I crossed this “bridge” while I was out geocaching on Saturday. It connects the Rachel Carson trail with the Northwest Branch trail just north of the Burnt Mills dam in Maryland.

There are geocaches along both sides of the stream and I didn’t want to hike back to the dam and cross . At the midpoint — where the rope is least effective at providing a restoring force and you are at an antinode of the tree it tends to bounce a bit — is a bad place to get dizzy. But since you are on a curved surface, you have to watch where you step, and there’s no way not to look at the water rushing by a few feet below, which I found to be disorienting. Turning around wasn’t much of an option. Falling in would not have been disastrous, since I was only a few feet up, there were no protruding rocks, the water was not going to sweep me away and it was warm enough that getting wet would not have been more than an inconvenience, but I’m glad I didn’t.

It wasn’t a full blown vertigo attack — I didn’t start talking like Jimmy Stewart, by golly — but enough to make me swear off any future attempts at this sort of thing unless my life is in danger.