Looking Glass Rock – J. Parker Nature Stories

I wasn’t sure I could go. I was pacing, or at least the best approximation I could do, back and forth in our hotel room, testing out the injured foot that would need to have far more than the 20 hours I’d give it to recover from the nasty turn I had given it on the Flat Laurel Creek Trail. It really wasn’t good. My foot had swollen so much through the gaps in the compression sleeve that I was wearing that the edges nearly cut my skin. I wasn’t sure I could walk down to the car, and was half hoping Jess would push me a luggage cart. I could barely make it from bed to bathroom, and yet in less than an hour I was hoping to tackle a 7 mile, 1100 foot elevation gain hike.

In normal times I might have heard the fat lady sing. But these were covid times, and the fat lady’s performance was canceled as it was against CDC regulations.

I felt like I was walking on air. I knew I wasn’t – in fact I was hiking on the narrow ridge of Tennent Mountain. There was but a narrow path that navigated the small bit of the ridge that remained level enough at the top to walk. In many areas the terrain sloped quickly and someone steeply on either side, but still mild enough to provide just the right level of unobstructed views and excitement without the feeling of danger. one could see the distinctive ball of Looking Glass Rock, though very small and far, far below (some 1,500-2000 feet lower in elevation gain). We had hiked that rock yesterday, and it was hard to imagine one could find a location so dramatically higher, but there we were, looking down on the rock which had struck fear into us at the end, where the dramatic slope of the rock gave us little comfortable place to enjoy the views we had hiked over 3 miles to obtain.

Tag Archives: Looking Glass Rock

2020/07/04 Jumping John Rock is a Gas, Gas, Gas

2017/10/17 – Touching the Sky at Tennent Mountain