The Dashing Trail Builder

The green mountains around her were stunning. As she descended into the valley step by step it was getting warmer. Moments earlier she had taken off her wooly sweater and packed it in her red backpack and she was now just in her black blouse. She pulled off the Buff which had been warming her ears and wrapped it twice around her wrist. The path was clear here. It was easy to walk faster and the places it was steep didn't make her believe in anything and pray she wouldn't die today. It all seemed managable. The campsite had to be close which meant that Coca Cola was close, lying down and dying on a bench was close and most importantly, ripping her shoes off her feet was close. She heard voices chatting around the corner. There were more people on this part of the trail which both soothed her and annoyed her. Before going into the mountains on the long hike she had read the signs carefully. The signs stated several times not to hike alone. But this day was about doing some soul searching and just listening to her feet moving. And she couldn't do that having to look after somebody else. With that said, she was grateful strangers were around at the steep parts, involuntarily looking after her insecure ass. She went around the corner and saw where the voices were coming from. Four young people were on the side of the trail. Two women and two young men. It was clear they weren't from here. There was an excitement to them that people of this land wouldn't express as clearly no matter how overwhelmingly stunning the scenery could be. One of the women had a strong American accent. The other woman drowned in the American woman's accent. One of the men was bent over a piece of wood trying to divide it to make it into a step for the wooden trail stairs further down. As she came closer the other man caught her eye. He was sitting down looking at the others. He was wearing a red sweater and he had a head full of lush brown curls. He looked exactly like she used to describe her type when she was younger. He seemed more reserved than the others. She thought that he might've been new to the group. Either that, or he just wasn't American and didn't need to fill the space out as much as the laughing American woman. She decided he wasn't American. She nodded to the four people and said hi and hurried on, because she instantly knew when she'd seen the man in red, that she found him attractive and therefore everything inside of her told her to panic and leave. She recognised the valley on her right from a different hike the year before and was happy the campsite was close and both a little sad and relieved that the attractive guy was behind her. He had been pure eye candy. She almost ran into the campsite shop and bought as many sugary drinks as she thought she could handle and stumbled outside to die on a bench. She kicked off her boots and socks and downed the sugary drinks. A group of Dutch men sat down on the benches next to her. She couldn't care less. She laid down on the bench and bent her legs. She started doing butt stretches, because her butt muscles had almost given up on her several times on the hike. As she did her stretches she saw him walking past behind her. The dashing trail builder. Suddenly she cared a lot. She sat up and looked at him walking by. He was walking barefoot. 'Freaking hippie.' she thought: 'But a very attractive hippie, nonetheless.' She rejoiced in the fact that he hadn't seen her lying there, doing stretches, surrounded by sugar in different forms, looking like a dying whale. He had just walked on, on his bare feet, with his curls dancing around his attractive features. The sugar kicked in and she smiled. What a hike. All those gorgeous mountains and glaciers that something had created topped off with a gorgeous human that someone out there had created. What a day.