673 - Overlook Mountain Fire Tower
Today we did all the wrong things.
What should have been the perfect adventure, went terribly wrong. I say perfect adventure because it had everything we could ever want…
Alara’s spiraling fascination with fire towers, and my recent obsession with abandoned things. Both were included on this Overlook Mountain adventure, via a measly 4.7 mile hike with 1,400 feet of elevation gain.
Notice my use of the word “measly”. We’d gotten too cocky lately, and it finally decided to catch up to us. Our departure time was a wee bit too close to sunset, and the hike up was unexpectedly hard.
Blame it on a night of bad sleep, or the other adventure we did that morning at Opus 40, but that this trail was seriously steep.
By the time we got to the abandoned building, also known as the Overlook Mountain House, darkness was falling across the land. This meant I had to speed run the thing in about 10 minutes, which was fine, but I left with little to no photos of the place.
All I managed to snag was a number of video clips for the Reel I posted to promote this adventure. All work and no play, as they used to say.
It’s a bummer because the place has a rich history. It used to be a mountain resort for the elite in the early 1870s that burned down not once, but twice. It was even visited by former US president Ulysses S. Grant at one point.
The structure that remains today is a concrete blueprint that was put up in an attempt to rebuild the building for a third time. But it never actually got completed due to the unfortunate timing of the Great Depression.
The thing is, I used to run into this problem when I was making YouTube vlogs for my photography adventures awhile back. I’d spend so much time filming content, I’d barely have time to make the art I came there to make (i.e. PHOTOS.)
And there was this wicked decision of do I save the good light for the photos or for the promo video?
The (only) solution was more time. I needed to arrive earlier to film the content for the vlog, and prioritize the good light for the photos. There was no other choice.
But these lessons get forgotten in the swift passages of time. And you, the audience, really don't care about these lessons. So I’m not even sure why I’m mentioning this. You just want the photos. Gimme that good content, gimme gimme gimme.
That’s all I hear from you savages. But I get it. I’d be saying the same thing if I was reading this whiny ass shit expecting a good photo at the end. So here’s the content:
That’s it. That’s all I have.
It’s a photo from the top of the fire tower, which was just a little ways up from the abandoned building. The view, which features those beautiful rolling hills, is what the Mountain House guests used to see on a daily basis.
Want to know why that’s the only photo I have?
Because I spent fifteen minutes trying to update my drone so it would launch. There’s no feeling quite like watching a stupid bar on your drone try to update while you have a single bar of service. Meanwhile, golden hour is lighting the place up like the Fourth of July.
Yet another lesson from the past that bit me in the butt tonight. Always make sure your drone is updated before going on an adventure. I never even got it up in the air.
Our third and final mistake caught us on the way down. When we reached in our bags to grab our headlamps for the descent, we realized we never grabbed them in the first place. Go figure.
So we had to make our way down like animals of the night. Except we weren’t animals of the night because we were tripping every three feet.
Fuck, I wish I had more to show for this adventure. The potential here was so good. But hey, you live and learn. Sometimes the same lesson over and over again.
Makes me understand why that resort, made entirely of wood, burnt down two times in a row. WILL SOMEONE GET SOME CONCRETE IN HERE?
