Hey everybody. This is my introductory blog here. I’ve been lurking around a bit for a day or two and loved what I have read so far. I was playing a bit with the interface and decided that I needed to put a bit of info on this here Blackberry Bush. This is an excerpt from my trip journal detailing my walk here from San Francisco. I will post more in the future, as I go looking for strange satellite images from the route. I hope you enjoy.

August 4th, 2006
… Now, I’ve passed a hundred rockslides at this point, but here the tracks just disappeared right into the side of the mountain. a massive tumble of rocks ranging from the size of small cars to BBs cascading the entire depth of the valley, from river to ridgeline.

Previously, when the track was overgrown, buried or when I had to pass collapsed tunnels I simply followed animal trails. The size of the animal dictated the ease of doing this, Starting with rabbits, which was very hard, and really only useful for keeping your eye on at least some sort of trail when your visibility was limited by the sheer amount of overgrowth you found yourself stumbling through. Deer, being slightly larger, weren’t as hard to follow, but their tracks would uselessly meander up a mountain side or in lazy zig zags along re-wilded tracks, as they browsed from one half eaten plant to another. Bear trails were my favorite; long well-worn straight lines along the tracks, wide enough to walk easily and frequently more comfortably than on the tracks, with the exception of having to dodge (and take pictures of) a surprising amount of bear poo. The only thing larger than bear trails were the infrequent but obvious ATV trails which were common in some points and prone to ruts and puddles, but which I had long since left behind by the time I encountered the cascading mountain.

I dropped my pack and would first attempt to follow the bear trail which I had been waking along on the side of the tracks. It went about fifteen feet up the side of the hill before sliding away underneath me. Looking up, the condition of the rocks above me said that this was obviously the bears’ way down rather than up so I returned to my pack and attempted to follow the deer trail, which in this case went right about level with the rockslide. The deer trail ended up leading me to two dead ends and ten perfectly ripe, knee high blackberries.

Since leaving Willits, I had started thinking of this section of the walk as blackberry summer. Every mile or so, I would come across spectacular bushes of sweet, juicy blackberries and had been eating them by the handful whenever I came across them. For the past seven days, I had been sharing the blackberries with the deer and bear; They got everything on the front, up to stomach level, and I got everything they couldn’t reach. It got to the point that I could spot hair on thorns, as much by seeing half chewed berry clusters as by the fur itself, left when a good berry was just out of reach of a hungry animal.

Teetering on a the roots of a single blackberry bush in the middle of the rock slide, I found myself between two deep vertical gorges running down, through the blackberry bush to the river valley below. I stood there a moment, contemplating a five foot jump across one of them, then stopped. Behind me, their trail was worn flat, dug in from hundreds of hooves. Past the chasm, I saw only two or three hoof prints continuing along the trail. And then I looked at the blackberries at my knees. I saw the deer coming along the trail, and stopping to strip the bush bare behind me. I saw their attempts to jump at the berry bush I was teetering on and their dramatic slides down through the thorny brambles. Thinking of my sixty pound pack, I realized that fools rush in where deer are stupid enough to tread. I grabbed the berries, popped them in my mouth and jumped back to grab my pack. It was time to ford the Eel River…

If you look really close at the aerial photo, you will see not only the bush, but the gorges and trail as well.