A couple-three years back on this nice walk to great vistas in all directions, I impossibly lost my eyeglasses, despite retracing a bunch of steps and doing the hike again the next day in search of them.
Our best guess since has become that they fell down into one of the deep, body- or even light-impenetrable crevices at the western overlook, maybe snagged by a shirt as I took one off to put a dry one on. Just a theory.
On this day, on the way back down, though not nearly as far down as when I finally missed my glasses–without which stuff is pretty daggone blurry–Gail said hey, I don’t have the camera bag. Which we had separated from the camera so I could maybe get a slideshow to accompany this dispatch, but then hey, the battery went dead.
So back up we start, looking along the trail before we meet up with some people on the way down. Gail asks about the camera bag, which they say they found at the western overlook (where we paused but didn’t eat lunch), and hung on a branch, and which Gail snagged off a branch, there by the western overlook.
Lunch, by the way, was delightfully warm in the sun on this cool day, with those aforementioned views good and sharp.
Flat Top Mountain Trail up and down. 5.6 miles. Well, more like 6.2 with the find-lost-item added distance.
How to get there: Blue Ridge Parkway to the small parking lot at milepost 83.1.
