Whiteface In A White Out

It was a long over due get away. After enduring 6 days with out power thanks to Irene, Bill and I packed up and headed once again north with Ausable Chasm as our destination. We made it there after having lunch at one of my favorite places, The Adirondack Inn before the bridge at Long Lake. Arriving there in time for another rain storm and having Lou with us made it impossible to tour the Chasm but I managed to get a few shots up top. Driving through Jay and Ausable Forks we could see the devastation from the flooding water which we learned from ranger dude on Whiteface was 19 feet above the normal level. We ended up back in Lake Placid and found us a really sweet room at the Olympic Inn. For a hundred a thirty bucks, the room here was really nice with the largest walk in granite shower I've ever been in!
The next day we traveled north again to Whiteface Mountain and despite the warnings of no 0 visibility from the park ranger at the bottom we paid the entry of 16 bucks a drove up the mountain. I just wonder one thing as I sit here writing this. Where in the world did my fear of heights come from? I was in total panic mode all the way up and all the way down. Once we got there in a total white out I was fine. We walked up through a dimly lit, shiny wet black passage way cut into the mountain to a elevator that would carry us up another 27 stories to the top of Whiteface which I learned is the fifth highest peak of the Adirondack Mountains. The elevator doors let us out in a stone Adirondack style lodge with stone fireplace and large beams and many historical pieces written about the building this mountainous road and lodge in heaven. Outside however found us inside a complete white mist of a cloud. It was as though I was in a scene of a Harry Potter movie. My parents had taken me up Whiteface when I was a young child and as I walked out of the lodge I right away remembered the viewers that you would put money in to experience the grandeur of the spectacular vista. No vista for me on Labour Day. Which is probably just as well being the scaredy cat I am of heights.
After our Whiteface Mountain tour we then toured its Gorge. Amazing waterfalls with stairways and different landings at different levels to experience the power and the beauty of the falls. It was a great trip that ended with a good read called Dancehall, a historical fiction about the girl whose body finally rose and was found some twenty years after her brutal murder on Mirror Lake. Mirror Lake is the small lake in the city of Lake Placid and is so deep that the woman's body had hardly decomposed as she was so deep down in her watery grave. Gruesome. But a good read by Bernard Conners.