A Day At Bear Mountain

This post came enormously close to being entitled "An Evening in the Bear Mountain Infirmary"! Happily, it did not.

Luis and I had an enjoyable morning hanging 'round the house, then got up (finally), showered, and headed briefly to his office to see what the renovations were looking like. Well, his office really won't be usable tomorrow unless more work was done over the past day, but it is smaller and the front will be a tight cubicle space for someone but it is what it is. We were there maybe 20 minutes. And then it was off to Bear Mountain. By the time we got there, sometime after 15h00, the weather, so typical for New Jersey and by proximaty, New York, had gone from cold and overcast to cool and not so clear, and then it became gorgeous with totally clear blue skies! It was still cool, but I prefer cool and the three shirts made it better. One short sleeved shirt under a light long sleeved shirt with a heavy swearshirt and I was ready!

They had the Oktoberfest going on there (yawn) and so after a very quick trip through there and determining that not a single healthy food existed there, we turned to the regular path around the lake. OK. The lake is lovely and the trees are mostly green (about 60% still green) but the other 40% ranged from splotchy patches of colour, some leaves with just the edges getting colour or "oh, my gods, how beautiful is this" to wow! Some leaves were a vermillion that rivalled the best setting sun ever. Some were lighter green but with yellow or orange edges to them. They were leaves, though, and I love leaves. And acorns, although the bloody critters tried to kill me.

After a summer of seeing the most wonderful of childhood summertime creaturers (and never having my camera with me when I encounter them) I finally found one at the right moment and the right setting - a gorgeous Monarch butterfly. We had millions of them in Pennsylvania when I was growing up there and then there came a span of years when they disappeared from the area and that was it. They were gone. About ten years ago, they slowly began to reappear and now, working at a golf course with so many delightfully manicured plants and lovely flowers, they are out and about and just so visible. And other more rare butterflies, too. So when this one pictured above landed in some flowers just hiding there in the shoreline, I had to slowly, so slowly, approach the flowers and patiently wait for him or her to come out from the side of the water. Eventually he'd show... and he did!

We wandered off the nicely manicured and macadamed path to the more challenging hiking into the woods trail, obviously a trail. The ground was knotty with rocks and stumps and roots, and it was uneven and exactly what a walk in the woods should be. And the acrons... goodness me, I have never seen so many acorns on the ground! It was unbelieveble and it made me very cautious. The trip up was arduous, except for where there were some stone steps, very reminiscent of the three-hundred stone steps in Parsippany. We made it close to 2/3 of the way up, but decided that it was getting steeper and more difficult and that now it was 16h30 and getting to the top and then back down before darkness was not only unlikely but bloody near impossible. So we turned around.

I'll be damned if that trek did not somehow make itself steeper when we turned around. I took a picture of the downhill trip and could not believe I'd made it up that! Somehow, down was scarier than up. It wasn't easy at all. And then, just as we are at the bottom of the steepest part of the hill, WHAM! I'm on my back, looking up through the trees at the bits of blue sky and there is Luis, not looking worried (he never does, which is disconcerting, and yet I'm grateful that he is not one to blindly panic. Anyone else would have. I avoided really hurting myself - my backpack took the brunt of the fall and saved me from hitting the occipital lobe on a very sharp rock. It did jar my brain around enough, however, that the front - my forehead - had a terrible headache. My feet, legs and arms were intact and my breathing was OK - a little fast with all that adrenalin running through, but normal under the circumstances and then I felt the back of my head for any moisture (no indication of bleeding so that was good). I seemed to be fine, although I was quite shaken. One elbow was a little scratched up but otherwise fine. It took me a few minutes, though, to summon up the courage to try to get up - once the adrenal left, it was nearly naptime and nothing wanted to move.

Luis took my hand and tried to help me up but those wretched acorns, which had done this in the first place, were still there (damn things were everywhere) and I could not get any traction at all. It was like trying to walk on marbles! So I waited a minute, really examined my surroundings and then slowly managed to find footholds and roots to hold on to where there were no acorns or anything else slippery to get me.

It was very easy going from there and we were back on the normal path fairly quickly. I was quite relieved and checked my head a few times as we went. No knots or any bumps or contusions there, so I just had the headache in front - which was rather severe - to deal with. I must have really given myself quite a whipping of the head to get that. But I took some aspirin when I got home and that was really all it took.

We got to the car and headed out, a good full hour trip to the Rockaway Mall. I needed to return something and of course we made other stops along the way, more money out of my pocket. The second season of "Grey's Anatomy" is out, so I had to have that. Luis had to have the three-pack of the X-Men movies (with a rebate that I get to fill out), and we agreed that $9.00 was a great price for "Shrek II", which we loved. Then we went to the book store (always a dangerous place) where I got my 2007 Old Farmer's Almanac, the next "For Better or For Worse" book, a book by the Weird New Jersey guys called "Weird Hauntings" and the October issue of "Weird New Jersey". It only comes out in April and October of each year, a publication by Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran. They also had a show on one of the better cable channels called "Weird US", where they would travel around and find the same local legends, weird stone things, historical bits, hauntings and tales that they found all the time in my home state.That's me, looking quite small by the huge glacial rocks! I love glacial rocks.

I've been to our petroglyphic rocks, the 300 stone steps and Tripod Rock (quite a hike but well worth it!). There are a million other sites to see. I love the Weird books. With my upcoming trip to New Hampshire, I need to look into my Weird New England and see what might be along the way!

We finished up at the mall, came home and watched some telly, then went to bed. Life is good!