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The river is mostly sandbar scattered with water rounded rocks, with the live current wide and ankle high or knee deep and more narrow, meandering from one side to the other, but which rampages as an unstoppable flow of water and wood in the winter rains.

Coming out of the city, it is about an hour and a half to park HQs. I would leave about eleven in the morning, the object being to make camp in late afternoon, the actual first leg hike taking about 5 hours.

After negotiating the creek to the next day's trail head, I would camp in the stream bed on a high and dry sand bar, at the junction of another much smaller but still running water course. This was the half-way point at the base of the mountain I would have to climb next morning. The gurgling of the stream made me wonder sometimes at night in the dark, if there was not some woman singing opera nearby, so that even on occasion, I would poke my head out of my tent in the dark, to see if someone had not set up camp close by.

The next morning after breakfast, coffee, the morning cigarette and packing up, it was immediately up 1500 feet, by a narrow wooded trail winding 'switch-back like' up the mountain, the last 300 feet so elevated, that one did not have to bend over much to scramble on all fours, finally onto a dirt road at the summit. From there it was all 'two track dirt road' winding through the hills, up a hundred feet and down - for 5 miles - along crests, with vistas of 20 to 30 miles in all directions, distant mountains and blue interminable sky overhead, and then descend into wooded and grassland valleys.

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