Watrous Gulch

A run today up Watrous Gulch, bifurcate trail that veers right where Herman's Lake is left. Passed an old woman in a blazing pink windbreaker, &, yards ahead, her husband, who asked after her progress. A tenderness, that. & ahead, at Bard Creek, was a structure loosely banded together of lightning-struck bark, fallen branches, planks of ancient oak shaped dountless by the blades of miners in forgotten years. Two benches, a fire-pit, an overhang strung shoddily together with twine pushed to its limit. The valley affords a thick & tangled scrub-grass, briared & dense around the flowing rivulet, itself a copper-brown. & on either side, grass gives quick way to looming granite, tree-line falters & the great bald caps of the mountains jut formidably into the now-greying sky, black clouds beginning to creep over their barren domes. We are hit with hail on our run out & get to the lot in good time for it. An amicable wood, no dint of foreboding as one finds elsewhere in these parts (Silverdale, where those taken a century ago malinger in aspen thickets).