Thursday, May 31, 2012:
Breakfast at Lions Head,
lunch at Sage's Ravine,
an afternoon snack atop Bear Mountain with Twin Lakes as the backdrop, and then 'home' in time for dinner.
I could get used to this life.
Wait ... I *am* used to it. Been doing it for five solid months now. Gosh, I'm spoiled.
There's a class of words that are my favorite. They're all very powerful words and have two forms - adjectives ending in a consonant followed by the letters 'id' (splendid), and nouns that end in a consonant followed by 'or' (splendor). How many of them can you think of? Candid/candor, rancid/rancor, squalid/squalor, ... there are plenty more.
The splendid/splendor pair are, in my opinion, under-used words. Upon being asked the routine question 'how are you?' on the trail, you sometimes hear people, full of the joy of being out in the wild, gushing forth with 'Wonderful!' or 'Excellent!' But I'm going to start saying 'Splendid!' Splendid is beyond wonderful, beyond excellent. It's magnificent. It's luxurious, glowing with light, radiant! How could you not feel splendid when surrounded by such splendor as that shown above?
Needless to say, I had a great day of hiking. The weather didn't hurt. If I were to request perfect hiking weather, today's is what I'd ask for. The setting obviously helped a lot. The hike took me through two of the best kinds of Appalachian Trail scenery - mountaintop vistas and secluded valleys with roaring mountain streams. And it gave me some of the best examples of both, all in one day. It even threw in a serious rock scramble up the north side of Bear Mountain - where I met an intrepid father carrying his 35 pound 4-year-old daughter up that 900 foot near-cliff in a kid-carrier backpack.
Yep ... intrepor ... that's what this intrepid man had in abundance, to lug his sweet little girl up to witness such splendid splendor in all its vivid ... uh ... vivor.
Okay, the word police are coming. They're all in a furor over this language abuse ... absolutely livid. Those furid cops with their over-active livor ... the bile! ... can't they just let a writer have a little fun?
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Here's a map of today's hiking route, with a link to many more photos:
AT Day 138 - Sage's Ravine at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking in Connecticut
When the splendor is splendid the result is splenditude.
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