December Skies

Oh, those moody December skies above the Allegheny: brooding, dramatic, uncertain. As winter advances, the sky becomes less steely and less low. It's no longer the gun metal gray of our usual November; instead, there's a luminous, watery light that makes me think of the old Dutch painter Vermeer de Delft. It's a timid light that refracts beautifully off the dusting of snow on the forest floor. Winter hiking isn't my favorite, but it is its own thing, with its own pleasures and rewards. The views are long. There are no bugs. You don't get overheated. It's also a great time to find artifacts of bygone settlements, since summer foliage tends to hide such things.

There's a rare, fully intact CCC camp, built in 1933, still standing along Forest Road 124 near Duhring. This place was used as a prisoner of war camp during WWII, and staffed by conscientious objectors. The old camp is privately owned and mostly used for horseback riding, but you can see it from the road, that distinctive old CCC architecture applied to a Hogan's Heroes-style campus. (The only other fully intact CCC camp I know is at Clear Creek State Park, where you can rent the tiny, old log cabins.) This shot was taken from one of their horse riding trails, which passes up over a partially cleared mountaintop and back down the other side. The trail becomes FR124B and rejoins FR124, which is how I discovered it: by snooping around FR124B, a track that clearly doesn't get much motor vehicle traffic. The backroads around this area are worth exploring.

Today I hit the abandoned town sites of Pig's Ear and Corduroy, too. (Do you think everybody up and left these places because of their really uncool names, embarrassed to have addresses like '56 Four Corners Road, Apt. B, Pig's Ear, PA'?) Nevertheless, Corduroy is a pretty site along the upper reaches of Hunter Creek (see below). I'll surely make it the topic of a future post.