Trails Lost and Found

UPPER TRAIL IS CLOSED DUE TO RECENT FLOODING. WE RECOMMEND NOT TRAVELING AT THIS TIME. WILL BE CLOSED TILL LATE 2009. As I read the warning, great floods also happened to me, of happiness, and not having to be bothered by trail happy hikers. Not that this is really a problem; most of the time the trailhead is empty. I'm not sure why this place keeps the regulars out, other than it's bear country and thick as a jungle in some places. Anyway, the recent flooding was merely a follow up to the one(a few years back) that gouged out the canyon and lower sweep of Troublesome Creek. That one was a flood, almost knocking out the bridge by the road with large cottonwoods and debris. This second flood only finished off what the original didn't do: it removed more of the bedrock and collapsed already loose walls of the hills; Rotten granite walls, peeling and dissoving into the current; trees and brush collapsing in mud flows over the edges; and a 10-12 foot wall of water to wash it all through the narrow canyon into the lower reaches. Nothing like rushing water, unstoppable and frightening to watch, scooping out hillsides with terrible power. Even large boulders were tossed about, yanked from their anchored niches on the weak slopes of mud. Most of all, and sadly so, the floods have erased all the pools where once the trout and salmon gathered. The results are filled-in channels and loss of breeding grounds for the fish, and beginning over again the process of stream fashioning for the surviving salmon to return to. I find only small trout now and no King Salmon at all, but that is another story, from far out in the ocean and in the main rivers, leading back to the birth places here in the smaller streams. Even the sign of black and grizzly bear is absent here along the banks of the stream. Still, with all this catastrophe, I still come and fill these hours with my wanderings, entering the forest by other means: on fallen logs, over the dry open ground where the water has receded, and along parts of the surviving trail. It makes for a full day, but that is what makes the challenge: following new pathways by Nature made. It's like the Year Zero where I can see the blank canvas upon which will be written a new story.