Saturday Stories. #24

Hello everyone and Happy Saturday! Well, we have returned to almost hot weather, with a high humidity. There is rain and thunderstorms in the forecast for later today and tonight. Then, amazingly, we should get a nice sunny day tomorrow. That would nice. Well, my blog continues to work nicely, and it is staying with me too, which is also very nice. Oddly enough, I thought that I had written a story last Saturday, but apparently not.

Nothing shows up anyway. Oh well, these things happen. Today we will go back a few years to a nice, hot, July day when Krissy and I had planned to go on a hike, just a day hike. We used to enjoy such hikes. Krissy was much like me in that she liked to take chances sometimes.

We found Daisy Fleabane on our hike.

So, this was back before the days of computers and cell phones. I had ordered a bunch of aerial photos of a certain area and thought it might be interesting to hike into this spot and look around. There was the remains of at least one building in one of the photos and I wanted to find out why someone would live way out there. We had breakfast, quite early, so we could get an early start.

It might take a while to hike in and then we want time to look around too. The beginning of the hike was quite normal, just walking through an area of tall pines with not much undergrowth. That makes for easy walking, plus being nice and fast. There was one cliff area we would have to climb, but it didn’t look too high on the photograph. It wasn’t either, maybe a hundred feet, or a little less, but there was no way we could find where climbing would be possible.

And Cow Vetch.

Not for us, at least. Finally we spotted one location that might work. This cliff had already slowed us down by an hour, if we didn’t try here we would never make it to our destination today. So, up we went. Krissy kept finding wildflowers along the way and asking me what they were. That was fine. But climbing I did not want to stop and look at wildflowers, I just wanted to arrive at the top without falling. Sigh.

About half way up we came across something we could use as a path, even though it was only just a little wider than our feet. But it was going in the right direction, and as we got closer to the top our little path kept getting wider. Krissy was holding onto my backpack as we climbed and then suddenly while she was looking up, her foot slipped and down she went. But she held tightly to my backpack as she hung in the air screaming.

There were a lot of Pale Corydalis in one area.

I was holding onto the root of a large pine that was at the top of this cliff, with it’s roots going all over. If I hadn’t been holding that root, we both would have had a long drop to a ledge below. I decided it was best to keep going since I could keep grabbing roots along the way. Finally I could swing her around to the path so that she too could grab a root and with me holding one of her arms, she was able to crawl onto the path.

We stopped there for a few minutes to relax a bit, then continued to the top. At the top we took our backpacks off and sat down against them. “Had enough excitement yet?” I asked her. She gave me a funny look, then jumped on me and tickled me. We were both very ticklish so we had a great time with our tickle fight. I have to admit, I lost that one. We still had about an hour to go to reach our destination, so off we went…

And lots of Ox-Eye Daisy. Notice the small Goldenrod Crab spider on one of the petals?

I will stop there and finish this next time and I will try to do that tomorrow so you don’t have to wait so long for the next part. Have a great weekend everyone and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2024 Steve McLeod.