Funny but sadly true story.
We surviving members (dregs?) of the Shining Rock Orienteering Society have once again converged upon North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest for our annual We-May-Be-Old-But-We’re-Still-Not-Too-Old-To-Get-Up-The-Damned-Mountain-Retreat.
There are hundreds of miles of trails in the PNF. But we decided to do the Coontree Loop (up Coontree Mountain) because we’d never done it before.
It wasn’t until we had left the car behind and headed out on the trail that we realized that, yes, we actually had done the Coontree Loop before.
Just the previous autumn as a matter of fact.
Turns out that short term memory loss is an occupational hazard among cohorts of our, um, age group.
But what the hell. It was a beautiful crisp autumn day and the forest was ablaze in fall colors. And since we were there to prove that we could still drag our aging bodies up a damned mountain, this one was as good as any.
Coontree is a popular hike in the PNF. It’s a fairly easy climb to the top but a difficult and sometimes treacherous descent. Or maybe it’s just that our creaking knees and calf muscles doth protest too much on the way down.
Still, we Shining Rock Orienteers are nothing if not a hardy breed. So we gutted it out. We went boldly up. And we cautiously inched our way back down. We may have seen better days but we are still game.
Long story short. We came, we saw, we hiked.
Later we retreated to nearby downtown Brevard for dinner. There I observed subtle hints that assured me it was just as well that I didn’t try to tackle Coontree Mountain on a bicycle, as is my wont. (I’m a road cyclist. They say you can’t call yourself a mountain biker until you’ve broken a collar bone.)
We Shining Rock Orinteers are not ones to tempt the hand of fate.
FreeGNV 