A Night on Burkemont Mountain

Marga and I spent the night of Sunday, November 23rd, 2008, in a cabin on the top of Burkemont Mountain. The wind whipped, whistled and rattled. When we woke up at dawn, it was cold and drizzly outside. After a couple hours of coffee and sitting by the fire, I suggested we go for a walk, but I was unable to pull Marga from the toasty hearth, so I ventured out alone with my camera. Below are the photos I took.

There were 5 or 6 ladybugs buzzing around the cabin before I left. This is the best photo I got of one.

Walker Top Cemetery and Walker Top Church are the first stop on any walk from Phil's Cabin. According to this report submitted to a genealogy website, there are 25–50 gravestones in the cemetery, mostly from the Walker family.

A black chain link fence around the cemetery.

Gravestone lichen.

Lichen rocks, moss rules, and death is forever.

I love these US Geological Survey Benchmarks. Oddly, the last digit of the elevation measurement has been destroyed somehow. It claims an elevation of 2,35? feet. It was more or less on the very top of Burkemont Mountain, which is listed as a peak elevation of 2,559 feet (780 meters), but I sure didn't see a place 200 feet higher anywhere.

The church is leveled by piled stones.

Property Boundary: State Park land behind this sign.

The Burkemont mountain fire tower. We climbed up there when we visited a few years ago, but with the wind whipping as it was and being alone, I didn't chance it.

Looking up from inside the base of the tower.

Someone had left a bottle of beer on the bottom rung.

This house is a little overrun by Nature.

A very stereotypical outhouse.

Phil's cabin. It started out as a small shack, and Phil has built the rest on his own. The entire top floor is a single large bedroom. Very nice.

From another angle.

All of these photos are accurately geotagged to within a couple meters, so feel free to click on them and view them on a map on Flickr.

Thanks again to Phil for letting us hang out in his cabin. Late Monday morning, we realized that we hadn't brought any food, so we had to abandon our mountain perch and head into town for some sustenance.