Back to Nature ~ Blog 34

The payoff for an hour and a half of work.

My shoulders hurt.

Ordinarily, the cause could be a workout in Piers Park, lifting weights in the gym or fallout from one of my many, many moves. Since yesterday I did nothing other than climb a 3,166-foot mountain, I have to assume it's related to that.

Mt. Monadnock rises in southwestern New Hampshire near the cute and kinda-grungy college town of Keene. I was visiting Four Eyes, who lives in Brattleboro, Vt., the town The Wife and I considered moving to this past spring.

This is what we moved to New England for. There was a little country deli down the street form Four Eyes that makes some of the best soups, brisket and fudge brownies I've ever consumed. We ate fantastic burgers. We saw cute little art shops. TW, in a visit last spring, fell in love with a furniture shop for some reason. The trees are tapped with rubber tubing, already prepared for the flow of maple syrup in the spring.

And then there are the mountains. Boston's great, but the biggest hill I've hiked in the last six months is maybe 200 feet tall. Monadnock, Four Eyes claims, is the most hiked mountain in the nation. But this was no Disney-fied tourist hike.

The Monadnock trail rises 1,850 feet from the state park in 2.1 miles. It's an average grade of 17 percent, with the steepest section at about 30 percent.

With that kind of vertical, I was often using my hands to steady myself on the descent. In many places, I dropped both hands to rocks and lowered myself using my arms. That's why my shoulders are sore. It's a good sore, the kind of dull ache that lets you know you did something yesterday.

Three years ago, as we considered where The Wife would go to PA school, she asked what I would do without the mountains. Oh, I'll figure something out.

There's no substitute for mountains. Monadnock reminded me of that. Vermont and New Hampshire are a special place, with mountains and hiking difficult enough that you can spend hours hiking and leave you weak in the knees. Or, in my case, the shoulders.