This path from the Audubon Fields Pond Nature Center in East Orrington is an easy walk with the beaver-chewed tree indicating the nearness of wildlife. Milt Gross photo.

Now I pretty much stick to those fairly level or not-too-difficult trails, not necessarily because my tastes have changed.

But because my leg has.

I was thinking yesterday about some of the falls I took over the years, usually on a rougher trail. Once nearing the bottom of the West Face Cadillac Trail in Acadia National Park, I was semi-leaping from six-inch-wide ledge to similar ones at a "cliffy" section near the bottom. My right heel missed a ledge, but my right elbow didn't.

My elbow hurt for about eight years. I didn't go to a doctor, because I figured the doctor would tell me I had hurt my elbow. I knew that all by myself.

Once near the east summit of Baldpate, I was stepping down a kind of step formed by roots in the trail. My foot hit not quite right, and my ankle hurt for months. On a more level trail around the south end of Upper Hadlock Pond in Acadia, my foot caught on a root. It was as if I watched myself fall in slow motion but was helpless to do anything about it. After that trip, my right knee was bleeding profusely. I limped back to my car, and as I drove home the bleeding slowed, then stopped.

On a walk up the Long Pond Trail that leads from about the center of the west shore of Long Pond in Southwest Harbor to the Great Notch, I stopped to remove a pine blowdown from the pathway. As I moved it, the six-inch-diameter dead tree broke, and as it fell a pointed branch stub scratched my right leg just above the knee. It bled so much I decided I had two options: sit there and bleed to death in the quiet of the woods or walk on up the trail and back toward the car and bleed to death along the way.

I chose the latter, but somehow didn't bleed to death along the way.

Bald Peak with its height of 794 feet on the far side of snowy Upper Hadlock Pond in Acadia is one of the writer’s favorite climbs with features resembling most of Maine’s mountains. The writer hopes again to be able to walk this half-mile trail from where it crosses a carriage road next summer. Milt Gross photo.

During a solo Maine Appalachian Trail Club maintenance trip up Moody Mountain, I had been reaching up to remove a fairly large branch that had been hanging just above the trail. Should that five-incher have chosen to fall while a hiker was beneath it, the hiker would at least have ended with a sore shoulder or sore head. As I was cutting at it, the branch let go, swung, and banged me on the side of my head. Things went around and around for a number of seconds until the branch lay at my feet.

But accidents such as these don't worry me as much these days. It's not being able to negotiate some of the rougher trails at all that bothers me.

About a half-dozen years ago, I turned my right leg in the woods during a routine walk along a path I had created in woods we owned behind our house. Fine and so what? The next day as I stepped off my Island Explorer bus at the Bar Harbor Village Green, a sharp pain shot through my upper leg.

My limping around the next few days earned me the handle "Gimpy" from the other drivers.

A massage therapist manipulated the leg, which relieved the pain and limp for two or three days at a time. Then the pain would return. More recently, another massage therapist worked it and said she believed a set of muscles had become kind of welded together due to my sitting in my bus for long periods of time.Okay, and she made the leg bend better but still not like it should and still with some pain.Then our doctor took X-Rays and said some arthritis had descended on the joints of the sore part of the leg. Next will come a consultation with a bone doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, who could be looking at my leg with yet another boat payment in mind. I've heard horror stories about surgery on leg bones.

I plan to keep on walking on easier trails, with, I hope, no horror stories of my own.

The trail Dolores and I began walking late one afternoon in Lincolnville that heads up Bald Rock in Camden Hills State Park may be a good example. It basically is an old gravel road with vehicle access blocked off and that leads to several trails up yonder hills.

On the return trip from his Maine Appalachian Trail Club volunteer work trips, the writer has enjoyed stopping to go for a relaxing walk along the Piscataquis River in Abbott. Milt Gross photo.

The terrain in my last MATC corridor-monitoring section was a bit rough, but my left leg managed to drag my right leg along behind it. And the walking stick I found hidden on a shelf at an L.L. Bean outlet store helps some. But my "gimping" speed has dropped dramatically, so I've dropped the section because it involves more walking than I'll have time to do in any given day.

I won't climb Saddleback again. Too many miles for my too-little speed. I'll never climb Katahdin again, too many miles and too much of the way requiring clambering that right leg ain't happy about.

A lot of Acadia's trails still are on my able-to-do list, including that new one my daughter, Lorraine, Dolores, and I tackled back in October. It contains fairly high stone steps, but they seemed to exercise the correct muscles in the sore leg and the pleasant muscle ache afterwards confirmed that feeling.

The trail around Great Head is okay, although it's rocky and somewhat rough with a minor cliff in the middle. But it's not that long. Lots of other Acadia trails still are good to go on old Gimpy leg.

Having somehow acquired an interest in arthritis and "bad" legs, which one book on walking assured me really wasn't "bad" but was healing, I've begun to ponder alternative treatments to avoid being the source of a surgeon's next boat payment. Hey, turns out I'm already doing them. Okay, not enough walking, but some. And I do take those little fat pills that are supposed to help, and seem to aid that leg more now that I've increase the dosage.

But walking sounds like my kind of alternative treatment.

Thankfully, it's now winter, which puts off some of those walks until a warmer, sunny day. But they are still there, just waiting to be part of my alternative treatment.

Part of what I enjoy about those easy paths and old roads through the woods is seeing the wood critters living in those woods. I've seen lots and lots of wildlife of all sizes, some way back in yonder forest but still on trails that weren't really that steep. Dolores and I see many critters while wandering along an easy path, such as the owl we saw eyeing a snowshoe hare for supper. Our easy path led us near the owl, which scared it enough so it probably missed its supper. We've wondered ever since, were we good guys in saving the hare's life or bad guys in depriving the owl of its supper?

Wonderful questions these, which we couldn't ask without those easier through-the-woods rambles.

The old gravel road leading to the Bald Rock trail in Camden Hills State Park is a pleasant walk for anyone able to place one foot in front of the other. Milt Gross photo.

There is in place a new national law or regulation that public trails near parking lots or roadways must be made wheelchair accessible when updated. That's fine, and I hope more of them become wheel chair accessible, because I don't think being confined to a wheelchair should stop a person from enjoying the woods. Especially the woods away from motor vehicles.

As for me, I'm looking forward to the many miles of easier trails I'll be able to get out and enjoy.

Come spring, as Ben Ames Williams titled his novel about the beginnings of the Searsmont-Union area. Those pioneers all walked a lot to just get around.

Come spring, I'll walk because I can where I can.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2011