Paul Levine, in Night Vision: "We are all born psychopaths, born without repressions.
Society teaches us the restraints of proper behavior
and helps us develop a conscience."
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Today was the Mensa hike on a piece of the Appalachian Trail, on Mount Peter. Originally ten or so people were interested, but then there was rain over the past few days, continuing into this morning, so a lot of people were afraid of mud and dripping trees and dropped out. Weaklings! The total amount of rain was less than an inch!
So four of us went, A., C., P., and me, and it was fine.
We started at the hawk watch platform, where two women from the Audubon Society were counting migrating raptors. They count from early September through mid-November. It's a cold cold job, standing up there in the wind.
Then we used P.'s hiking GPS and looked for a geocache that was supposed to be near the hawk tower. I was giggling because it was described as "at the base of a cedar tree in view of the hawk tower, under a piece of bark", and I was the only person able to identify a cedar tree. ("No, that's a hickory." "No, that's a white pine, but at least you're getting warmer.") The last time a Mensa group visited the hawk tower, the guys had searched in "front" of the tower. Weird how a) the tower seems to have a view orientation, and b) everyone searched "in front". Turns out the GPS pointed us "behind" the tower. Hey guys, that's still "in view of".
I found the cache. C. took out a souvenir pin from Scotland and put in a Euro coin worth about five cents, and I signed the logbook. I'll log the find on the geocache website later this evening.
Then we walked the Appalachian Trail to a rocky overlook. The guys said it was a little over two miles from where we picked up the trail, but I don't think so. It felt to me like about a mile.
The trail continued across the rocks, but we turned back here. You can see a white spot on the far rock, next to the red blotch. The white spot is a trail marker (a blaze). Follow the dotted line....
I was a little disappointed that we didn't go farther, but it was very cold and windy in the exposed areas (although it was warmish in the woods), and people got hungry. So we went for pizza.
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