It is fall time in Montreal and absolutely no one stays in the city. Every week I was flooded with email talking about ‘great views of fall colors’. And yes, I have to admit, I fell for them.

This is McGill campus from across the street, but you get the point. Something I like to mention now is that Montreal trees seem to maintain the color for quite a bit longer than their fellow trees in the great nature reserves. Don’t wait too long or you might just as well wait another year!

My first hike around fall time and also my very first time in the United States (yippiee!) was Mt Mansfield, Vermont. After some emails we kept sending back and forth, a group of us went on this hike together. The whole way up we solved riddles, black stories and told each other jokes, the whole way down we basically stayed silent.

At one point we got lost and ended up on a muddy canyon trail that was supposed to be closed, because of the heavy rain the mountain got in the past few days, but we fought our way through the puddles and fallen trees and it was more adventurous than we could have hoped for.

The following weekend I went on a hike around the McGill Outdoors Club House. This is an actual house in a village ca. 1h drive from the city and members can spend as much time three as they want. The place is huge and full of history, cozy spaces, hidden and lost stories and games. The house is close to a river, some smaller hills, a lake, cross-country trails, rock and ice walls and so much more! Perfect for a day or even a hole weekend out of the city.

Here is just a glimpse of what you can see around the house… feel free to go for a swim or a walk around the lake, or two or three or four… don’t get lost.

Next up is my trip to Victoriaville. It’s all about birds (again) and geese in particular. It’s the time and place when thousands of geese gather for a rest on their way further south. I don’t know why and I am not too sure whether anyone does, but they all know it and they remember every year.

At this point a whole wave of birds came towards us. The latter birds rose up first and then the ones in front of them did and the ones in front of those ones and so on until they were all up in the air and they found a new spot not much further form their previous and then they started all over again- like a game.

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Here are two birds that we observed during our walk around the lake and that will actually spend the winter in Canada. The chickadee and the blue jay. The blue jay is so beautiful with its blue shiny feathers that half the group run off into the forest to try and chase it for a photograph. As you can see I was one of them and rather successful. The geese were forgotten but just for a moment.

The End.