OK this chimney is from the old tower keeper or fire watchers residence. Obviously there is NO WAY to get up here daily so I suppose some poor &^^%$ard had to live up here. Behind the boys you see in the photo is a cistern. The boys had been hiking the Appalachian Trail for 5 days with their dad and had come up to Shuckstack as a side event. Unfortunately they took one look at how rickety the tower was and were rather taken aback. I finally talked the two teenagers into going up by saying "Hey could you follow an old lady up the tower? That did it and up they climbed behind me. I managed to get one of them to take my picture in the room at the top of the tower.
Otherwise no one might have believed I climbed it as it was so rickety looking.
Here are a couple of views from the top of Fontana lake and the mountains surrounding the tower. My GOD it is worth the climb BUT it is an awful lot of work.
This photo of Archie coming up the tower gives you a bit of a feel for how narrow it is and how steep the steps are as do the two photos at the top of this post (I am still having problems formatting here today). Hiking out of there to make it a loop we went down a hellish trail that was incredibly steep for 2.7 miles banged your toes all to hell because of course you are going straight down, I am much better climbing like a goat than going downhill. Then after that we had around 5 miles on the Lakeshore trail to hike to get back to the trailhead. Lakeshore is VERY MISLEADING. You can't really see the lake to take photos only occasional glimpses of Fontana Lake but you can see lots of old rusted out cars that were abandoned in the thirties when that road was made part of the Park. I don't care for rusted cars no matter what the vintage so I didn't take pictures plus 10 miles into the hike my toes and corn had had it and quite frankly at that point all that kept me going was thinking of a soft bed and hot shower if I kept swinging one leg in front of the other!
Otherwise no one might have believed I climbed it as it was so rickety looking.
Here are a couple of views from the top of Fontana lake and the mountains surrounding the tower. My GOD it is worth the climb BUT it is an awful lot of work.
This photo of Archie coming up the tower gives you a bit of a feel for how narrow it is and how steep the steps are as do the two photos at the top of this post (I am still having problems formatting here today). Hiking out of there to make it a loop we went down a hellish trail that was incredibly steep for 2.7 miles banged your toes all to hell because of course you are going straight down, I am much better climbing like a goat than going downhill. Then after that we had around 5 miles on the Lakeshore trail to hike to get back to the trailhead. Lakeshore is VERY MISLEADING. You can't really see the lake to take photos only occasional glimpses of Fontana Lake but you can see lots of old rusted out cars that were abandoned in the thirties when that road was made part of the Park. I don't care for rusted cars no matter what the vintage so I didn't take pictures plus 10 miles into the hike my toes and corn had had it and quite frankly at that point all that kept me going was thinking of a soft bed and hot shower if I kept swinging one leg in front of the other!
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