Beautiful Day

My family and I went to Stone Mountain State Park in Traphill, NC today. The views are amazing, it's so hard to capture on camera. Mom took a lot of the pictures because I got so frustrated with the low-quality frames my digital camera was producing. Her $200 Nikon digital is the shit.

Pictures of the hike can be viewed here.

So maybe in the moment it wasn't so beautiful. It was nearly 100°F (at least it felt like it); sweat was dripping from every possible pore, lungs were wheezing, hearts were pounding, legs were shaking....we hiked up a damn mountain people! Well first we hiked down to a 200 foot waterfall, and then we hiked half of the mountain loop (approximately 2.25 miles). The halfway point was where my parents left my brother and I to wait in a parking lot, because the parking lot in which we parked was on the other side of the trail. Personally, I could not finish the hike.

Would you like to know what the other half consisted of?

Walking on top of Stone Mountain, experiencing gorgeous views like this one.

My parents are pretty fit, considering their smoking habit, but they both needed to rest multiple times during this hike. As soon as they pulled into the parking lot to pick us up my mom yelled, "We died! We died and we came back to life." Soon after they left us to finish the hike a couple we had passed earlier joked with us, "I can't believe you left your mom and dad out there." Then, "You're better off though, it's all uphill that way." Yeah, I surely would have died. I'm still disappointed and jealous that I didn't get the opportunity to hike 2,300 feet and walk across a mountain ridge. I will though! It's a goal and a promise.