October
10th October
Well, how sad it is that my first winter of snow has slipped away. Tiny caps still cling tenaciously to the very tops and lay in rivulets along shaded slopes. How short a time it seems. I have had an amazing winter and I am truly sorry to see the end of it.
As a consolation some of our favourite walking paths are now open and traversible again. We returned to Lyndon hill . We didn't do the saddle walk since the path is still icy in the shade. Instead we ambled up the hill towards the Broken River ski area. It was a fine day and we took our time, stopping for coffee on the banks of a stream eating our lunch while listening to bird song in the deeper forest.
I find that we a great deal fitter now and walks that we once took us a day can now be concluded in couple of hours. This will probably be the last walk as a family until November as Marisa is preparing for a trip to the US.
When we returned home in the evning its was suprisingly chilly and we decided to light a fire. Gabriel went our to get the wood and came running back in to tell us that a hedgehog was in our back garden.
Coming from Western Australia I am familiar with Echidna's but I have never seen a hedgehog. We rushed out an to find this little fellow. He was about the size of my fist and not terribly concerned about our presence at all. Echidnas are much larger, typically the size of a large cat. These hedgehogs look really weird to me, like hunchbacked pigs really.
He stayed with us for a couple of nights before leaving. It did give Marisa a chance to snap these shots of the little fellow while he was feeding on the back lawn.
The locals tell us that they show up every now and again. You can feed them all sorts of things to keep them around a while. One of the benefits of having them around is they control pests such as snails in the garden.
--Brook
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