Time keeps ticking, ticking, ticking…into the future.

2007-09-03 01:03:22.000 – Ryan Knapp,  Meteorologist

Ah, a sunset.

Everything that has a beginning has an end.

In most kinds of science (those subjects with –ology attached to them), everything is linear with one start time and one end time. In biology, one might use the life cycle. In astrology, one might say the starts. In meteorology, one would say the weather. If you don’t like the weather one day, just wait a day or two. If you don’t like an entire season, wait a couple of months. That’s the great thing about time, it is always pressing forward, whether we want it to or not.

Time was certainly evident Sunday on the summits. Let’s start at the beginning. The sun rose over a mostly clear sky with unlimited vistas. A sense of awe and bewilderment with childlike appreciation provide tremors to ones soul as one takes this view in. Excitement soon takes over as one starts to ponder what the day ahead might reveal. With weather like this on what is typically labeled the last days of summer (since schools usually start Tuesday) and with experience from last summer, I knew the summit would soon be lifting a plentitude of bodies to the highest vista point in the northeast. When I laid my weary head down at 630 am on Sunday morning, there were only two other people on the summit awake with me, Stacey and Brian (day observers). When I awoke eight hours later, I saw a swarm unlike anything I have seen or could have even imagined. Trails to the summits were moving with an endless swarm of bodies traveling up like worker ants bringing sugar back to their queen. Cog trains were running two at a time. Cars were coming and going at an equally impressive rate with rumors that there was a 40 minute back log of cars waiting on Route 16 at times today (although I have yet to get confirmation on this). So many people on such a small mass, it was mind bending and hard to take in at times.

As the day wore on, the crowds slowly began to thin. The sun began to hang low in the sky and shadows began to stretch once again, grasping the night time sky to the east. The moon rises and I watch it with the same appreciation as I had this morning. The day has ended and night has begun and an all too familiar question comes full circle: I wonder what the night ahead might reveal?

Ryan Knapp,  Meteorologist