Nameless Creek #1 & #2
My whole body ached on Friday morning, every muscle. I did my Nameless Creek #1 expedition on Thursday. Everything conspired to make hiking strenuous and treacherous: boulders, rocks, stones, and fallen tree trunks concealed by the dead grass. There was deep, sucking mud I had to wade through, rivulets I had to cross, the bluff I had to scramble up. All this wore me out.
Good thing I had my sturdy walking stick. I could not have done this trek without it. I used it for balance, support, and feeling my way through the mud. In some places I had to cross, the stick went two feet below the mud’s surface before finding solid ground.
It wasn’t all bad. It was a fine day. I achieved my goal of climbing down to the marsh and seeing the mouth of Nameless Creek #1. To my surprise, Nameless Creek #1 didn’t empty into the marsh but into a larger stream, call it Nameless Creek #2. My secondary goal was to work upstream along Nameless Creek #1. Reaching this goal was hard because it was here, between the creek and the bluff, where I encountered the deep mud. Water was oozing out of countless artesian springs. For each spring, there was a rivulet and delta of deep mud that I couldn’t avoid.
I searched maps, atlases, and Google for the names of the two streams without success. So, I started calling them Nameless Creek #1 and Nameless Creek #2. Nameless Creek #2 is a slough in the backwaters of the St. Croix River.
