Where Are My Teeth?

I have to get a map

It's amazing how small a patch of ground you can get bewildered in if you try hard enough. Yesterday evening I was coming back from a walk in the park when I made a mistake about the right trail back from the plateau that leads to the North Branch Nature Center. Earlier, I'd been trying to find a path over the top of that thousand-foot ridge that (quite clearly with a map handy) lies between Elm St and the road to Middlesex, so I really truly didn't want to go that way.

It seemed like an easy thing to cut back around a thicket at the head of a ravine, across a low ridge and down to the main trail. The sun was clearly visible on one side, the ridge on the far side of Elm St clearly visible on the other. No problem.

Well, at this time of the spring, none of the minor trails is clearly marked, except maybe by the cropped tops of spring bulbs and the occasional pile of deer scat, and it turns out there are two or three shallow ridge lines inside that thicket. Imagine my joy at crossing each one in turn and seeing nothing resembling the footbridge to North Park Drive. Also imagine my growing certainty that I had missed some obvious marker and was about to pop out in someone's back yard, like for instance the folks who felled a tree across one of the spur trails and put a big wooden gate at the bottom of it.

It's clear that the area I spent a solid half hour traipsing uselessly around was no more than a couple hundred yards on a side. Can't wait till the leaves block the long view and the ferns fill in chest high....

Posted by wallich at April 21, 2003 05:15 PM