Stuff

 We've been busy lately. Carole retired from her job and is only working part time (she'll take full retirement in less than two years). We continue to visit state, national, county, and forest parks with our travel trailer serving as our base of operations. We're planning two big trips to round out the year, but have found we have to make a list and never get our first choice of destination due to campgrounds being full. From what we read the reason for full campgrounds everywhere is because people went stir crazy during the lockdown and vast numbers of those people have purchased tents and travel trailers and are hitting the roads to travel in record numbers. I believe it.

For years we've talked about taking the Casita trailer to Pennsylvania. That's where we'll likely end up going next. And we want to take a decent Autumn vacation somewhere to view the Fall colors, which we tend to do around Halloween every year. We'd like to continue that tradition as long as we can find a place where we can park the trailer for a few days. We'll likely avoid the Great Smoky Mountains National Park considering the nightmarish traffic we encountered there in 2019.

On the personal front I went to see an insurance planner referred to us by my wife's financial adviser. I switch to Medicare in twelve months and needed advice on supplemental plans to cover the things Medicare does not. She helped me pencil in the basic path I'll follow in one more year. (Nine months, actually, since you receive your Medicare card three months prior to your birthday and have to act at that time.) I remain pretty healthy for a man of 64 and want to stay strong enough to hike, kayak, and backpack for at least another decade. We'll see. I've already lived longer than my dad did, so there's that.

My second WORKING CLASS HERO novel inches closer to completion and the third book is completely plotted. After that I have a new writing project on which I have been tinkering for years. It's something that I very much want to see finished and which I wish to be able to market to a traditional press. Going the traditional route is getting to be tougher--it's almost as bad as trying to crack the professional circle-jerk comic book industry of the 1980s. I wonder if there will even be an independent traditional publishing industry in a few more years, or if we'll see Amazon as a privately held publishing monopoly.

Well, on that happy note I'll take off till next time. We have a kayak trip down the New River planned for this coming week. That's always a pleasure. The extended weather forecast looks promising.

This video is from a family trip we took last week to Damascus, VA to bike the Virginia Creeper Trail. Andy had never done that so we all headed up early last Saturday to rent bike and take the shuttle van to Whitetop Station for the ride down the mountain back to Damascus. We had a blast! However, this video is only of Beaverdam Creek at the nearby Backbone Rock Recreation Area which we visited after the bike ride. My old video editing software won't work on the new desktop computer I bought this week, so I have to use a new program. This video of the creek is my first experiment with that software.

 

Solitude

Went hiking alone on Saturday. It was nice. I'd  almost forgotten what it's like to find some peace and goddamned quiet.

Hungry Mother Creek, Virginia.

Stairs!

I've encountered some impressive staircases in my visits to state parks and National Forest sites. Some of the most stunning efforts at staircase building have been in West Virginia. Sometimes I'm just completely amazed at the expense and feats of engineering that have gone into placing these stairs to make access easier to some of these peaks, gorges, and waterfalls.

Here are a few of them:

These stairs were actually under construction. When completed, they take you to the Holly River Falls, which you can see through the trees. A most spectacular waterfall. Located in Holly River State Park in West Virginia.

These were National Park stairs. To take you to an overlook in the New River Gorge in West Virginia.

These stairs are quite organic and were constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and are located at the Backbone Rock Recreation Area in Tennessee.

These were probably the longest set of stairs I ever climbed. They're in the Tallulah Gorge State Park in Georgia and take you, of course, to the bottom of this spectacular canyon. This is merely one leg of many.


Again, another more organic set of stairs, this one located in Blackwater Canyon in West Virginia.

I like the way this staircase blends with the rock grotto in Beartown State Park, also in West Virginia.

One of the most amazing feats of engineering I've seen for National Forest staircases is at the Falls of Hill Creek in West Virginia. In addition to this very extensive set of staircases that take you past several impressive waterfalls, there is a tremendous metal staircase near the very end that must have been extremely difficult to install. Here it is:

This was something to see. It was bolted to the wall of the canyon so that you could gain access to the last of the waterfalls on Hill Creek.

Backbone Rock Falls

The most beautiful waterfall that I've ever seen is Backbone Rock Falls at Backbone Rock Recreation Area on the Tennessee/Virginia border, just a few miles west of Damascus, Virginia. Backbone Rock itself is something to see, and is a thin pillar of rock rising abruptly above the stream that surrounds it on three sides. In the late-1900s, the engineers building a rail through the area decided that it would be easier to punch a whole through Backbone Rock rather than completely take down a portion, thus creating what is often referred to as "the worl'ds shortest tunnel". A motor road runs through it now, and it's something to see.

Backbone Rock Falls lies just a short stroll from the highway and the famous rock. It plummets into a very steep, very dark little canyon filled with hemlock trees and extremely tall yellow poplars doing their best to reach up and out of the gorge and past the rocky lip to the open sky. The shadows and the dark greens and the atmosphere of this place are unique in my experience, and while the waterfall certainly is not a major one, it remains to me the single most beautiful waterfall I have visited.

Standing at the foot of the falls in the bottom of the gorge.

My friend Roy's daughter Emily down in the gorge at the bottom of the fall.

Roy, among hemlocks, at the top of the gorge.

Backbone Rock, aka: World's shortest tunnel.