To Start Off

I guess there’ll be no real order to these, so I’m just going to jump in with a story about Linville. My buddy David Willette’s family had a cabin there. They probably still have it but that’s beside the point. Well David invited Danny Allen and I to go with he and his father to the cabin for the weekend, and it sounded like a lot of fun. Linville is fairly close to Boone, and there’s a large gorge where the Army does some training. The morning after we arrived David had the bright idea that we should hike down to the bottom of the gorge, there was a river and white water rapids and we thought “sounds like a great idea”. An hour or so later we’re making our way down the switchback trail to the bottom. Well when it came time to go back I realized that nature was calling and I needed to go add to the logs that were already lying around, so I tell the guys to go ahead and I’d catch up. Well from my vantage point I notice that although we had come down a switchback trail there seemed to be a vertical trail that may get me to the top before David and Danny, so I finish my business and set out to beat them to the top. I start out and the trail is relatively mild, however it pretty quickly gets steeper, and steeper; to the point that within a half hour I’m basically walking straight up and using my hands to help climb. It’s at this point that I realize that I’d been going quite a while.. but hadn’t crossed over the switchbacks at all. This was a problem. I yell at the top of my lungs, “HEY, WHERE ARE YOU GUYS?” and I hear from the next MOUNTAIN over, “WE’RE OVER HERE!!!”. Hmm I’m obviously screwed. I yell for them to meet me back at the bottom and they reply “ok”. I’ve mentioned that I was on a fairly steep surface but haven’t mentioned how hard it is to walk on pine needles that are packed like a foot deep. It’s hard when they’re dry, but today they weren’t dry.. it had rained the night before, so when I turned around to head back down I immediately fell on my ass. I looked like an albino member of the Jamaican bobsled team. I’m hurtling towards the base at close to the speed of light and I’m reaching for trees, grabbing grass, anything to try to slow my slide to no avail. I see that I’m coming up on a large rock and think to myself how unpleasant it’s going to be if I hit this rock at 10,000 mph so I roll to my left a couple of times to miss it. Well before I can complete my last roll which would put me face up again I’m luckily stopped by a small sapling. I say luckily because I had finally come to a complete stop and I was fairly close to the base of Mt Everest that I’d been body surfing down, but unluckily the tree had stopped me by allowing each of my legs to go on opposite sides of the tree. Sadly evolution has given the male of our species and interesting bit of luggage at the point where our legs connect, and this equipment had just reached terminal velocity and impacted a tree. I lay there for a few minutes waiting for the comforting embrace of death, which I know must be close by, because I can’t breathe, I’m coughing up blood, and wheezing like a 2000 year old chronic tobacco smoking mummy, then I roll the last bit to the bottom. My dear, close friends soon arrive and help me up, and with one arm across each of their shoulders we begin to make our way out of the gorge. We make it about a quarter of the way up, and I finally stop coughing and I begin to get my voice back, so they ask what the hell happened to me… and laughed the rest of the weekend and for several weeks after.

Next story hopefully tomorrow, and there's alot of them