Moving more slowly now, as the grade steepens, and the spruce and balsams are getting thick and tight-together amidst the crisscrossed deadfall trees, I stop and wait for the others. Ralph is right behind me, and then Dorothy a few steps back; further down the slope, Marcelo keeps an eye on his wife Bev, and Ralph's wife, Blanca, and Kathy, who, quietly, slowly, yet seemingly effortlessly, ascends at the back of the group.
"So, I think if we head this way," I tell them, "it's a little more... um..... open."
"Which way?"
"This way."
"That way?"
"That way."
So we go that way. I wrestle a thick dead log down to the ground, and then hack away all its little branches with my hands and follow that by crashing my body through the medium sized pieces that snap off with each step. There. Shortly after that short steep open section, we are closed in again by deadfall, and are traversing east trying to find a way past a giant spruce log. Ralph catches up to me and says that maybe we should think about lunch, as the others are talking about things like low blood sugar.
While the others eat, a hastily whack westward, to be sure that we haven't wandered off on the wrong tributary. Friday [my dog], who is right behind me, wishes we were stopping for lunch. Soon, I find the head of the brook in a cavernous gorge-like chip out of a sizeable scaur amidst the conifers; and despite my anxiety at not being at Goodrich Rock by now, I am momentarily pleased, as if finding the genisis of the water from this un-named Osceola brook, has suddenly calmed me, as it's a special place in these woods, a place where few people have been, and the trickling sylvan watermusic soothes my soul.
Then I look again at my map. Shoot! The head of the brook is beyond the Goodrich Rock! We've gone too far! I start heading back to the group, dreaming of soon seeing the rock hiding amidst the greenery of the conifer forest...
"That way?"
"That way."
We all seem to agree. Having stayed alongside the brook for too long, I figure we're northwest of it. We are soon stumbling down the steep-nested rocks and rootclumps, heading southeast. Another reason I'm sure that we've gone too high, is that on one of my scouting missions, while the others took a break, I hiked until I saw the ridge, with the blue blue sky as a serene backdrop to the wind-fluttered yellow birch leaves, and the usual fungal accompaniment beneath the hardwoods. Knowing that Goodrich Rock sits in a den of conifers, similar to the one we're now tramping through, I am sure we've gone to far. If we went over the ridge, we'd begin descending down to Timber Camp... hmmm... sounds interesting.... another day maybe...
And then Dorothy, cries out, "Is that it? That's it! There it is!"
and turning back up the hill, I see it, just some fifty feet down the hill. From below, the rock is an imposing tower-like feature; but from above, it is considerably more covert and diminutive. I am astounded that I had just passed it without seeing it. We crown Dorothy and scale the ladder. After the climb up the ladder, the view we'd been waiting for greets us with a wide open countenance of blue above nature's forest quilt of reds, oranges and yellow amongst the green. Magnificent. We made it. Halleluliah. Although never truly lost [I prefer the term temporarily misdirected], we were tested; and now, sitting peacefully at the top of the prodigious rock, we feel an elevated sense of accomplishment after the arduous bushwhack and the psychological fatigue of not knowing exactly where we were. We summarize that we missed the rock by about 200 feet as we hiked up.
