“Wrong way,” yelled Iggy from the top of a gravelly path. He turned and scooted by before I could stop my bike.

I reversed direction and let gravity pull me down the short slope.

“Turn right on the sidewalk,” added Iggy, moving rapidly out of sight.

Too much information for me to process on a slippery surface. So I hit my brakes. Skidded. Tried to pull my left foot out of its stirrup to steady myself.

Wham! I felt onto the gravel, left leg first. My first attempt at climbing Montreal’s Mount Royal was on hold while I assessed my condition.

The morning had started so nicely. A light snack of yogurt and white tea. The good feeling that comes from exercising before work.

I’m used to bicycling in street traffic back in Boston’s suburbs, so it didn’t faze me to follow Iggy onto Park Avenue, a major cross-street of Montreal. After all, Iggy and I had bicycled in Montreal traffic earlier in the week. Montreal drivers seemed no worse than their notoriously bad counterparts in Boston.

So I my tumble caught me by surprise. My knee was coated in dirt. A bit of blood seeped through. But it didn’t hurt much, so I got back on my bike just as Iggy returned to ask “What happened?” Soon I was trailing him again as we crossed the street under the gaze of a monument to George-Etienne Cartier.

Then we started up chemin Olmstead, the Olmstead Path, that wound its way up to the Belvedere outlook atop the mountain. Frederick Law Olmstead was the initial designer of the park on Mount Royal. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw its slow rise. I later learned that “Olmstead selected a mild, two per cent grade (the future chemin Olmsted) as the park’s main access route so that one-horse carriages could carry families of modest income up the mountain.”

Still, for a pudgy, out-of-shape athlete like me, two percent isn’t insignificant. Plus, it had a light coating of fine gravel, which made me feel skittish. I fell farther behind Iggy. Luckily he paused before plunging onto an offroad path between densely packed trees. Slender roots punctuated the dirt path. I wondered if the terrain would get rougher. Just then, we pulled back onto the Olmstead Path.

Within minutes, there stretched in front of me a lake with a boat dock, where a single woman performed stretching exercises. It looked like something out of a yoga instructional video. I’d arrived at Beaver Lake.

“You can stop here to use the bathroom. I’ll come back to pick you up on my way down.” Iggy didn’t think I could do it.

I dug in my heels, insisting that I wanted to try. It couldn’t be that much farther to the Belvedere outlook. Iggy gave in.

And, I made it! Here’s a nice Wikipedia photo from the outlook.