365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Little-Known Places
Day 189: I thought I knew where I was going, but I soon realized that my memory from forty years ago was probably faulty. Plus, the directions I'd been given weren't tallying with my observations, leaving me to question whether I'd misread or misinterpreted them. In any event, getting where I was going wasn't working out according to plan, so I decided to try an alternate route. In so doing, I stumbled across this which, after forty years, I had forgotten was there.
There are several small spillways like this, tucked away in tacitly undisclosed locations in the Park. Some are part of existing water systems while others are simply forgotten bits of history. If you know where to look, the trailheads to some are obvious, if unmarked and lightly disguised by vegetation, but others require orienteering skills and tough hide to attain. It does take one aback somewhat to encounter a man-made waterfall in the backcountry, a reminder that there is probably no one place in the Park where Man's foot has not been put down. Wilderness is a state of mind, wild only until you realize that before you, someone was there, marking their territory.
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