This is the 15th year of continuous daily publication for 365Caws. All things considered, it's likely it will be the last year as it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to find interesting material. However, I hope that I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world with my natural history posts, or encouraged a novice weaver or needleworker. If so, I've done what I set out to do.
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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