4am, 500 miles, hundreds of feet....

Friday the internal clock clicks ON and I was dreaming of climbing a small and rocky mountain, REALLY!  The dog jumps on the wife as she exits the bed and the wife says "I could do with another hour's sleep!" but I am like "think of the FUN!" and so we eat the coffee and scones and hit the road....
500 mile drive, round trip for the day, over and back.

TODAY?  I feel like I was dragged up a pile of rocks and down...and I was!  There is nothing like a small energetic beagle to help you hike a mountain, and I am SORE.
It was incredible though.
I will fill in the details Sunday, here is a beginning:
In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne had just written THE SCARLET LETTER and  met Herman Melville for the first time to climb Monument Mountain in Great Barrington, Mass.  They were hit by a very heavy storm and sheltered in a cave and enjoyed chatting about writing (we had good climbing conditions on our climb, but it was REALLY stormy before and after, and it is such a dangerous and treacherous hike I am glad it was dry) .
Melville came down and wrote MOBY DICK and dedicated it to Hawthorne.
We went to find that cave.
We did!
(I think we did)
More later....

Remember my last post, about cowboy cookies?  Mountain climbers need them too!  But NOT beagles.
Penny is a champion hiker and rider.  She looooves what we love, marching for miles!  Then sleeping like the DEAD.  Good golly I slept like the dead last night...


Shortly after starting I was like "this cave?" and the wife was like "that is more of an OVERHANG".
Truly, there might be caves all over the place but.....


We came around a corner and saw THIS waterfall and CAVE. The cave goes back in a bit, and would easily shelter 6 or more people (hard to tell from the photo...but WOW).  We were like "this is IT!".


Climbing to the top, as you will see in pics tomorrow, was impossibly perilous.  You are climbing up very steep rocks...and down...and across narrow ledges with dropoffs of hundreds of feet!
This is one of the 2 summits....Penny kept pulling me to the edge which is why I sat down I was so scared.  Just beyond her tail is a sheer drop all the way down to the valley... unbelieveable view...