It was an unseasonably warm day on Saturday, so M and I headed out for a hike in some local conservation land while E was off visiting her mother. The conservation land was a tract we’d never visited before, and it was a lovely spot, with trails winding their way past assorted ponds and marshes and over streams. The first indication we had that the water level might be higher than usual for that area was when we came to this bridge:
We continued along the trail, winding around a marsh, until we came to this spot where the trail headed along the edge of the marsh on a raised boardwalk.
Clearly the boardwalk wasn’t raised enough, since it disappeared into the water. In similar situations — hiking a short stretch of flooded trail with a thin skim of ice on it it in the middle of winter — my friend CrankyOtter and I have been known to take off our shoes and wade through it. I even recall doing it with a toddler M riding piggyback. But I was so unfamiliar with this tract of land that it didn’t seem prudent, and I probably couldn’t have talked a teenage M into wading. So we backtracked all the way around the beautiful marsh.
And we found the other end of the flooded stretch of trail, at which point I was glad we hadn’t waded. The arrow indicates where a stretch of boardwalk had been flooded enough that it floated into a position perpendicular to the path, before icing itself back into position. Goodness knows where some of the other boardwalk sections might be.
We continued along another trail, and this time found another bridge with several feet of water, mud, and sticks in the gap between the bridge and the land. I’m especially amused that this bridge was clearly built higher to accommodate occasional high water, without anyone also correcting for the fact high water would need a wider span, too.
We stepped on the sticks and reached the bridge and crossed it, but a few feet further along came to this section of trail, which was flooded so widely we couldn’t even see where the trail continued on the other side.
We turned around at that point and found enough trails on higher ground to make our way back to the starting point. It was such a pretty tract of land that I look forward to hiking it again sometime… but maybe not until everything is frozen under several inches of ice, or else not until water levels are way down in summer!
