When I finally visited last September, the leaves were just beginning to turn. Roy, now in his seventies, met me at the gate. He was wearing a baseball cap that read “Hellbender Hugger.”

“Only one way to know.”

By 2015, the creek had turned from lifeless to merely struggling. By 2018, the first wild hellbender nest in over thirty years was discovered under a slab of sandstone just downstream from campsite #7.