Here is what a walk is right now. Mud mud mud. Go around the bog. Some bogs are quicksand. For real. Go around when you can. Don’t drink the mud water, it’s full of bugs.

Step up on a root, swing over the tree. Scrape along damp bark to make it over. Keep going.

Some walks are still too much of that to keep going, turn around before you get to the creek and maybe next week.

Some walks have been walked by people apparently lugging a chainsaw or axe all the way down there. I have run into exactly one of them. Be down in the darkest part of the wood and run into a guy with an axe? He is likely friendly and just a groovy woodcutter but guess what, we go the other way. Thanks, though!

Lumpy guy in running shoes with the machete, less disconcerting. I can outrun him if I had to, really  he’s only making the vine walls taller for everyone and won’t take that thing to nobody’s throat.

A few walks have been interrupted by a little too much coyotes. The other night, walked in just about three minutes and heard every single coyote all at once screaming. Maybe fifty? One hundred? Too many. That was unsettling to say the smallest and I threw on leashes and we carefully with enthusiastic and efficient intent walked back to the car and all dogs got thrown in fast and we drove down to the park where nothing is wild and that was cool.

There was the very loud four coyote fiesta at work the other day, with the happy ending of no chickens dead no kids tossed off of horses. It’s been feeling a bit extra mountain liony some places, maybe I make that up in my head but something about the light and green and the way the air feels I think the animals are all waking up and ready to rumble.

A new thing is Otterpop’s hearing is going away fast. I had thought her thirteen years of age but the vet’s office claims fourteen on some paperwork and I had never thought that a thing that could happen. But now I ask her to stay in exactly close to me and if not I tie her up because deaf dogs loose in the woods makes me nervous.

Small problems to have, in the grand scheme of things. At least some woods left here now, to have small problems in.