Chapter 683

Dessie and Phillip Hiking Toward the Waterfalls

“ ... Be back in a few,” Phillip said as he left for the stream. Because of the steep bank, he had to go farther than he expected to find access. When he returned with the water, Dessie had scraped a small area clear and bordered it with rocks to form a fire pit. Soon, they had a fire going to heat their lunch and prepare coffee.

“You know that filtered water is perfectly good without boiling it,” Phillip teased again. “As we’ve discussed before, the company claims to have performed intensive testing to prove that their filter removed 99.9% of viruses as well as the bacteria during the filtering process.”

“So, do you want to forget about boiling the water?” Dessie asked, calling his bluff.

“It would make things a lot easier. In addition to not having to spend time making a fire and boiling the water, we wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for the water to cool before putting it into our travel bladders. However, we are a long way from help if we get sick,” Phillip replied with a barely hidden sigh.

“True. We both enjoy technology, but will we ever trust the manufacturer’s claims enough to risk our lives out here where there isn’t a hospital within a few minutes? Suppose there’s a dead and rotting rodent a hundred feet upstream, huh? Will the system filter the bacteria and maybe viruses out of the water, then?”

Phillip didn’t answer verbally, but the look on his face did. Chuckling, she poured the filtered water into the pot to boil. “Oh, by the way,” Dessie casually said, “Sophia gave me a collapsible five-liter plastic jug that should cut down the time you have to spend getting water for us while we’re at the falls. I put it in the bottom of my pack and was going to save it for a surprise, but after your griping...” she said with a grin.

“Crap. We have the smaller collapsible containers. Why didn’t I think to get a large one for our semipermanent camp when we were purchasing our supplies? Thanks, Hon. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

Dessie felt her eyes mist, but she fought the tears off while hoping he never would be without her.

A little later, they poured hot water into their lunch pouches then sat sipping perked coffee as they waited for their freeze-dried meals to heat. Phillip let out a sigh as he sat on a rock and leaned back against a nearby tree. “This is the same brand of coffee we always use when we’re in Germany, yet somehow it seems so much better drinking it out of a metal cup while sitting by a campfire. Even a campfire in summer.”

Dessie chuckled as she held her cup out in a mock salute. “It’s not only the same brand; it’s the same coffee. I had just opened a 1-kilo bag but decided to take it with us rather than it going stale while sitting in our hotel kitchen all summer.”

“Well, I’m glad you did, because it certainly tastes great.”

A little later, they sat on a big rock a hundred feet or so from their fire while eating their meals. The area provided a better view as they passed the binoculars back and forth while trying to plan their best route to the second waterfall.

“We’re probably going to wind up carrying the cart all the way across that swampy area,” Dessie said as she motioned. “There just doesn’t seem to be any way around it without walking half the afternoon.”

Phillip swallowed a bite before answering. “We’ve talked about how Germany is supposed to have far fewer snakes than the U.S., but that marsh still looks snaky to me.”

“What I worry about is the water being over our boot tops,” Dessie said as she lifted the binoculars to her eyes again. “Hiking with wet feet is no fun at all.”

“There are bushes and some kind of weeds in there, so we know, at least, that the area isn’t a lake that’s several feet deep, but with the clumps of bushes scattered out the way they are, there could still be deep places between the bushes that are well over our boot tops.”

Dessie sighed. “If we do get water in our boots, at least we’ll be within a short distance of our destination — after we climb a bit, that is.”

An hour later, the terrain had changed drastically as they made their winding way down the last hill before standing at the beginning of the marshy area. At this point, the marsh was just scattered pools of water overgrown with grass, interspersed with water plants and an occasional thick bush. It was evident, however, that the water had recently covered the whole area, because the mud was everywhere.

Phillip turned to his wife. “I suggest we don’t bother even trying to use the cart in this mess. Let’s just carry it until we get to the beginning of the slopes over there where the trees start again.”

It took a half-hour of slogging through black, sticky mud and brackish water before they were once again standing on dry ground.

They both found a place to sit, each resting their back against a tree as they dug the black goo out of the treads of their boots. Phillip took his boots off to whack them against a tree in a futile effort to knock the rest of the sticky mud off. After a moment, he turned to his wife, “Babe, do you realize that we haven’t seen a soul since we left the castle — either time?”

“Yeah,” she slowly returned. “It is odd. I didn’t expect to see droves of people, but not seeing anyone at all is equally odd.”

Phillip took out their maps. “Look,” he said as he studied the area on the map carefully, then motioned to the main trail that wandered more than three hundred kilometers across the countryside. After tracing a route from the nearest point on the main trail to the waterfall, he continued, “There’s little wonder that we haven’t seen anyone. The main trail swings back to the right at its closest point to the waterfalls, and the first thing a hiker would encounter from there is this area here. Even on the map, it appears extremely rough, if not completely impassable. After that, they would hit the swamp at its widest point. That would not be a fun hike. There’s little wonder that we haven’t seen anyone. The falls look nice for what we’re interested in, but there isn’t anything spectacular about them. The water doesn’t fall for a thousand feet or so, which would probably make it more interesting to most people. Bottom line: it’s probably isolated enough to make most hikers think about going somewhere else.”

“You might be right,” Dessie said. “I wouldn’t want to go back out to the main trail from here.”

“And I imagine it’s even rougher than it looks on the map. We lucked up. Had it not been for Karl and Glenda, we would probably have followed the main trail before turning off at the closest point to the falls...”

“ ... And given up,” Dessie finished for him.

“Yep. And I doubt that we will see a hiker the whole time we’re here. It’s amazing that there is something as beautiful as the chain falls way back here. And ... I suspect, as you said, we would have given up when the hike got rough even before the swamp. And speaking of rough,” he said while pointing, “we have a couple of places that I can see from here that still won’t be a picnic, so we had best get started.”

“At least we can see the falls from here. We’re almost there,” Dessie insisted.

They were both right — to an extent. They were almost there, but there were a couple of interesting places to master before they got to the second waterfall and a couple of washouts to add to the difficulty, which they rightly assumed were caused by heavy rains and flash flooding.

“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.”

In only a few minutes, they topped the little plateau, and to their relief, the area was almost level, the stream now moving much slower and the water much more placid. Both banks now had a thorough tree cover that provided a much-appreciated shade. Also, there was very little undergrowth in the immediate area.

A few minutes later, the gentle slope they were ascending opened into what almost seemed to be a small park. The water from the waterfall didn’t drop perfectly straight down but crashed over rocks and down a not-quite-vertical drop before pouring over a final boulder to drop straight down for the last twenty feet. The falls culminated in a pool some thirty feet across before narrowing to go over the final falls a hundred and fifty feet farther along. The slope from where they stood to the water was gentle and would have been perfect for launching a canoe or small boat.

“Oh, Phil. It’s even more gorgeous than I hoped it would be. It’s so peaceful it’s almost like a park, and just listen to the sound of the falls.”

Phillip stood at the edge looking down into the water. In the middle of the small lake, as they would find out later, the depth was somewhere around six feet, but the gravel bottom around the edges meant they wouldn’t have to wade in mud to go swimming. “Come here,” Phillip said, motioning.

When she hurried over, he nodded toward the water. “Just watch a moment, Baby.” He had barely finished speaking when a fish broke the surface not more than thirty feet away. “I don’t know much about the fish in Germany, but back home, we would call that a very nice rainbow trout. Now, if we can just manage to fish without going to jail...”

Dessie giggled. “Our permits are supposed to be good; besides, I can’t imagine a game warden with determination enough in making an arrest to hike all the way in here, nor have I seen anywhere in the last several hours that a helicopter could put down safely. Also, there’s enough tree cover in many places along the stream to hide us from some wildly determined game warden flying over.”

“I can’t imagine a game warden in a helicopter,” Phillip said with a chuckle. “No matter the fine, it wouldn’t be cost-effective. I think our risk of going to jail is minimum, and I’m going to have that big guy or one like him in a skillet before we leave here.” As he was speaking, another fish broke the surface close to the opposite shore.

Dessie tore her eyes away from the water and the fish to say, “I already love this place, but right now, we need to get a little closer to the falls and see if we can find that perfect campsite.”

After putting their burdens down, they scouted around until they found what they were looking for. The ground was reasonably level with just enough slope to drain water from the tent area in case they had a rainstorm. There were trees, but instead of the taller pine and spruce they had encountered much of the day, these were shorter and much thicker with larger leaves. The combination provided a dense and much-welcomed shade.

With a smile and nod from each, they began setting up their campsite roughly a hundred feet from the base of the waterfall. Since the waterfall wasn’t one straight drop but several connected ones, the water was slowed a bit and didn’t make a deafening sound as it crashed into the pool at their level. Back where they had chosen their campsite, the sound was even more subdued.