Vertical real estate

Rather than bore you will details about the lodge and so forth on my recent trip to the Land Of Vertical Real Estate, I will summate:

It is a hunting camp. We had canned biscuits, eggs and sausage every day for breakfast. Other meats were typical lunch fare and very good. Suppers were stuff in a giant crock pot, cause the cook staff exited stage home and hunters were still in the field. The beds were good and hard - which I actually do like. The room was about the size of a form room, which wash also perfectly acceptable.

Look. It’s a hunting camp. It ain’t a 5 star hotel, which I don’t like to stay in anyway. Compared to some places I’ve stayed, and enjoyed staying there, this place was worthy of many repeats in the future.

I have slept on the side of a mountain in a tent in the rain. I felt the mountain eroding from beneath me as I wondered if it was going to wash me off the mountain side and into the valley. I have slept in trucks, in the open air, in airports, on recliners, on watermelons, in deer stands 25 feet off the ground. I have stayed in the premiere hotel in Austin, Texas.

At the lodge I had actual walls, a bed with sheets, a roof and HVAC. It was good.

I probably ate too much. I say that but it’s probably not true. I worked it off. I am not kidding when I say the place is the land of vertical real estate. I walked up and down three mountains while I was there.

I saw signs all over the place - land for sale. Many acres. What the signs didn’t tell you is the acreage is either vertical or at a 60 degree angle. The few horizontally flat places are either creeks or pastures with the pastures not for sale.

If you put up a fence there, you can easily fence in 1,000 acres with  the same amount of fence that would fence in 200 acres in South Georgia. The reason is, again, vertical real estate. A mountain occupies WAY more space above level ground than the bottom covers on the level ground.

Does that make sense?

Try this. If you walk a half mile in S. Georgia, you are a half mile horizontally from where you started. Up there you can walk a half mile and be a few hundred yards horizontally from where you started. Why? Cause you walked up the side of a mountain.

I know. I did it.

The Thursday morning Shag went bow hunting, I went coyote hunting below the lodge. Measure horizontally, I was less than 100 yards from the lodge. Measured by going down the mountain (and later that same morning BACK UP THE MOUNTAIN!) I was about a mile away. Except going back up the mountain I was about 2 miles away. Something to do with Einstein’s Theory of Spatial Relationships of how Fat Redneck Newspaper Editors Are Stupid Enough to Walk Down The Mountain to Start With Which Means They Have to Walk UP After Being Worn Out From Hunting All Morning.

As for the pastures, they tend to get boggy in the rain, or as happened when we were there, melting snow. This is OK, cause you can’t sink very far before you hit the rocks. Muddy rocks, in case you don’t know, give Teflon tips on how to be slippery and non-stick.

This boggy pasture also means you can’t build a house in the horizontally flat land unless it is on stilts unless you like sinking up to your ankles walking from the truck to the house. To build, you need to whack a chunk off a mountain side, hope the rest of the mountain doesn’t fall on you. If the mountain falls on you, you obviously don’t need a house any more.

There were a few signs along the roads warning of falling rocks. Most places didn’t have these signs. I can only guess they county road departments didn’t have enough money for falling rock signs for all the roads. Even the president would balk at that expense.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must note: The place we went is called “mountains.”

It’s more like hills.

I speak as a person who has lived in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, been to the top of a mountain which made the pikes where we were look like molehills.

The mountains where we were had trees. All over the place. The Rocky Mountains didn’t have trees. If you fell up there, in short order you’d hit a tree. Up in the Rockies, if you fell, you fell until you hit another mountain.

In the Rockies when you saw a sign warning of “falling rocks” it actually mean the mountain was falling. A Great Smokey Mountain would fall off a Rocky Mountain and that would be falling rock. In the Apalachians, a falling rock was more on the order of something smaller than a house.

www.wildernesshuntinglodge.com