During the COVID-19 crisis, in addition to writing and revising my magnum opus, I’ve been doing a lot of hiking and mountain climbing. The other day, as I was leaving the house to hike a portion of the Appalachian Trail, I reached for my trusty hat.
I wore the hat while climbing Mount Washington and other mountains in my late teens and early 20s. I wore it caving a couple of times. I wore it during an epic 80s overnight road trip from New York to Chicago. I wore it hiking through Glacier National Park and Yellowstone. I wore it while fly fishing in New York, Vermont, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. I wore it in the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and Bryce Canyon. I wore it in the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, the Green Mountains, and the woods of Maine. I wore it while boating on Great Sacandaga Lake and in the Penobscot Bay of Maine.
I’ve had a lot of adventures with this hat, and it just occurred to me that it’s over 30 years old. I got the thing when I was 17 or 18. Here are a few photos from some recent adventures with the hat: –
Chris Orcutt hiking in Lake Minnewaska State Park, NY, fall 2018.
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Kaaterskill Falls, Catskill Mountains, NY. 2018 or 2019.
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A bluff over Canopus Lake, Fahnestock State Park, Appalachian Trail, Feb. 2020.
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Black bear tracks near Iron Mine Pond, Taconic State Park, March 2020.
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Cooking some Beyond Meat Italian sausage over a ‘lil “Indian” fire in Wilcox Park, Pine Plains, NY.
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The NY-MA-CT Tri-State monument, Taconic State Park, April 2020.
–The bluff above Canopus Lake again, but a better picture because I’m in it. :)
CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.
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