A Loooooong Walk to Try to Cross 22 Bridges Within the Square Mile that Surrounds My Home (spoiler: I couldn't cross the last one)...

For the past week or so, I've been hunting out, then diagramming all the possible bridges in my neighborhood that I've broadly defined as a man-made structure meant for people and cars to traverse a channel in the earth which can be occupied with water either regularly or occasionally. By this definition, the category includes road bridges, footbridges (either low or high water), and other structures that traverse a ditch where a drain pipe is covered by pavement or substrate put there on purpose to bridge the channel where the water runs through. (I drew the line at drain pipes emerging from sidewalks on one side as there is no body of water (however small) that is traversed by the sidewalk. Luckily, most of the bridges I crossed were the conventional kind and not the odd ducks like ditch crossings. If a footbridge is a feature of a road bridge, I count both as the same bridge, but if the footbridge and the road bridge cross the stream at different points, then I count them as separate bridges. In all, I identified 22 that comply with my definition. Here are the highlights of that day. 

 --Originally, I estimated 21 bridges total, but I discovered a bonus bridge near one of the low-water footbridges. It ran over a drain pipe thatt feeds a tributary stream joining Phinney Branch, the main stream (or creek) that flows through the area. 

 --I enjoyed listening to Ann Patchett's book of essays, These Precious Days (a great read that I highly recommend). 

 --I saw and filmed a new bird I've just noticed in our area as of today: a green heron. Funnily, it mostly a gray and brown bird with black and white accents, but I've been told that in the right light, the gray wings actually have a greenish tinge. We had a stand-off where I filmed it while it watched me head on. It was a little odd to see it looking straight at me rather than from one side or the other. I guess this means it's eyes have a very broad range of movement and wide scope. 

 --Towards the home stretch of my walk, I saw a red fox walk out into a clearing--it saw me at the exact same moment and we froze for a a couple of seconds. As soon as I started to reach for my phone, it fled back into the woods and all I got was a photo of the air in which it had stood. 

 --I almost completed the full circuit, but because of recent heavy rains, I didn't cross the final low water footbridge due to heavy mud accumulation deposited on the path by the flooding waters. Also the footbridge was still being flowed over by a fast current...no need to risk that! 

 --Finally, I worked out a shorthand notation for this bridge walk and a couple of days later, I made my wife a walking map of this route with break-off points and bridge markers. Off to the side, I noted the logged times from the stopwatch timer I was running while on the walk. Please enjoy the photos and the map of my walk! 

(Update: the following day, I walked it again and was able to cross bridge #22, getting back to my starting point in 1 hour and 44 minutes.)