Sep 20, 2016 3 min read

Have you ever driven through Ohio or Kansas or Florida and remarked on how flat it is?

Returning home to Southwestern Pennsylvania after living in Ohio for six years made me appreciate our rolling hills even more (maybe not so much when they’re covered in ice and snow.) I am still amazed when I return to Morgantown each fall for West Virginia University football games and remember traversing those steep hills during my college years. Yes, there may have been a fraternity party or two involved in some of our slides down High Street on a snowy Saturday night, but the biggest challenge of all is climbing the hill leading from Mountaineer Field to the WVU School of Law.

Country music star Brad Paisley is a West Virginia native and performed a free show outdoors in the law school parking lot a few weeks ago.

It was a terrific concert with a great crowd, and most of us parked in the football stadium parking lots below and made the climb up the huge hill for the show. This is much easier now than it used to be because someone got the bright idea to build stairs into the side of the hill. I lost count during my climb up, but the stairs have to number into the hundreds, with a steep grade. Strength and conditioning coaches have been known to have the football players run up and down the hill to train. I was just happy to have made it to the top without needing an oxygen mask.

After the show, the crowd funneled into the stairs, and a few students slid down beside us on the wet grass. That brought to mind the absolute worst attempt of all to climb the law school hill back in 1996. My parents, me and the guy I was dating went to the WVU-Miami game and parked at the law school. It was a night game and there was torrential rain – so much so my mom decided she didn’t even want to brave it. She sat in the car in the parking lot and listened to the game on the radio.

She was smart. Dad, my boyfriend and I slipped and slid down the grassy hill (no stairs back then) and sat through what was almost an improbable WVU victory … until the last play of the game when Miami blocked WVU’s punt on fourth down, returned it for a touchdown and won the game. Adding insult to injury, we now had to try to climb up the quagmire of the hill, which by now was all mud. If I hadn’t been so mad about the loss, I would have been laughing at everyone wiping out on their rears.

I’m not sure when they built the stairs, but I’ll bet the person who suggested it was one of the idiots (myself included) climbing that slippery slope that night.

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.