The larch tree (Larix laricina Tamarack Larch) is my favourite fall tree (slightly ahead of the sugar maple and the red oak). It is our only deciduous conifer and changes to this incredibly rich warm gold colour after most of the other deciduous trees are stripped bare of their leaves. It therefore provides the last hurrah before we must endure the bleak month of November.

These beautiful larch trees stand at the edge of a raised bog along Tilton Lake Road on the way to Clearwater Lake.  I took the picture on October 19 just a day-and-a-half before my father-in-law Jean-Paul Picard died surrounded by his family. 

J-P was a great lover of all things "wood". He built his Manitoulan home of wood and finished the interior with local cedar. He took great pleasure building (and watching) fires in his wood stove and in a large outdoor fire pit; a place where the family gathered in the summer to tell stories, sing songs and drink beer. He also loved being in the woods at Burwash Lake to hunt and fish. In his early days in Temagami he worked in the lumber industry when selective cutting was the norm instead of the exception it is today. He had the old-fashioned value of reusing and recycling. He was reluctant to cut down a living tree and I once witnessed him giving hell to a MacMillan Bloedel employee for their practice of clear cutting old growth forests in British Columbia. 

One of my favourite memories of Jean-Paul dates from 1994 when J-P, Paulette and I took a boat to Meares Island off Tofino on Vancouver Island to walk the Big Tree Trail and see the giant "Mother Earth" Western  Red Cedar. I can still see his big grin and bright eyes as I took his picture dwarfed by this giant in a land of giants. I will miss him.