My Dad, Dootnie, died June 27, 2010 of complications from cancer surgery. He was 71 years old. I intend to write a full-length post about fulfilling Dad’s request to be taken to Cellar Mountain after he died, but I haven’t finished thinking it out yet.
April 29 would have been his 72nd birthday. The day after, a Saturday, about 15 of our family and friends gathered to take his ashes up to one of his favorite places in the world, Cellar Mountain. It’s in the George Washington National Forest, not too far from Stuarts Draft, VA. Here are two views of where it is:
Approximate location in the big wide world:
A closer view, in topo form, of the spot we ended up at – you can see that it’s a lot farther to get to the top of the mountain. We did it a number of times when we hunted; it was a good 40-minute hike at a brisk pace. It was a great place to hunt, but the trade-off was you were always soaking wet by the time you got up there, and it was usually at least 10 degrees colder up there than down at the Coal Road. No such worries on this day – it was in the low 70s, and the pace was much more leisurely, as my 69 year-old mother was part of the procession. We only had to climb about 600 feet of the 1600 feet to the top.
Here’s a little video/photo montage that I put together with my iPhone and a cool little app called Splice
