Stream crossings

A couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of unseasonably mild weather to explore the lower reaches of Sawmill Creek, looking particularly for a beaver dam reported by the City's water environment group.  The lower creek meanders through a deeply incised, wooded ravine -- a green slash through quiet neighborhoods.  At places, where it cuts close to the south transitway, the City has stabilized the banks and slope through a variety of techniques:  armourstone, gabion baskets, plantings, even realignment of the channel.  Not bad work.  Once the vegetation matures, the engineered portions should appear reasonably natural.  The hardened portions preserve the floodplain and the natural form of the creek.

The ravine, itself, has suffered a lot from the surrounding development.  In the open, leafless woods, I could see fill, yard waste and garbage spilling down the slopes.  Plastic flotsam lay scattered and tangled in the underbrush, carried there by spring floods and summer rainstorms.  In places, I pushed through dense thickets of Japanese knotweed.  Periodically, I stopped to untangle myself from downed crack willow branches, or to pull burrs from my jacket and pants.

The summer storms had brought down or split many trees.  Some lay in or across the creek, where they had caught other wood and debris to create impressive log jams.  I crossed several of them to avoid steeper slopes, balancing or crawling across the slipperly, canted trunks.  It reminded me of my teenage excursions around Goldstream Park and the Malahat Drive in Victoria, where I would scramble alone up the mountainsides along the tumbling creeks.  Probably not the wisest thing to do.  I would often find myself paused on a precarious foothold on a slick ledge, above a creek jammed with massive deadfalls, out of sight and sound of any help.

At the time -- and even now, I guess -- I believed that the rewards justified the risks.  Balanced on a boulder in the creek bed, with walls of stone and trees climbing high on either side, and a waterfall splashing down a mossy rock face into a secret pool, I felt transported to a different world.  With the forest closed in around me, I felt connected to the earth in primal way, as if I could have grown roots myself.