A little light adventure

A planned trip earlier this month to revisit the Herriman Lake trail near Crane Lake didn’t go as planned, but it made for an interesting adventure in either case. The trail, which my wife Jodi and I had only traversed once before, was overgrown with lingering waist-high summer vegetation, all dripping with heavy dew from the night before.
About a half-mile in, our planned route looked as if no one had passed that way all summer and the trail seemed to almost disappear into the woods, suggesting it might be a challenge to follow. Considering that we had lost the trail for a time on our last adventure there, we opted to turn back.
But along the way we had passed over the walking bridge across the Echo River and noted that the rocky riverbed was essentially dry. From our map, we could see that the river would come close to the enormous rocky outcrop (think mini-mountain) that had been our original destination, so we tried traveling the riverbed, figuring we could cut cross-country when we neared the outcrop. We’ve always enjoyed river walking, and often walk riverbeds on the North Shore during low water to explore the canyons they’ve carved over the millennia.
The terrain along the Echo River was perhaps less dramatic, but it offered a bit more variety as we picked our way through a modest rock canyon and along dry stretches of loose cobble. I never thought of the Echo River, which flows from Echo Lake to Crane Lake, as a seasonal river, but our late summer and early fall dry spell has definitely sent water levels falling.
Our plan to travel the river to our destination worked for a time, until we reached a beaver pond that looked traversable only if we were content to wade up to our waists in muck. We weren’t feeling quite that adventurous, so we turned around and headed the other way, eventually intersecting with the road that we had driven on to the trailhead.
It turned out not to be the long hike we had expected, but we made up for it with a jaunt to the Vermilion Gorge followed by a late lunch on the deck at Voyagaire Lodge and a stop at the ice cream social at Handberg’s Marine, all of which made for the kind of light “adventure” that might become our new normal as we edge toward Medicare eligibility in just over a year.