I thought YOU brought the trail-finder!

This picture captures one of my favorite moments of our Azalea Falls adventure. Our hike around the falls would have been a bit challenging under ideal conditions as there were plenty of places where a wrong step would have been bad news. Yet, the challenge of keeping our feet on the trail was increased even more by the challenge of finding the trail with lots of downed trees everywhere due to January's severe ice storm.

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We'd made it about halfway around the top of the gorge on our supposed "one mile loop" when we seemed to lose the trail completely. We could see the lodge across the gulf (and I snapped the picture of our place in the previous post from about that point), but we had no idea how our loop was going to get us there from here. So, we decided it must be because we were supposed to head down into the little ravine. We carefully managed to pick our way about halfway down before we realized that we still didn't see a trail on our side or up the other side back to the lodge. Nor did we see a bridge across the stream aside from a log we would probably need to shimmey across. (I gladly offered to take pictures if anyone wanted to try that!)

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As we were assessing our situation and pondering our next course of action, Jami was inspired with the memory of a movie she'd seen recently. The story was of a young man who had gone to the Alaskan wilderness to live off the land for a while. He'd become trapped by a rising river, mistakenly eaten poisonous berries, and died a slow, painful death due to lack of medical attention. Kinda makes one appreciate civilization, doesn't it? Ruthanne and Sara's faces in the picture above seem to express that thought.

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Anyhow, after that rousing tale, we were all sufficiently motivated to hoof it back up the way we'd come, and our story ended happily with us sitting on the deck sipping our beverages of choice. And we probably still hiked about a mile--just not a loop.