The Climb

As much as I loathe Miley Cyrus, she does have some good lyrics from time to time and her song, "The Climb" has been on my mind for the past few days...well, since my climb!

Sunday, bright and early at 4 AM, Ronnie and I headed out to climb the Chimney Tops!  I had about 4 hours of sleep and Ronnie had none, but we were actually quite chipper!  Ronnie had been looking for a hiking partner and I was looking for someone that was brave enough to take me climbing before the sun came up for some amazing photo ops, and also someone that I could possibly outrun, if in fact we came across a bear!  You know that joke, that you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in the group!  Well, in a group of 2, I better be booking it if Yogi and Boo Boo decide to nab some hikers!

The Chimney Tops trail is not a very long one - only 2 miles, but we didn't realize the difficulty of the trail. I think Ronnie said it was roughly a 1000 ft elevation change over the 2 miles!  We made the first mile pretty quickly and without many problems.  We were decked out in our head lamps and short sleeved shirts.  It was cold enough that we could see our breath, in the light of the head lamps, but we were burning up from busting it up that mountain.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Ronnie and I are both incredibly out of shape, so that made this little hike even more eventful!  Around 1.3 miles we started feeling like we could puke!  We had to stop every 20 yards or so and sit for a minute.  I guess the change in elevation was starting to wear on us by that point.

The top of the Chimney Tops is actually rock-face or basically a bunch of slate jutting up out of the ground!  The trails technically ends at the base of the rock face, but we and many others, ventured forth to literally climb the rock face - like, looking for hand and foot holds kind of climbing!  At first I didn't want to climb the rock face, but Ronnie told me that I didn't get up that early and hike until I wanted to puke to just stand at the bottom of the rock face to get my pictures.  So I shimmied up the rock face and it was SO worth it!

Luckily, we made it to the tippy top before sunrise!  That was the whole purpose of the trip.  It was somewhat light outside before the sun truly came up over the mountains, but the view and the photos were still quite moving!  It's not the tallest mountain but it's tall enough and you have a 360 degree view so it's amazing... especially at sunrise!

I wish Adam could have gone and he wanted to but he didn't want to lose that much sleep and then have to start the work week the next day.  It was good having a little bonding time with my brother though.  Hopefully Adam will go again with me one day, maybe in the fall when the position of the sun is different and sunrise is at a different time!

Here are a few photos that I took at Sunrise and on the hike back down!

God's Flashlight!

 this is where God's Flashlight was pointing to 

S-curves in nature are beautiful! 

Little Red Squirrel who was busting a move!  I could hardly catch him clearly in a photo!