We walked into autumn, and the pages of a Grimms’ fairy tale.

I forgot my gloves.

Which is, I suppose, a minor annoyance compared with getting lost or trapped in a dungeon or tossed into a witch’s stove.

And although I brought no bread crumbs in my pack, I did remember the fruit leather (mango) and the candy corn, both of which I consider survival foods.

My wife, Lisa, and I were confronted with nothing more threatening than an occasionally bitter downvalley wind gust during our hike on the first day of October along the North Fork of Anthony Creek, in the deep woods west of Pilcher Creek Reservoir.

It was a fine introduction to the new season.

This boisterous fork of Anthony Creek is among my favorite streams.

It plays all the varied music of which a mountain brook is capable — from the delicate tinkling notes of a riffle to the bass thunder of a plunge pool.

This part of the Elkhorns, on the fringes of the 1960 Anthony fire north of the Anthony Lakes Highway, seems to me something of a contradiction.

The country is wild, with forests in places not so much dense as all but impenetrable, in the lodgepole thickets that colonized the scorched ground.

Many trees, particularly near the creek, survived that long-ago blaze, and these tamaracks and Douglas-firs and ponderosa pines and Engelmann spruces make a distinct contrast with the dog hair lodgepole swathes.

Yet the place is also rife with roads.

There are three routes up the creek’s canyon, two north of the stream and one to the south.

One road on either side is fairly well-traveled. Both are midslope roads, several hundred feet above the creek.

I prefer the middle road — Forest Road 7312-150 — which rarely climbs more than 50 feet higher than water level and is, for long stretches, far closer. It’s an easy hike, for the most part, with the gentle grades typical of roads that follow streams.

It’s also the most disheveled of the three roads, and by a wide margin.

Although we saw fairly fresh tracks from an ATV in muddy spots, I doubt many full-size rigs venture up the road.

At the junction with the well-maintained Anthony Creek Road (7312), an alder dangles over the road at a 45-degree angle, its trunk as thick as a weightlifter’s biceps and just about at windshield height.

The road, which seems not to have felt the scrape of a bulldozer’s blade for at least a few decades, is riven by gullies, some of them carrying water from roadside springs, interrupted by the occasional boulder, and intruded on, almost constantly, by alders and firs.

In many places their branches extend far enough that they meet in the middle, their branches intertwined.

Which is to say, it has more the appearance of a rarely trodden path than a road.

Hence my earlier allusion to the likes of Hansel and Gretel.

This route, the forest it traverses and the stream it follows, are nothing like remote. The nearest wilderness boundary is some miles distant.

And yet I feel whenever I go there a distinct sense of wildness, no matter the inevitably arbitrary definitions of the land managing agencies.

We saw no one during our roughly 5-mile hike.

(Although we did see several beer cans, the inevitable spoor of the forest.)

Actually we saw many other spores — of the fungal rather than aluminum variety.

Mushrooms have been especially profuse in the woods this late summer and fall, lingering evidence of August’s record rainfall. Rotting boletes were most common along the road, but Lisa, whose eyes are much keener than mine, also rooted out a calfbrain, also long past its prime, and a solitary shaggy mane that still seemed sound.

(I enjoy looking at wild mushrooms, but other than morels I do not trust my rudimentary knowledge to go so far as to pick any for potential consumption. Otherwise I subject my liver and other vital organs only to mushrooms which presumably had a more domesticated but also predictable origin, and which are placed by someone else on my pizza before it’s baked.)

On this day, as on all my previous visits, we turned back before we reached road’s end, which is at least another mile and a half.

There are no panoramic vistas — the road, after all, is in the bottom of a canyon.

But we enjoyed a bounty of scenery just the same, as autumn is beginning to dip into its palette with the year on the wane.

Vine maples, some of which droop over the road, have swapped summer green for fall’s brilliant yellow.

Red osier dogwood leaves have taken on their namesake hue, and the old cottonwoods, which are scattered around the creek’s floodplain, showed twinges of yellow.

We saw a few tamaracks, the most conspicuous of the conifers, whose needles had begun the transition from pale green to the orange-yellow that is a defining color of autumn in the Blue Mountains.

Only the tamaracks’ crowns had turned, though, and it was as though these trees were lit candles, the flames bright against the green backdrop.

When we could at last see our FJ Cruiser, parked beside the 7312 Road, I felt as though we had not merely returned but emerged, that there was a distinct boundary between the main road and the place from which we had just come.

I was reminded again of fairy tales, of forests which are tranquil but also vaguely mysterious, welcoming but a trifle spooky in their inscrutable silence.

(Except when some animal, concealed by the dense vegetation, crunches through the undergrowth nearby.)

The snow will come soon and transform this land even more dramatically than autumn does.

But for now fall reigns.

Drive to Pilcher Creek Reservoir, which is on Tucker Flat Road west of North Powder. From the turnoff to the reservoir, continue west on the gravel road, which becomes Forest Road 4330 and enters the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.

After about 3.3 miles, turn left onto Road 7312 at a sign for Anthony Highway, which is 9 miles to the south. Drive Road 7312 for almost 2 miles to where it crosses the North Fork of Anthony Creek via a concrete bridge. Road 7312-150 starts on the north side of the creek.

The two other routes in the North Fork canyon are the Mud Springs Road, 7312-200, which starts about half a mile north of the bridge, and Road 7312-100, which begins just south of the bridge.