On the Trail

If you have been a faithful reader of my blog, you may recall I like to run during the summer. You may also recall I like to spend time on the trails even though I am pretty much scared of everything from heights to bears, but I still keep going back for more.

The last few summers, I have taken up trail running in the foothills. In other words, I am a forty-one-year-old who can run a four-mile trail that gains almost seven hundred feet in elevation . . . twice. You can refer to me as Middle-Aged Wonder Woman. (It's not that unusual to see middle-aged women trail running and more in Boise. We're basically Amazons out here if Amazons were five-foot-three and freckled.)

Of course, jogging in the foothills means I have to share the path with some interesting critters.

1. Badgers
The other day, I noticed a ton of large burrows while running in the foothills. It turned out they belonged to badgers.

A fellow jogger stopped me and warned me about the two she had encountered in the direction I was headed.

"I have been running this trail forever, and I have never seen badgers in the area," she told me.

She had been able to sneak past them but was a little unnerved by the experience.

 "I might turn around . . . " I began to say.

"Wait!" she said. "There's a biker. Let's see if he has to stop."

He didn't.

I saw a few runners at the top of the hill who would reach the badger sighting about the same time as I would. It looked like the badgers had either gone back in their burrows or had moved on.

"If I hear you screaming, I'll come back for you," my new runner friend said as we parted ways. 

When I approached the burrow, which was indeed right on the trail, I could still see paw tracks in the dirt but no badgers.

And thank goodness for that. Badgers are mean and nasty. They are nothing like the wise, hermit-like character in Wind in the Willows.

2. Beetles
If you have been in our foothills, you have probably seen the humongous black beetles that love to roam the trails. They don't die easily, although I have come across a few causalities of mountain bike tires. It's possible these beetles were created by a radioactive experiment gone wrong. I've seen enough superhero movies to know this could absolutely be true.

3. Lizards
I try not to step on these little guys them as they scurry across the trail because they are super cute . . .

unlike this next, more nefarious creature . . .

4. Snakes
For someone who is super afraid of everything, including radioactive beetles, I have handled my snake encounters fairly calmly. Just this week, I saw a few tracks across the trail but no snakes in sight.

Once I came across a snake on the trail so tiny and immobile, I jumped over it. It lifted its head and stuck out its tongue ever so slightly as I passed.

Another time, I was running around a switchback and saw a woman frozen on the trail, standing beside her bike with her dog.

"Why is she just stopping there?" I wondered.

I rounded the corner and saw a large snake coiled up, sunning itself on the path, flicking its tongue. The biker and I both backed away slowly and returned the direction we came. I didn't stick around long enough to check out whether or not the snake had a rattle.

I haven't run into a mountain lion . . . yet . . . It could still happen. I am definitely not complacent about these things.

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