Expecting New Results

The walls are muttering again about Doing Something Useful With My Time, so I am going to try to collect a few more white blazes before winter e sets in. Hopes for checking off the 1000 mile mark having been dashed in New York last May, I am just pushing to get beyond my mid Atlantic comfort zone.

Also, the partisan drumbeat in northern Virginia ... whatever Canada does to pull off their elections in a couple of months, we need to embrace as protection for the last fragments of our national sanity.

This time, the trail will lead north through the mountains just south of the Virginia border. Highlights will include the shelter at Roan High Knob, highest on the AT at 6186 feet, bracketed by a number of "balds", mountains of similar size that rise above the tree line, close to the Nolichucky Gorge and through the Mountain Harbour B&B (https://mountainharbour.info) , which will doubtless look even better when I collapse at its door after a week of Ups and Downs.

Weather is always a concern in this area. The forecast at the moment is for rain, and rain, and then probably, well, rain.  Having had enough of hiking wet in New Jersey last spring, I will be tuning my hiking plan to dodge between raindrops.

I plan to depart on September 15, return to Round Hill in early October, and post tales of my travels when my Internet connection allows!

Pictures from Delaware

Some photos I took while visiting Claymont to join in welcoming a Kenyan missionary group that Father John Gayton is supporting.

Still serving!

The bridge where Sean and Marie went kayaking

The new Wilmington Poohsticks Bridge

Holy Rosary Catholic Church

Other notes -- one of the big trees in front of 87 South Avon Drive has been taken down, and Claymont Elementary School has been changed to a community center. Time moves on.

Blue Ridge Democrats' Meet and Greet at the B Chord Brewery.

Beer, bluegrass, and blue State visions. State Senator Jennifer Wexton on schmooze, Senator Tim Kaine on harmonica (dark blue shirt, lower left.)

Looking back 2015-2018

I got lost chasing through the posts that have built up here, trying to recall when I was somewhere, or the other place? Time to work out a tag and search widget ... In the meantime, here's a few of my favorites, starting with one from Marie' graduation in 1977.

Event	Links
Grandson Backpacking 2018
Rocksylvania 2017
Solar Eclipse 2017
Mount St Helens and the Lava Tube 2017
Olympia to Vancouver Island 2017
Strawberry Mountain Wilderness 2017
Southwestern Virginia 2017
Olympic Peninsula 2016
Cocoa's Fantastical 4697 Mile Adventure 2015

More later!

Into the light of the dark black night, crying

Remembering roads traveled 2007 - 2018

My Blackbird was the victim of insurance industry practices that discriminate against older automobiles, a tired driver, and a deer.

The driver suffered no physical injuries, but has become a little more gray.

Again.

Resting. Reading. Waiting.

The cellular engineering and the biochemistry that heals tendons and joints have not evolved to dot-com worldstrider speeds yet. Enforced idleness, aargh, the moss is growing back!

Good thing that there's a pile of neglected books at hand to keep me sane.

For nearly a year, I have been working my way through "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", Annie Dillard's 1974 love song to the southwestern Virginia woodlands. Fellow 1975 Cornellian, bibliophile, and close friend Barbara Cook loaned the paperback to me some time ago; it is a long, slow read, and worth it.

I must return the book to her some day soon.

Tinker Creek -- photo from wildernessescapades.com

What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening.  If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun's surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet the winds are blowing, the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the snoweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral.

Lick a finger: feel the now. -- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

To the hills, again

A great day hike today with trusted friends Barbara Cook and Mary Thurman anticipating my return to the Trail.  Beautiful day, good companions, enough exercise to justify a small celebratory ice cream!

Harpers Ferry panorama from Maryland Heights -- photo by M. Thurman