Where has the summer gone?

Seriously, where? I know it's not autumn yet, but all of a sudden there is that dark, purple, slightly moldy smell, and the urge to garden has completely disappeared. The back yard looks, as the Brits say, like a tip. 

There has been very little accordionating on account of sweaty wrists that get stuck inside the strap and cause bad playing. In my defense, I have been busy with the allotment garden:

Michael's pic

learning beekeeping at Toronto Botanical Garden:

(btw it was 34 degrees Celsius that day = extremely hot Fahrenheit)

 

and hanging around Barbara's cottage on Golden Lake, where she generously allowed us to spend a week:

From there we made a day trip to Algonquin Park. We entered through the east gate, which can only be reached via a horrendous gravel access road. The day we drove it, it was completely corrugated and a lesson in what it must have been like to travel over real corduroy roads in pioneer times -- i.e., enough to loosen your dental work, if you were lucky enough to have any. I don't know if I'd do it again and suspect the only reason I did it this time was that I had forgotten what it was like the last time. There was that sinking sense of deja-vu, accompanied by the conviction that I was about to forget again.

However, there we were, finally in, and it was just a matter of another 10 or so lumpy kilometres to the Barron Canyon trailhead. It's not a long trail but fairly steep, since it takes you to the edge of the gorge. 

So spectacular. Unfortunately no picture humanly takeable (by me) can convey the sheer gut-wrenching height of it. To do that you would have to be able to peer over the edge, and that is something of which I am not capable. I believe that the force of gravity actually gets stronger the closer you get to the edge of a precipice, and that it wants to pull you down. There are signs warning, not that a misstep might result in death, but that it will. And they are right.

A little farther along the road from the Barron Canyon trail is the Achray campground, the trailhead for the Berm Lake trail, and a buggy little hike to the spot on Grand Lake where Tom Thomson painted "The Jack Pine." We are suckers for all things Group of Seven -- how did people even know how to look at the Canadian landscape before they came along? The site looks nothing like the painting -- for one thing, the original jack pine is long gone -- but it is a very lovely spot and quintessential Canadian Shield, a.k.a. the landscape of my heart. 

I would love to go back sometime and camp there. Just as soon as I've forgotten about that road.