Hiking the Great North Mountain region – A nonagenarian hiker – The day of safe harbor – The new ailment in India – The vaccine in the U.K. – The ravages of COVID accelerate – Evening statistics
This has been a day “crowded with incident,” both on the personal and on the national level.
I met with the Vigorous Hikers at the Wolf Gap Recreational Area, where we hiked over the Great North Mountain region along the Mill Mountain, Tuscacora, and Stoney Creek Trails. We split up into two sub-groups. The hike included a bushwhack, but it was possible to avoid the bushwhack via a detour that added three miles to the total. Four of us took this option, of which I was one; I am not overly fond of bushwhacking, although I’ve done it on occasion. The weather was clear and, initially, quite cold; it was very windy at Wolf Gap and it was only when we went beyond Big Schloss that we got into an area that was sheltered from the wind. Still, the wind died down and the temperature went up as the day progressed, and it was quite comfortable by noon.
The four of us who took the longer detour to avoid the bushwhack arrived at the point where the two routes converged well before the others, and in the end we decided to leave after we ate lunch. The hike leader had given me a walkie-talkie so that I could communicate with him, but generally these do not function very well over a distance of more than a half-mile, and in this instance most of my attempts to notify him of our status failed. We did have one brief moment when we established contact, but it ended all too quickly, and eventually I had to turn it off because its battery was running low. At the point of convergence, therefore, I left a note for the hike leader telling him that we had moved on, so that he would not wait for us when he arrived and found that we were not there. From this point we continued along FS 92 to Rte. 675, where one of the members of our sub-group returned to Wolf Gap, while I and the other two went along various fire roads to the Tibbett Knob Trail – where, unfortunately, the wind picked up again and discouraged lingering at the overlook on the knob’s summit. But it was worth seeing all the same, especially since my two companions had never seen it before. (Those who took the bushwhack, as I later learned, followed the shorter route back to Wolf Gap and did not access Tibbett Knob at all.) Once we got past the worst of the windy areas it was a beautiful day, and it has been such a long time since I’ve been on the Stoney Creek Trail that it was almost like going on a new trail for me. The complete hike was 18 miles in all, with about 3000 feet of elevation gain, but most of the ascent occurred at the beginning, going up to the ridge on the Mill Mountain Trail, and the remaining ascents were relatively short and gentle.
What made the hike particularly notable, however, was our meeting at the beginning with GP, the “grand old man” of hiking in our area. He and BH, his wife, generally meet the Vigorous Hikers and undertake a shortened version of the group’s route. He will be celebrating his 90th birthday on Thursday, and BH brought some homemade cake (delicious!) for the occasion. People like GP are nothing short of an inspiration. It is inevitable that I will lose some of my agility and speed as I grow older, but at any rate there is hope that I may still aspire to activity on the trails even in my old age. I have seen far too many examples of people withdrawing into a mole-like existence as they grow older and I will be striving to avoid such a fate as long as I can. GP, as well as several others I have associated with on Wanderbirds hikes, have shown me that this is possible. Today, for instance, after we had congratulated him and gave him our best wishes, he and BH were cheerfully beginning their hike along the Mill Mountain Trail, which ascends over 600 feet within the first mile.
Alas, one has to come down from the mountain eventually, literally as well as metaphorically. Not all of the news I heard on the radio and gleaned from the Internet articles was bad, but it was a decided letdown after the revitalizing exertions of the main part of the day.
As predicted, the case brought to the Supreme Court that challenged the results of the Pennsylvania election has been overturned. The lawsuits initiated by Sidney Powell on behalf of Trump to contest the voting results in Michigan and Georgia have been similarly unsuccessful. We have now reached the so-called “safe harbor,” the date at which states are supposed to certify their results, set at six days before the casting of the electoral college ballots. Nonetheless some attempts to derail the election process are still ongoing. More than 60 Republican law-makers (so-called – in this instance “law-breakers” would be the more accurate term) have made a motion to the state’s congressional delegation to reject Biden’s victory in the state. And in a truly bizarre development, Texas has mounted an effort to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin by filing a lawsuit against them directly to the Supreme Court. One can imagine the delight of the residents of those four states to learn that they are taking their marching orders from Austin.
There is no additional information about the mysterious new ailment in India. It is unrelated to COVID, and tests for other viruses such as dengue have come up negative. Water contamination and air pollution have also been ruled out. Officials are currently conducting blood tests for pathogens such as E. Coli, which can cause nausea and vomiting, but not typically do not cause seizures as well. At this point it defies classification and the full extent to which it has spread is unknown.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is now being administered in the United Kingdom. The U.K. has had an especially severe mortality (even worse than our own) and its government has secured 800,000 doses of the vaccine so far, enough to give 400,000 people two doses each. The FDA is likely to follow this example of approve the emergency use of the vaccine, but it still may be a matter of several days before the vaccine is administered here.
This news provides a much-needed note of hope, for the deaths from the virus in the U. S. have now been averaging more than 2,200 per day; and we have not even accounted for the fallout from the recent Thanksgiving celebrations. The gatherings typically massed during Christmas and New Year’s will exacerbate the situation. The news from various states is consistently grim. To take a few examples – In California more than 22,000 residents test positive for the coronavirus each day, with about 12% inevitably showing up at hospitals in two to three weeks. Riverside University Health System Medical Center, one of the state’s intensive care units, has opened an ICU in a storage room. North Carolina’s patient count has doubled in the past 12 days. In Georgia, the number of confirmed or suspected coronavirus infections has soared more than 70% in the past week, and hospitals are already warning state officials about their ability to absorb new COVID patients.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 68,546,837; # of deaths worldwide: 1,562,031; # of cases U.S.: 15,589,681; # of deaths; U.S.: 293,363.