arm cheese

Those trees in the background are leaning like that, believe it or not. The mountainside falls away very steeply in that spot, the creek becomes too rugged to follow.

 

This composition isn't particularly riveting, I think when I took this I was both admiring the color of the iron-rich rock and trying somehow to show the character of the creek and what made it such a nice place to bring the boys. I did my best to remind them that anyplace in a mountain stream with green on it, can be treacherously slippery! Test, test, test!

 

To wit, years later, in a very benign spot after a fun but very warm hike, my youngest son stripped down to cool off in some shallow water, and he slipped in the water. In the act of bracing himself, he fractured his wrist. Summer vacation had just started, he spent the rest of that summer wearing a bright blue lobster claw-like cover on his arm anytime he wanted to go swimming, to protect his cast. We sent him to grandma's for a few weeks of R&R and his hygiene and cast-protection skills inevitably suffered after endless days of swimming and eventually the cast started oozing what one of his uncles referred to as "arm cheese".

Done