Well Ed,

 

I finally did it today along with Dan Sherwood.  We hiked the Alum Cave Bluffs trail to your favorite mountain.  It took us a goodly amount of time - left the parking lot at the trailhead at 8:15 am and arrived back at 3:30 pm.  We spent about 45 minutes on top looking around; took a few pictures both going and coming.  I haven't loaded them into my computer yet.  I'm very interested in comparing photos of that rock formation with the hole in it; I took photos with two different lenses - one is a 18-70 zoom, the other is a 70-300 zoom.  These are Nikon lenses on a D70S body and the Nikon digital SLR still uses the 2/3s of 35mm format CCD which multiplies the focal length of the lenses by 1 1/2 making the 300 mm equal to a 450mm.

 

I was beat by the time we got through the hike but it was a great hike.  The temperature outside the lodge office was a wee bit over 72 when we got there at about 11:45 but all along the trail the conditions were very comfortable with a slight breeze along the route.  The llama's were there and asked us to send you their greetings. 

Your record is in no danger from either Dan or myself - it was a fun day, but once is enough for me.  We saw at least half a dozen hiking folks at the top who new you both directly and by reputation.  A woman along with her  two daughters from Nashville all seemed to know you on a first name basis though they didn't know you were an engineer who had work in Oak Ridge; apparently they knew about you after you moved to Florida.

 

Hope you remain in good health and my awe of your hiking to Mt. LeConte grew by leaps and bounds today and it was already at a very high level.

 

Here is Dan Sherwood's contribution to the hike. I worked with these two guys in Oak Ridge.

 

Ed,

Just a quick note to add my 2 cents worth of comment about the hike and stuff.  Nothing you haven't heard before, I'm sure.

You may recall that I blew out my left ACL when I was at CRBRP.  So I choose my hikes carefully these days and don't try to push it.  I hike, bike and dance, but try not to push any one event too hard.  This hike pushed it a bit.  My normal is to hike about 2 miles about twice a week at the OR arboretum, so this was way more than I'm used to.  But Jim wanted to do it at least once, so away we went.  He started out pretty chipper, but ended the day looking like a whipped puppy.  He mentioned many times his respect for your accomplishments hiking this mountain.

I had done the Alum Cave Bluffs Trail to the Cave, maybe 3 years ago, with the intention of going all the way to LeConte.  But they were blasting at the time and wouldn't let you go past the Cave.

Fun hike.  I took about 80 pictures along the way, and posted 16 to my website.  So if you want to look at those, and see what I'm into these days, go to:

http://dlsherwo.googlepages.com/home

There's a hiking page with links to hiking places and some galleries on my site.

BTW, you need to change the 1001 to 1301 ! ! ! 

If you have a webcam & headset and use skype or Yahoo, perhaps we can have a video chat sometime.

Take care,
Dan