False Spring on House Mountain

This weekend past a sliver of spring fell upon the valley of East Tennessee flicking away the shroud of winter for a moment – a temptation of early March that could end up cascading days of mild temperatures and soothing sunlight or launch headlong into drenching days of cold rain or even some snow. It is unpredictability at the maximal level.

I always opt for the ‘shine (sun that is) it makes my frequent jaunts into the wilderness a slight more soothing; although walking the highcountry in a gentle rain is equally enviable.

In any event I’m finding a minor obsession (evolving major in triple-quick-time) with burdening around a digital camera I received during Christmas festivities. I have never owned even a cheap variety of such instrumentation and thought initially it would be a psychological difficulty to tend for the care of some fancy camera while scratching my body bloody through backwoods thickets of sawbriar while attempting to secure a fragile piece of electronics from being smashed by a bent branch snapping back into equilibrium.

But the excursions I’ve been on since December have caused no damage at all to the sucker, and lemme tell you things have been rough a few times. On lengthy hiking trips cameras are best kept tucked deep in the folds of a wool sweater and summarily buried down in the ye olde backpack until one is struck by such a peculiarity that it is impossible to quell the urge to sling off a fifty pound backpack, undo the secure lashings, and throw out all manner of gear until the scratchy wool sweater is fished out and unfurled and the maniacally protected camera is called to duty to snap a pic of what better be a Yeti foraging down by the creek.

Alas, my father and I tend to wander, sometimes for days, up and down remote slopes of the mountains exploring watersheds far off the dotted markings of the trails on our soiled maps. Much of the time we travel light; small backpacks with essential gear, packs of parched-corn for food, and a poncho to keep off the cold rain. A camera has no safe haven on a trip like this; it is just as susceptible as my fly rod to some Murphy’s Law-style of untimely death. All I can do is keep it in a ziplock bag and cinch it tight with a few rubber bands, but mostly I keep it in a cargo pocket. It helps to have it an arm’s-reach away – things in the woods happen fast and can slip away without your mind even marking it.

So it’s a classic trade-off, but I am no longer worried. If the digital must befall some tragedy in the pursuits of capturing one of those damn wish-I’d-had-a-camera-to-snag-that-shot moments, then it will be a worthy fate.

Enough BS. Here are some slices from last Saturday’s scramble up House Mountain. (Not much scrambling though, the forest was warming on the south side and coming slowly alive, perfect for SLOW-going), The trail along the top is dense with virginia pitch pine and table mountain pine, like so:

The mountaintop has a few good views if you can snake out of the scrub. Here I was facing west from a rock outcropping. The expanse of the Tennessee valley is visible; the Cumberland Mountains are visible on the horizon some fifty miles away:

On the same rocks I saw this friggin’ duck with a metal rod shoved up his arse. It left me with feelings of conspiracy, much like the overabundance of governmental surveillance cameras hanging from traffic lights back in town:

Finally, here is a view to the northeast of Clinch Mountain (starts here and runs through to Virginia) I’d say at about two-and-a-half miles away. The far left knob is known as Signal Point and was an observation camp for the Union Army during the Civil War; from a vantage over there you can see straight southwest to Knoxville and on a smog-less day all the way to the outlines of Lookout Mountain some one hundred and fifty miles away near Chattanooga, TN:

Yup, the addiction is manifest, sure beats the 35mm for ease of use – now I need one of the 256 Meg cards – NOT…. I can’t spend all of my time behind the lense….