Aurora Over Mount Chocorua

(Hey, that rhymes, get it?)

From my friend Jim D, a retired chemistry professor from Linfield College in Oregon who moved back east with his wife right across Lake Winnipesaukee from where I used to live!

I once saw the aurora from Gilford, but it was like a white glimmering sheet and nothing like this at all. 

What a gorgeous high-res picture.

--

PS: I once hiked to the top of Mt Chocoura.

PPS: I tried again another time, this time on a second date with a woman, but we left too late in the afternoon and terminated the hike just before the really rocky, steep part to the top. She was a slow hiker, and we tried to take a shortcut trail to get back to the car. We ended up deep in some woods trying to grope our way back to the car. As the sun fell on that November night, I kept telling her, with more and more urgency, that we needed to hurry up. But she just couldn't. I was able to somehow follow the trail by starlight (we didn't have a flashlight) and got us out of the woods and on to a road that led back to my car. In my memory it is actually a special moment -- I was feeling that I somehow knew how the dark, not visible trail before us would go, as it twisted and turned around trees and humps and creeks and rocks. I almost felt like I had done enough hiking and backpacking by then -- 1900 miles on the Appalachian Trail, plus dozens of other trails -- that I could intuit where the trail would go based just on the terrain. And I did. It was kind of unnatural and, if I believed in it, a bit supernatural. I don't believe in the supernatural -- I just feel like my instincts kicked in when I really needed them, when I had started to think we were really going to be lost out there in the New Hampshire woods in November as it was getting quite cold.

But we made it out. I kissed her in joy, kind of awkwardly, we drove out the long dirt road to a place and ate pizza, and I never tried to see her again. Too slow. I have to admit that evening scared me more than almost any hike I'd ever been on. Although there was another one in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona in January....

Good times! Seems like all I have left anymore are memories.