What Goes Down Must Come Up

Ariana waiting to ride the slide
during a previous visit to
Chestnut Mountain. Yes she
is wearing flip-flops.

So a few weekends ago I took my family up to Chestnut Mountain Resort to ride the slide, enjoy the view, and have some great food at Sunset Grille. My kids – Ariana (10) & Maya (6) – absolutely love to ride the slide at Chestnut and we are frequent visitors every summer.

I guess I wasn't thinking because I let Maya wear flip-flops. Not a good idea when you plan to ride the slide. For those of you not familiar with Chestnut's Alpine Slide it is a fiberglass (I believe) slide that twists and turns its way down the mountain and you use a sled to ride from the top of the slide to the bottom. Once you reach the bottom you take the chair lift back to the top.

Well it was bound to happen - Maya lost a flip flop when riding the chair lift back to the top. By the time she reached the top and got off the chair lift she was an emotional mess. For some reason she had decided she couldn't live without her FAVORITE flip flop.  So I agreed to climb down the mountain with her & Ariana to fetch the missing flip flop – despite the wise council from the other adults in our party. They, like any other rational adult, thought I was insane to climb down the mountain (475 foot vertical drop after all) to retrieve half of a $5 set of flip flops.

Well I had a plan – those of you who know me know that I always have a plan! I knew the going down wouldn’t be too bad and thought that I could just retrieve the missing flip-flop make my way down the rest of the mountain and ride the chair lift back to the top. After all it would be good exercise to climb down.

Maya & Vicki before their
excursion on the Alpine Slide.

The girls and I had a pleasant trip down – chatting and picking wild flowers along the way. It was good bonding time after all. We retrieved the flip-flop and I started to continue down the hill when I heard one of them – I think it was Maya – who yelled “Where are you going?”. Sure enough, I turn around and the girls are climbing their way back up the mountain roughly following the same path we took down.

I tried everything I could think of to convince them to turn around – truly I did, but they wouldn’t do it. And for some reason I wasn’t comfortable letting them proceed on their own.  I’m not sure what my rationale was at the time after all it wasn’t like there was anyone else climbing around on the mountain and the rest of our party was waiting for us at the top.

So I did the unthinkable – I climbed up after them. Both Ariana and Maya are very active children and therefore both are in excellent physical shape. I, on the other hand, have made every excuse not to exercise and therefore am not in any kind of shape to speak of.

A portion of the Alpine Slide
at Chestnut Mountain Resort

The girls proceeded flitting back and forth across the mountain continuing to pick wildflowers as they went. I kept my head down – I refused to look up to see how far I had to go yet – and plodded along as straight as I possibly could up the mountain. I figured we were about ½ of the way down so roughly 200 feet to climb back up.

100 feet to go….. I flopped on the ground gasping for air & desperately craving water. The girls began to get concerned for me and started cheering me on and offering encouraging statements to keep me moving.

50 feet to go….. Ariana ran to Rick, my husband, and told him I was dying.

25 feet to go…..Rick met me with a bottle of water and let me lean on him as he walked me to a shaded table to recover.

30 minutes later I recovered enough to slowly start walking back to the vehicle – still leaning heavily on Rick. 60 minutes after scaling the mountain (following a short nap during the drive home and another bottle of water) I felt like myself again.

In summary, the lessons I learned from this whole experience are:

§  Stick with what you know will work to avoid scaling a mountain when you are not prepared.
§  Always bring water with you when hiking – particularly if out of shape.
§  Exercise is not a waste of time but will ensure your body is ready when you want to challenge it.
§  Listen to the advice of your peers – particularly if they all think something is a bad idea.
§  And finally your child will get over losing a FAVORITE flip-flop!

Maya's infamous FAVORITE flip-flops!