At one point today, I was trying to find a mountain trail with a red blaze, based on the information from the hiking map posted by the road. (Balkan hiking maps are among my favorite forms of European fiction.) I was reminded of the afternoon in the mountains above Rasinari, near Sibiu, in Romania. I had gone off-piste after a rather frightening encounter with a few sheepdogs, and I thought I had found a marked trail, so I followed the red blazes for awhile. Eventually, the spatial distribution was peculiar enough for me to realize that the marking was for forestry management purposes, and not marking a trail at all. Things are seldom as they seem.
