Tom’s report:
It has become our Thanksgiving weekend tradition to have our Sunday hike up to the summits of Oka. The turnout is usually lower than other weekends since many are busy with holiday-related activities. But the 14 of us who turned out were thankful we did. The day before the hike there was a story on the news that the employees of Sépaq (the network of provincial parks) had suddenly gone on strike. Oh no! But further along they said that the parks were still open and the picketing workers were not blocking access, so I tweeted that we were going ahead with the hike. In any case, it turned out they returned to work on Sunday morning, so there was no issue. The drive north to Oka brought us from sun to cloudy and foggy conditions. But the conditions cleared as we assembled in the parking lot and we had perfect conditions: sun and comfortably cool temperatures around 13 C.
After the requisite group photo, we set out at 10:01 am along the eastern trail towards the summit. (For those of you who ski there in the winter, this is trail 5.) Most people who come to Oka for a hike take the western trail (Sentier du Calvaire), 
so we had our trail mostly to ourselves, although we did have to keep an eye out for a few oncoming mountain bikers. This trail has some sharp ups and downs for the first 3 km, until we reach the first summit, and it is classified by Oka as a “hard” trail, on a scale of easy/intermediate/hard.
We took a pause at the summit to catch our breath and have a snack. This summit is ringed by tall trees, so there is not much of a view to be had. The next 2 km were much easier, as the trail was a gentle descent through the woods. At the 5 km mark, we turned towards the second summit and we had one last steep climb to reach the three chapels. When we arrived at the lookout, our quiet solitude was ended as we joined the large crowds of people who had taken the easier trail up and who were massed there. We ran into our own Christine B-M, who was this week leading another group from a hiking club based in Saint-Lazare. They had hiked there from the Oka ferry. As per their annual tradition, the park had Oka cheese and local apples on offer. The cheese was cut from large wheels into generous slices and the apples were all-you-could-eat. We made a point of eating generous amounts of cheese and all the apples we could! We also paused to take in the view of the lake below surrounded by autumn colours.
Once we had sated our appetites, we began walking the last 2.3 km back to the cares. We descended along the Sentier du Calvaire, pausing to peek into some of the mini trail-side chapels to view the bas reliefs of religious scenes. We were back at the parking lot at 12:11 pm after a hike of 8 km. We were left with plenty of time to pursue other holiday activities. For many of us, this would involve ingesting large amounts of turkey with all the trimmings. We were thankful that we had done our hike as a preemptive strike against all the eating to come!