We have winter around
here, and sometimes it falls on a weekend! Could those global warming
fanatics be right? The Appalachian Irishman longs for the cold, snowy
winters of his youth, when, getting out of school for days, friends
and I would ride sleds, slide on frozen ponds, hike, and even camp in
the snow!
We have had about a week
of winter around here, with a generous estimate of a whole two inches
of snow and below freezing highs. The usual havoc reigned:
unnecessary school closings, raids on grocery stores, vehicles in
ditches, accidents, radio road condition reports (from “brave”
souls who drove in it), etc.
Yesterday, the Appalachian
Irishman took his sixty-fifth hike, for three hours, on his beloved
House Mountain. It was 25 degrees in the valley. How cold on the
mountain? Who knows? The water in my canteen started to freeze. The
snow started falling heavily on the ridge, with the wind blowing and
the temperature dropping. On the north bluff, the updraft blew the
snow upward. On the trail down, I slipped, for the first time ever
hiking up there, on an ice patch, landing on my butt and tapping the
back of my head against a rock. I hiked out the last part in the dark
with no flashlight. What fun! I wish we had more than one week of
winter here. I need to go ice fishing!
At any rate, for your
viewing pleasure, what follows next are seven photographs from
yesterday. (I forgot to change the year on my camera from 2009 to
2010. That's why the photograph dates are 1/9/2009, not 1/9/2010
correctly.)
I wish someone would give
me a job hiking, taking photographs, and writing about my adventures!
The first photograph, of course, is sheer self-promotion!
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