Looking southeast from the fire tower at the summit of Shuckstack in the Great Smoky Mountains. Fontana Lake is below, and Nantahala Mountains of North Carolina are beyond. Fontana forms the southwestern boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Brian Stansberry, Wikipedia

by Julia Sneden

The other day I received one of those black-bordered cards with "Over The Hill" printed in large letters on the front. It was an invitation to the 50th birthday party of a friend, and gave me a good indication that the party would be full of black balloons and tacky jokes. No thank you. Not for this ancient hill-climber. Laughing at old age takes a bit of brio, and I'm happy to muster that whenever possible. But that "Over The Hill" stuff turns me off. 

Face it: the climb up wasn't any picnic, so the trip down ought to be a lot easier, and a lot more fun! Where do people get off behaving as if the downslope were a lousy place to be?

When my brother and I were children, the school bus dropped us off at the foot of a large hill. We had to hike up a steep mile and a half to get home.  It was wartime, and the school board in its wisdom decreed that there was enough gasoline for just one trip up that hill per day. It never occurred to us to question why they picked us up near the top of the hill in the morning, when we were rested and could easily have run downhill to the bus stop, but in the afternoon, when we were tired, delivered us to the foot and left us to trudge up. Their decision left me incredibly fit, and with calf muscles that to this day bulge like softballs.

In my late teens, I was invited to join a hike up a small mountain on the Appalachian Trail. The mountain was called Shuckstack, and my friends and I were told that it was a challenging climb. Nowadays my rock climbing, glacier-hiking sons would ridicule that claim, but at the time, Shuckstack sounded like a real adventure. I was confident that I was up to the hike, even though I was by then in college and a long way from the school bus stop of my childhood. Little did I realize what dormitory life had done to my level of fitness! The first part of the climb was very steep, and the day was hot and humid. I huffed and puffed and sweated and tried not to whimper. There was no conversation in our small group, only an occasional muttered curse or groan.

Once the initial, steep ascent was past, the trail ran along a wooded ridge, full of bushes that caught at us, poison ivy that we tried to avoid and fallen trees that we had to struggle over. Then came another long, steep climb. By the time we reached the top, we were completely out of breath, dehydrated (this was in the days before anyone thought of carrying bottled water), and almost too hot to care that we were at the summit. The views were lovely, and there was a certain sense of satisfaction in having made it, but we were mighty tired. We collapsed on the rocks, tactfully trying not to sit upwind of anyone.

The descent, however, was a different matter. Suddenly, we were full of energy. We took time to notice the delicious and deceptively cool looking shade in the woods around us. We saw small flowers and vines that we had overlooked on the trudge to the top. We jumped off low rocks and clambered over fallen trees as we trotted along the ridge. We chatted happily about how difficult the climb had been, and congratulated each other on our success. We identified several birds and small critters along the trail. When we got to the bottom, we took off our shoes and socks and waded in the lovely, clear stream where we had started our climb. We collapsed in the car on the way to a friend's house where a big victory feast awaited us.

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