Stone Mountain

My brother is visiting with us this weekend, which has been great. I made him work out with me at the gym yesterday morning, and we made him hike up to the top of Stone Mountain this morning. I am quite sure he is loving us. Really, though, we had a fun time making our first trek up to the top of Stone Mountain. Billy had never been there at all; Jarrett and I have visited on several occasions, but have always just taken the cable car to the top.

Having never hiked the trail before, I was never aware of all of the carvings that are etched into the granite surface all the way up. It's pretty cool -- if the dates stand to be correct, some of the carvings date back into the 1800s, as you can see in the photo below.

Being the huge piece of granite that it is, it gets a slick when wet, so we had to watch our step considering all of the rain we have had lately, but it wasn't too bad. Jarrett and I had laughed when we found out there was a handrail on the trail, but it ended up that I was very glad it was there. Things got much more steep than I was really expecting, and my slight fear of heights crept up on me at one point, but I survived. And, as usual, the view from the top (albeit quite cloudy) was fairly spectacular.

Elsa fared pretty well, though it became even more clear that our current baby carrier would never cut it for hiking days on end out in California. You can tell from the photos that it does not allow her much of a view, and she is just generally rather scrunched in there. She looked pretty fancy alongside her daddy in their matching (at least in terms of color) jackets.

We enjoyed our walk up and back down (about a mile each direction) so well, that Jarrett and I ended up trading in our one-day parking pass for a season parking pass so that we could come back several times and use the trail as another means of training for our hikes out West come June.