Well, not quite!
However, this post’s vantage point is at the top of Australia’s highest sealed, “all weather” road…and it does give me an excuse to hail a musical hero.
The photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken in springtime, 2018, at 11.03 am on October 20.
We had just reached the top of the Great Alpine Road, which, at 1,840 metres, is just 22 metres below the summit of Mt Hotham.
Very, very nearby – also just below the summit – is a ski “village”, an unusually convenient one, from which skiers proceed downhill.
If Trump’s eponymous Tower is your idea of an elegant, understated edifice, then Mt Hotham’s could be your kind of village!
However, if you avert your eyes from the hideous “village”, in every other direction the vistas are splendid.
Australia’s High Country is low country by international standards, but it is no less singular and beautiful for that.
The featured image looks northwest, with Mt Buffalo dominating the skyline.
Click here for more on The Great Alpine Road, including a video.
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As it happens, this post’s musician came from another mountain region, also beautiful, well-weathered and of similar altitude to Australia’s “roof”.
The Appalachians are very much lower than the USA’s Alaskan “roof”, but they are the high country on that nation’s eastern side.
Musically, they are North America’s richest mountains!
Perhaps their most remarkable 20th century musician was a blind man from Deep Gap, North Carolina – a humble but proudly independent individual who did not hire an electrician to do the wiring for the family home, which he had in part built with his own hands.
Arthel Watson, known as Doc Watson (1923-2012) was a truly phenomenal guitarist, but he was much more than just that.
This obituary will give you some idea.
More vivid is this video (you may like to skip the irrelevant first 40 seconds), in which Tim O’Brien covers a song he learned from Doc’s version, and remembers a visit to Doc’s house, very late in Doc’s life:
Best of all, listen to Doc himself, whilst also seeing him, at various points in his life, via this nicely-curated video:
And if you’d like to see Doc explain how on earth….
His warmth is as inescapably evident as is his musicality. If you wish to skip Ralph Rinzler’s intro, cue in to 1’30”. The video’s latter part is an uninterrupted, superb version of Deep River Blues: