Last Sunday turned out to be a nice day for a hike. Apparently, many others agreed as we were 32 hikers (plus 4 dogs) at Prevost. Indeed, the parking lot was unusually crowded as another walking club from St-Jerome with an even larger gang than ours were also setting out for a hike. Fortunately, we took a different route than they did and we did not see them again until 
we returned.
It was cool, about 7 C, but mostly sunny as we set out shortly after 10 am. We followed the usual route along the MOC (McGill Outing Club) trail and first went to summit of Mount Shaw. While there is a view from the lookout, it is a bit of an exaggeration to label this a mountain! We took a sharp descent down the other side, past the long-abandoned building foundation. We then made our way over to Lac Paradis. While many of the leaves had fallen, there were still enough red-tinged trees to make for some lovely scenery. The water of the lake was too enticing for two of our dogs to resist and they went in for a dip.
We walked along the edge of the lake and then made our way over to the power lines, which signaled the start of our longest climbing section. We regrouped at the top and then made our way along the top of the elevated terrain to the main lookout on Mont Belvedere. We stopped there for 20 mins (11:55 am – 12:15 pm) to admire the view and have a quick bite. We then started out for a few minutes in the wrong direction, before we corrected ourselves and got back on course. We then continued on the MOC trail and descended gradually to the junction with the WN (Wilson North) trail, where we turned left. We then took another left on the JE (Johannsen East) to bring us back to the road that then intersected with the Ptit Train du Nord trail back to the cars. We covered 8.5 km in 3 hr 10 min. Most importantly, we did it with out losing any one of our 32 hikers!
Afterward, several hikers gathered at a nearby Tim’s to reward themselves for their efforts. It was another great day at Prevost.