Grandfather Olesky – that’s me – will be going on Grandfather Mountain near Linville, North Carolina so I won’t be posting articles on this blog till at least Tuesday.

I’m giving up golf at the Sunny Hill senior league in Kent on Friday and the Brookledge senior league in Cuyahoga Falls on Monday – right when I’m in the middle of a hot streak of 7 par holes and 1 birdie hole for the 13 most recent holes – to be with my younger daughter, Monnie Ann, and her husband, Bob, at their vacation home about an hour from Charlotte and maybe a little closer to Grandfather Mountain.

It should be an interesting hike up Grandfather Mountain, since the temperature forecast is for the 60’s once you hit the peak at 5,946 feet. That’s almost twice as high as any mountain in my native West Virginia. The journey at the bottom is forecast to begin in temperatures up to 90 degrees.

I remember going from 72 degrees at the foot of Mount Washington in New Hampshire to 20 below zero wind chill by the time we got to the peak at 6,288 feet. There are markers on Mount Washington of climbers who froze to death within 400 feet of the safety cabins because they couldn’t see them in the blinding snowstorms that pop up without warning.

Interestingly, nearby is Grandmother Gap. I wouldn’t touch that line with a 5-foot-8 Pole, which is my height at the age of 83.

Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Eastern United States. Grandfather Mountain, 70 miles from Asheville and the famous 255-room Biltmore mansion of the Vanderbilts, is the highest peak on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I’ve traveled to 54 countries and 44 states, so I’ve been to the mountaintop before.

The Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, the Alps in Italy and Austria, the Great Wall of China, Harry Potter’s Middle Earth setting in New Zealand.

But it’s always a thrill to enjoy Mother Nature when you can see her work for miles and miles when you get to the top.

Or a master painter who puts Michelangelo and Picasso to shame when He created Yellowstone National Park's rainbow of colorful pools and the thousands of “sculptures” in Bryce Canyon in Utah.

You can count on me coming back with a ton of photos that will make it to this blog.

Meanwhile, you can email me at jo4wvu@neo.rr.com if you have any information or photos you want me to add to the Monongah High Alumni blog. I’ll take care of that when I return.