Back to Chimney Rock

Before we go any further, I have to go potty.  I step into the restroom and am totally surprised by the fact that the walls are painted in the most beautiful scenery:

Can you believe it?  In a toilet?  I like it!  Every inch of every wall was a continuous mural.  When I came out I asked Granpa if the men's room was painted also.  He grins kinda sheepishly and shows me the pictures he took.  LOL!  He even got the fixtures in the picture!  Can you find the door handle?

Whew!  Now that we got that out of the way...

The next thing up is the tunnel into the mountain to the elevator that goes up, literally, inside the mountain to the next level.  If we were young and spry we could take a trail that leads up the 26 stories to the same spot.  Make that young and foolish:  26 stories?  Mercy me!  After that, the only way to get to the top of Chimney Rock is to climb.  Why waste yourself on the bottom half only to realize you're too pooped to get yourself to the top half?

I can't say that this graphic is an encouragement, however to take the elevator:

It lets you know that if the elevator breaks down you can exit out the back side of it and take this stairway.  That doesn't seem terribly important - until I realize that there are no other openings, like in a skyscraper where there is another floor to get off on about every 15 feet.  That elevator door isn't going to open again - can't open again - until we ascend over 200 feet.  Yikes!

So we mosey down the 198-foot tunnel hollowed out of 509-million-year-old Appalachian Mountain granite toward the elevator ...

reading interpretive signs about geology and the mechanics of creating first the tunnel and then the elevator shaft.  The miners accomplished their feat in just 91 days in 1947.  They brought their equipment up to this location by using a bridle trail developed in 1938 for the first visitors to get to the Chimney on horseback.  (Twenty-six stories up an almost vertical incline on horseback?  Not me, baby!  Not even on a Grand Canyon mule would I do that!)

The first thing we see as we step off of the elevator is, woo-hoo! Daniel Day-Lewis.  Well, his picture anyway.

(Sorry about the glare.)  And his clothes - that he wore in the making of "The Last of the Mohicans."

(What's Madeleine Stowe's hat doing in there?  She was his love interest in the movie.)  Aren't the shoes great?

Ok.  We can go home now.

Granpa says, "Not so fast, sugarbunch!  You dragged me all the way down to Asheville and over to this mountain.  We are climbing to the top."

Hmmm.  I was afraid he might say that.  Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.  (Took me forever to know that they were talking about the British pound/dollar, not the weight of a pound.  Kinda like hearing "chester drawers" instead of chest-of-drawers.  Diction is so important.)

And so we climb...