees and nuthatches as well.  The only other birds were a 2 year old ring-billed gull and a golden eagle.  My two pictures of the eagle were not that good.  But he was flying and I have a hard time focusing on a bird that keeps changing distance like that.  Oh well, maybe another time.  Golden eagles usually only come through this area during migration in the spring and fall.  We have a lot of bald eagles here though, the highest number of breeding pairs anywhere in the province and second only to B.C.

But it sure was nice down there today, not much wind, really a beautiful autumn day to be by the river.  But, it’s important to watch out for slippery rocks.  All this rain makes the rocks wet.  And there is one kind of rock here that gets extremely slippery when wet. So I am careful not to step on that particular type of rock.  Until this time.  I was looking around, instead of down.  I stepped on the rock and slid about 8 feet (about 2.5 meters), then over a ledge and landed on a pile of rocks about 6 feet (2 meters) down.  I will admit, that did hurt.  A lot.  Still does.

I landed on my side.  It wasn’t easy walking back.  Didn’t think I would make it back.  I had to keep stopping due to the pain.  Oh my.  It all happened so fast I couldn’t do anything to stop myself.  I won’t go on that part of the path again until it’s nice and dry.  Which may not be until next year.  At least I wasn’t close to the river at that point, so no way that I would have fallen in there.  Although that would have been a softer landing than those rocks.  Oh well.  It’s over.  And no serious damage.

It is still nice and sunny, amazing that it lasted all day for a change.  Sorry this is a bit late today.  I will try to do better from now on.  I hope you all have a wonderful day and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

© 2019 Steve McLeod.