Fort Necessity National Battlefield

Sunday afternoon, with the family all gone away their different directions, I decided to bag one more peak before my Secret Peak-Bagging Nemesis got to it.  (Anonymous carpetbagger from New York State who comes down here to claim all the easy peaks without even honoring them with a quick description or a single photo!)  It had to be a mountain near Pittsburgh because I only had a few hours to complete the task.  So I trained my eagle-eye on one Hager Hill, which is inside the Fort Necessity National Battlefield.  Here’s a shot of the reconstructed fort, which a young George Washington hastily improvised in 1754 in a place called Grassy Meadow.

And here’s the viewless vista from the summit of Necessity Hill, which stands at a respectable 2,120 feet.  Necessity Hill is the ridge just above the fort, and it’s the peak I ended up bagging, but it’s not Hager Hill.  Also, two other members of my peak-bagging club had already been there, so I did not get to claim “First Ascent.”  I will not tell you whether one of them was indeed my Secret Peak-Bagging Nemesis.  

I brought my daughters here many years ago, when they were little.  I tried to inspire a sort of “pride of place” in them.  I showed them Jumonville Glenn, where Washington plunged the American colonies into the Seven Years’ War, which we call “The French and Indian War,” probably my favorite of all the wars—if I’m allowed to have favorites.  I showed them Braddock’s grave, where he was buried under the road after dying from his wounds while trying to take the Forks of the Ohio (Pittsburgh) from the French.  I showed them the isolated grave of one Tom Fawcett, a scoundrel and hermit who had been one of Braddock’s soldiers and who claimed that he shot Braddock in the back for being such a prick.  In this photo you see a bit of the road that Braddock hacked into the American interior.  

And of course, I showed them Fort Necessity, seen here.  I also took them downtown to the Point to see the outlines of Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt.  I never showed them Bushy Run, or Ligonier, or Hanna’s Town, though (God help them) they are half Hanna.  When they were little, they found it all very interesting.  Now?  Well, things are different now.  They would never want to accompany me on ventures like this…

 

And though I managed to be the third person in my peak-bagging club to nab Necessity Hill, I did not end up bagging the yet-unclaimed Hager Hill, my original goal.  There’s no trail to it, and I did not have enough daylight to do a proper bushwhack.  Even to get to the top of Necessity Hill, you’ve got to take the trails up as high as they’ll go, then ignore the sign telling you that the lane to the top is for “Authorized Personnel Only.”  (I think it’s referring to vehicles, not foot traffic.)  There’s nothing up there but more trees, as I pointed out in the second photo above.  Maybe I’ll go back for Hager Hill someday, but it didn’t honestly look all that interesting.  Sometimes there’s a reason a peak goes unclaimed.