Just to the left of the big bush in the foreground is a narrow "channel" created by flowing water.
It it unlikely that cryptobiotic soil will take hold in a feature like that, so similar channels
(and deer paths) acted as pathways for me in this area of little or no bedrock. Because these
channels aimed for the fall line, and I was traversing the fall line, I had to make a zillion
little detours to maximize my use of these features. The shortest ecologically-sensitive
distance between two points here was anything but a straight line.
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