More Bogus Mysteries

So, I've got the day off, and I'm home alone with the kids, trying to plug away at my doctoral coursework, but to no avail. It's impossible to concentrate with the kids around.

Besides, there's a brutal shortage of hiking and blogging in my near future, as I'm leaving for classes in Rochester this Sunday, then writing papers (as well as juggling a very tolerant parish and a relatively-tolerant-but-don't-push-it-buster wife...and two children) until February 22, when this term's papers are all due.

And so, in this "calm before the storm," I decided to do another post about Bogus Rocks...since I'll probably be living off the memory of that last hike until late February. (Most things are bearable if you know for how long you'll have to endure them.)

I thought it would be really clever to name the first photo "Dos Equis," but it doesn't quite evoke the Siberian feel that I associate with that ghostly quadrant of the forest. The derelict tracks off to the right lead to the Rocks. And the icy road leads off into the forest to a place called Watson Farm. The signs are for real when they say "no winter maintenance," too.

And did I say that those rocks were thirty feet high? Well, they're surely thirty feet at the overlook. But in most spots, the height is probably something between fifteen and twenty feet, as you see in this second shot. Still a nasty fall.

And check out the poor, denuded tree, exposed to the winter weather. What strange woodland varmint climbs so high to eat the bark of trees, and why does it eat so selectively, bypassing perfectly identical bark closer to the base of the same tree? Other trees had the bark chewed off a full twenty feet off the ground (no exaggerating this time). Are we dealing with young black bears here?

And finally, who made these tracks in the melting, two-day old snow? A young bear? A bobcat? Do you think he knows that he lost his glove?

Anyhow, rock on, most excellent rocks. (Dude, that was bogus.)

Bogus Rocks

A pretty entertaining movie that got totally overlooked by the world was Transsiberian, a 2008 "neo-noir" Sundance thriller starring Woody Harrelson. As I set out in quest of "Bogus Rocks," I was reminded of the film: long expanses of abandoned railroad tracks stretch through miles of the level pinewoods. This is a dark, eerie quarter of the forest, silent and blanketed in snow. The terrain could definitely pass for Siberia, or Yakhutsk...or Irkhutsk.

Bogus Rocks don't get their name from being made of styrofoam. They're real rocks, and big ones at that. Once, long ago, this part of the forest was blessed with an industrial site called "Bogus-Something-0r-Other," and the name stuck long after the factory disappeared. Bogus was surely the name of the guy who owned the factory, although when I was young, and could still get away with using pop slang (back in the days of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) "bogus" meant something roughly equivalent to today's "lame"...which Bogus Rocks are not.

The stream that runs through this part of the forest is called Bogus Run, too.

Bogus Rocks are a long stand of boulders overlooking a broad basin-shaped valley, or depression, in the forest floor. Several streams flow through the valley, and local legend has it that there was once an "Indian fort" here. Others say that the Indians used the valley to corral livestock...which seems pretty unlikely to me. Not because it wouldn't make a great natural corral, but because...what kind of livestock would they have corralled? Elk?

In any case, earlier inhabitants of Kane asserted that there were wooden pens, earthworks, and defensive ramparts in the slopes above the valley. Some say that you can still see ancient carving in the rocks themselves, but I find nothing.


In the 1920s, an archaeologist from the U. of Rochester documented a site somewhere around this area, and he called it a "hilltop stronghold" claiming that it was bulit by "proto-Erian" people 600 to 800 years ago. He collected pottery and other artifacts. That's pretty cool because so little is known about the Erie Tribe that originally inhabited this region. The Senecas in nearby New York State exterminated them in the early 1600s, but left their land largely unoccupied.

Nevertheless, I have my doubts about whether Bogus Rocks are indeed the site of the archaelogist's "Indian fort." The site of Bogus Rocks is in Howe Township, Forest County. The history books situate the old Indian fort in Highland Township, Elk County. True: Bogus Rocks are very close to the line between these two backwoods political entities, but---unless I'm very much mistaken---it's still on the wrong side. That gives me reasonable doubt that the locals are right in saying that Bogus Rocks is the same site as the old Indian fort.

Bogus Rocks make a great hiking destination. There's an overlook, seen in the second photo. In the third photo, you see an icy cliff edge dropping off to the forest floor thirty feet below. The fourth pic shows some sort of lair among the rocks. I couldn't identify the tracks, but whatever creature lives behind those icicles has itself a nice little pad up there. Is it a porcupine? It climbs high into the trees to eat off the bark.

Strangely, hiking guides of the ANF don't tell you how to get to Bogus Rocks, so take note! Go to Chaffee, the intersection where PA948 leaves PA66 and heads toward Warren. Continue on PA66 toward Marienville, but only go about one mile. Reach a Y in the road where the pavement (PA66) veers to the left, and a dirt road (Chaffee Road) continues due west. Take Chaffee Road into Forest County, and cross the railroad tracks two times. Park at the second railroad crossing, and follow the tracks to the right. After less than half a mile, there's a sign and a well-worn path off to the right.

The Weary Road

"And you, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
And rest beside the weary road
To hear the angels sing."

This sentimental old Christmas carol always seemed so sappy to me until I learned that it was written by a Massachusetts minister in protest of slavery. After learning that, it became my favorite Christmas song; you can see traces of outrage in all the lyrics, poetic cries against the injustice of human bondage.

(It's said that there are more slaves in the world today than there were when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, many of them foreign women hidden in dingy trailers at ordinary truckstops...where caring people buy their gas then zoom off to their destinations, all unawares. Alas, although The Allegheny Journal is mostly about "escape," human trafficking is beyond the scope of our homespun journalism. )

This Christmas Eve, I find myself thinking about the power of metaphors. One cool thing about Christmas is that it's a time when people expect metaphors and parables. I've hated Santa from the time I was five, and I noticed that his liar's beard was made of cottonballs. But other Christmas metaphors / parables have their power: You don't have to believe in "The Whos" for the Grinch's story to get its point across. You don't have to believe in ghosts for Scrooge's story to speak to you. And you don't have to believe in angels and miracles for the Nativity story to touch your soul. In fact, stories are really the most powerful medium for speaking to the soul, whether they're literal fact or simple parable. Even the best literal stories work themselves into parables at some point, becoming a strange mixture of fact and fantasy, taking on a more than literal meaning.

Christmas is a time to tell ourselves stories. Pick good ones. We'll get back to some serious backwoods discoveries next week. For a few days, at least, The Journal is going to "rest beside the weary road." Hope you'll do the same.

Winter's Silence

There's a silence in the winter woods unlike any other season. No insects. No people. No birds.
Winter hiking can be less exciting because the plant life is all hidden away, as are the old industrial artifacts. Parking near trailheads can be difficult, too, since the pull-offs usually aren't cleared. You can only cover about half your normal distances in the snow. And yet, winter hikes are worth the pain.

It's the profound silence that I love, "the silence of eternity." Once you get out there beyond the noise of the road, there's a deep hush over all the frozen landscape. That intense quiet takes me by surprise every time, even if it's the very thing that called me to the woods in the first place. It's an unexpected visit from an all-too-rare friend. The only sounds are the gurgling brooks, not yet frozen, the creaking branches, the snow underfoot.

Today's trek covered the southern terminus of the much neglected Mill Creek Trail. You gotta love making the only set of tracks in the snow, even if it does bode ill for the trail's future. (In the Darwinian cycle of funds apportionment, the upkeep goes to the most utilized facilities...like the ATV trails.)

When I was a kid, I used to think it was weird that, in the woods, Christmas Day looks just like any other. The squirrels are still holed up; the wind still rattles bare, snowy branches; the same supreme silence reigns. There's nothing special about the day, no music, no lights, no feasts or gifts. The childhood magic of Christmas ends where the woods begins, stark and cold. I used to think it was a little sad, how December 25 was just another day in the wintry forest.

Now it makes me want to spend Christmas in...the woods. The silence is a gift.

The Holy Experiment

This famous painting, by Bucks County folk artist Edward Hicks, is known as "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts an encounter in the 1680s where William Penn is talking cordially with the Lenni Lenape, the indigenous people from whom he purchased much of the colony of Pennsylvania. Penn is a Quaker. He believes that there's a fragment of the Divine in every human being, and so he is duty-bound to treat everyone with respect, and to honor his agreements with the original inhabitants of the land. The river in the background is the Delaware.

In the foreground, you see the fulfilliment of the words of the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox... They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain." Isaiah 11:6-9

Penn and his followers called Pennsylvania a "Holy Experiment." His was the only colony that guaranteed absolute religious freedom for anyone who claimed to believe in some version of the Christian God. That's narrow by modern standards, but it was pretty liberal back in the day. In fact, the Quakers were so tolerant that they were soon outnumbered by people far less tolerant than themselves. And in time, those "less tolerant" folks rose to power, where they sit entrenched these 300 years later. But as long as Penn lived, the land was never "taken" from the indigenous peoples, only "purchased." That's pretty fair, since Penn could have behaved like other European settlers, laying claim to the land and purchasing it only with musket and sword.

This second picture, of course, lampoons "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts a ruinous place where respect has been supplanted by the shameless and shortsighted drive for material gain.

I know--as you do--that there's no returning to innocence once it's been lost. And all the Utopian experiments in the history of the world have failed. Wisdom cannot be legislated, but only acquired through pain and openness. Respect will never be as glitzy and glamorous as raw material gain. But how did we get so far from where we started? I don't mean "How did we get so far from our religious roots?" God knows religion has been a huge part of the problem! I mean, how did we go from a society based on respect to a society based on individual gain? And what can be the future for people who make such a shift?

Images

My philosophy of life in the Pennsylvania Outlands is this: Don't let the weather stop you. If you're a ninny about the weather, then you will never enjoy life here. Heck, if you're a ninny about the weather, then you've probably got deeper issues that this blog can't address.

And yet, I'm more than a little saddened that I got freezing rain during my week's most sacred hours, Sunday afternoon. Freezing rain is the one thing that can usually make you wish you'd stayed in. And so, instead of reporting on the weekly adventure, I am left to pour over images from finer seasons, the Ghost of Hiking Past.

They say there are two phases to life. There's an earlier phase when you're primarily oriented toward the future: marriage, children, career goals, adventures, etc. And then, after all your goals have been met (or left glaringly unmet), and the flower of youth begins to fade, there comes a second phase, where you are primarily oriented toward the past. This second phase comes earlier for some than for others, and it isn't necessarily a bad time in life. How bad it is depends on how you invested the energies of your earlier days.

I wonder why no one ever gets caught up in the present, the here-and-now? Why don't we ever fix on the phase we've got in our hands at the time? I don't know. But I've got to admit: I'm definitely oriented toward the future this week. I've got a lot of hopes riding on the afternoon of Sunday, 12/20, the next chance I'll get to hit the trails.

I was hoping to explore the ghost of Pig's Ear, but the ATV trail reopens down there next Sunday, so it might have to wait for another day. I'd love to find out how that place got its name. Was someone really trying to make a silk purse or something?

Byways

A lane rose steeply off to the right.
It flanked the mountainside a little crookedly,
tunneling beneath hemlocks
before disappearing from sight
and rolling on forever
into other byways
across mountains
and through valleys
that I would never see.
It called to me, that road.
In promising tones,
it chanted the old, old song of my soul:
Come away. Turn away.
This is the path of
adventure,
freedom,
solitude,
peace.
After all these years,
the anthem is unchanged:
Discover. Escape.
And when I’m old,
that road will still beckon.
Come away. Turn away.
This is the song of every way
I’ve ever had to shun;
once it rang with promise,
tantalizing and sweet,
but today the sacred song accuses me,
for we’ve both learned
that I do not come away.
I never turn aside.

Pines, part two

As noted below, our hardy ancestors planted evergreens around their rural homes in order to keep the cold winds off the house and to retain warmth. In bigger towns, the houses sat side by side, insulating each other. But in isolated areas, it was necessary to plant pines to act as windbreakers. Today, you can identify many abandoned town sites on the ANF because of the pines planted in neat rows. The three sites that come to mind are Guffey, Corduroy, and Windy City. In two of these ghosts, all that remains is the pines. And in the case of Windy City, the name itself should prepare you for what you'll find remaining there: rows of tall evergreens.

But as I shoveled a narrow path through the snow between my office and my house, for the third time today, it occurred to me that our ancestors had another reason for planting pines. They did it in order to keep the snowdrifts from piling up against their houses. Mounds of snow against the doors would make it impossible to get out, literally snowbound inside your home.

My grandparents used to talk about the fierce winters of the 1930s when they had to climb out of their house from the second story windows, wearing snowshoes. A nice stand of pines would have borne the brunt of such a wintry onslaught, leaving a canyon of protected space between the house and the trees.

Anyhow, here's another shot of Corduroy. Too bad you can't see the creek from the grounds of the old house. You surely could at one time, but now there's too much brush.

Lonesome Pines

The abandoned village of Corduroy is little more than an empty post-residential lot surrounded by large, sweeping pine trees. Like the camp site at Guffey, it's a spacious grassy lawn with a stone fire ring on the spot where a big house used to stand. Or it might have been a church or an inn. Both ghost towns sit in pretty stream valleys. Corduroy is unlike Guffey in that there is no evidence of any old industrial complex here, and the town site is entirely level and low-lying. Corduroy is also smaller and a whole lot further afield.

Of course, our hardy ancestors planted pines around their rural homes in order to insulate them from the bitter cold winds. Today, the pines at Corduroy are so tall that they provide more beauty than warmth. But that's okay because nobody ever camps here except fishers, in the spring and summer when the weather is good.

I mainly like these fine pines because they show me traces of what used to be. I'm fairly certain that this is the spot where the largest house in the hamlet stood, presiding over a broad green lawn on the banks of Hunter Creek. I know nothing about this old settlement. I don't know if it was a lumber town, a tanning town, or just a regular old farming town. But the thing I love about ghost towning is exactly this: to stand in a place where there are traces of long-forgotten lives and to imagine them. Who were they, with their real hopes and fears, their genuine sorrows and joys? What living, what childbirth, what labor, what abuse, what passion, and lovemaking, what dying and grieving took place on this very spot, which is now just a patch of grass in the forest? What heartache and horror took place right here; what lives were lived out in this place, and how different were they--really--from my own? Their stories will never be told. Aside from a few pine trees in a row, their tale is lost forever. As the Hebrew psalm says, "Their place remembers them no more."

They say you can find anything on Google. I sure can't find anything about Corduroy except the vain promise that it is "a populated place" in Elk County, PA.

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.

Pigeon Run Area

In keeping with my original promise to provide a "backwoods discovery guide," I'm posting some photos of the area around Pigeon Run and Spring Creek, although I'm fairly certain that the body of water pictured here is a tributary called Hunter Creek. This area of the ANF crosses over into State Game Lands #28 without warning, and if you really cared about the border, you would have some difficulty keeping track of it.

Given the relatively tiny readership of this obscure blog, I sometimes give myself license to rant or wax philosophical. (Hence the angry posting below.) Alas, that's what happens when you're at home with the kids all day on a Tuesday. In any case, the hike described as "Pigeon Run Falls" by Jeff Mitchell is great if you're in a hurry. If you've got a little extra time, follow his directions to the waterfalls, then cross Pigeon Run at the falls, and follow it back downstream until you reach an old forest road going up the mountainside to your right. This road trails off into some of the most beautiful, loneliest country in the Southern reaches of the ANF. These photos were taken on a cell phone, and they don't do justice. But the valleys are deep and steep. The pathway runs right along the edge with great views to the various streams below.

I don't know why I can't just blog about theology like other ministers. I have close friends who never even read what I write here because the Allegheny National Forest isn't a pressing matter in their lives. They look at this page and say, "It's just trees. Why aren't there any people in your pix?" I think it's because I mostly go to the woods to be alone.

Anyhow, unless I miss my guess (which is really unlikely), the narrow track over the mountain above Pigeon Run Falls--described above--winds all the way north to Four Corners and eventually becomes a road that joins PA66 at the big Chaffee intersection.

Owl's Nest

Owl's Nest is one of those places I've been hearing about for years. It was a hamlet in the Allegheny National Forest that owed its living to the natural gas industry. The residents are all gone, though some gas company still operates some machinery there. Because of my morbid fascination with abandoned town sites, I took an interest in the place.

I've had ideas about visiting Owl's Nest for about three years, strictly on the back burner. Looks like I'll be putting those plans on an indefinite hold. Front page headlines of the aptly named Kane Republican trumpet "Marcellus Shale Gas Drilling Near Owl's Nest." The long awaited and much anticipated Marcellus Shale has finally struck a blow in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Never mind that the company doing the drilling is out of Oklahoma, and the drillers have been imported from Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, and Colorado. Never mind that this Marcellus Shale drilling can only pollute our aquifers and give the local economy nothing in return...unless, perchance, the drillers choose to spend their weekends living it up at the famous Hallton Hilton, which, like Owl's Nest, is another local legend I have yet to experience. And who owns this bed of ancient shale anyway? (Hint: Not you.)

The drilling is taking place two miles west of Owl's Nest, on State Game Lands #28, a beautiful spot that I know well. It's where Pigeon Run meets Spring Creek. In his book Hiking the Allegheny National Forest, Jeff Mitchell calls the path through this area "one of the most scenic trails in the ANF." It follows an abandoned railroad grade that runs alongside Spring Creek and passes through both the state game lands and the ANF. (See hike #34 on page 82.) Here's a cell phone snapshot I took in the fall of 2008. I wonder what the place looks like today. And what will it be in a few years? Do people really think that Marcellus Shale is going to bring prosperity to this region? How much drilling will have to occur, doing irrevocable damage, before local people admit that drilling for Marcellus Shale makes no returns to the local economy and runs the risk of destroying the quality of life that we currently have?