Jungle Jumble

On Saturday as I was napping, a friend called and asked me if I was interested in joining him and his German shepherd on a jungle walk near our home. I had already put in an hour of fast walking earlier in the morning but wanted to up my Idita walk minutes, so I said sure. As we left the city behind, we were on the Boulder path in 10 minutes. We walked along some of the familiar paths and then ventured into an area neither of us had been in before. No problem, we actually had an old map of some of the trails and a compass. We walked up to what is called the 3rd Summit with the intention of looping back. I mean, this was just a basic walk ahead and turn around and walk back on the same path kind of thing. Problem was, we weren’t on the same path anymore. How could we have possibly missed our trail? We ended up walking north and needed to go south. We no longer had a clue where we were or which trail we were on. After a bit of trial and error, we did make our way out of the jungle, just not where we anticipated.



So Sunday afternoon, I'm thinking... I'm going to go back and try to figure out what went wrong. I shot through the jungle and made it to the 3rd Summit. The whole time I marched towards the 3rd Summit, I kept marking and keeping track of every fork in the trail. I turned around and started back and the trail was getting less like a trail the more I moved ahead until finally I wasn’t on a trail anymore. I was heading down a steep slope. Ok... deep breath, calm... I had no compass and I had no map. Didn’t think I’d need it. I headed further down the side of hill; it was steep and full of growth. The small under story growth gave me something to hold on to as I descended the steep hillside. At the bottom was a small boggy stream. Now I remembered from Saturday crossing a stream and there was a trail just on the other side. So I figured, no problem here. I crossed the stream and expected to find the trail that would lead me out, but I kept climbing higher and higher and there was no trail to be seen anywhere.

Finally at the top of the hill I found a trail. I started left, thinking that ‘felt’ right but the trail kept slowly diminishing. So, I changed direction and walked for about 15 minutes and still saw nothing that looked familiar. No fallen trees across the paths. No garbage left by rubber tappers. No outstanding trees or bamboo groves that I usually remember. And then that trail started to thin out and I popped out into a small clearing I had definitely never seen before.

This was getting frustrating. Now, technically, I knew I couldn’t REALLY get lost because though this jungle is sizeable, the city, small village areas or highways surround it. Walking in any direction for a certain amount of time would find me ‘popping’ back out into civilization. It wouldn’t be a fun walk, but it would be doable. And it was still early afternoon. But by that time I was getting pretty tired of being in the jungle. My water was running low and so was my strength.

Being in what was for me a completely unfamiliar area, I turned around and tried going back the other way. As I got back to the initial area where the trail was disappearing, I slowly continued forward and followed what appeared to be a track. That track then started becoming more evident and I found myself back at the 3rd Summit. I had basically walked down from the summit at a different location, crossed a different stream from the one crossed on Saturday, and looped around the backside of the summit.

This time I was very careful not to deviate from the path back. When I hit my first junction, I recognized a fallen tree and I knew that a left would lead me about 1.5 miles through the jungle where I would come out about a mile from my office and where I left my car.

I came out of the jungle. Bought a sports drink and sucked it dry and walked the mile to my car.

I made it home exhausted and juiced some apples and oranges. While relaxing, sipping cool fresh juice, my brutal dog, a toy poodle with the grisly name of KiKi demanded she wanted to take me for a walk. So there I was, being led by my dog KiKi around the neighborhood. She was at least kind enough to let me stop and smell things along the way.

I will go back and I will figure out how I could get lost 2 times in a row. They do say 3 times a charm.