This week with Arlene and Jeff:
...“If we get some heavy rain, this place is going to be interesting to cross,” Phillip worried as they scaled a washout roughly twenty feet deep and thirty feet across.
“There isn’t a cloud in the sky, so I don’t think we need to worry about flash floods catching us, Worrywart,” she teased. “If there is a thunderstorm in the mountains, the runoff shouldn’t last more than an hour or so. You’re right, though; we’ll stay away from the washouts if we see clouds in the mountains.”
Finally, they reached the main stream that came from the waterfall which was their destination. At this point, the stream was thirty feet or so across, varying from a couple of feet in the shallows to pools deep enough to swim in. At one place, the bank was a good twenty feet above the water and had crumbled away making their way treacherous.
Carefully, they followed what was probably an animal trail that paralleled the stream for a couple of hundred feet. Along the way were several trees that were barely surviving because floods had washed much of the dirt from their roots. One was undercut so severely that it was barely living as it leaned precariously above the water twenty feet below.
“Stay away from the edge,” Dessie cautioned unnecessarily, “I don’t want us to lose our footing or this ground to crumble away, and us go down into the water.”
“It’s not the water that I’m worried about,” Phillip said, “it’s those boulders and that broken tree sticking out of the bank that would make a fall down that steep slope much more interesting.”...
Have a goodun;
Roust