Route 666...Highway to Hell

Henry's Mills, like most quaint, riverine locations in the ANF, surely used to be industrial hell. You can tell by the name that it was a "mill town," and I'm not referring to a scenic flour mill with its water-wheel creaking and turning rhythmically in the stream. No, it was probably home to one of those godawful mills where they stripped the bark off the hemlock trees to use the acids in treating leather. But history has been kind to Henry's Mills. Today it's a picturesque hamlet on the banks of Tionesta Creek, about two dozen beautiful little seasonal homes, and hunting camps, and a few chalets.

The North Country Trail cuts straight through Henry's Mills, and the beautiful PA Highway 666 is the main road through town. (Interestingly, New Mexico--easily the 2nd creepiest state in the country--also has a very nice Highway 666, which is nicknamed "The Devil's Highway" and passes by the very eerie Shiprock.) At Henry's Mills, PA666 runs parallel to Tionesta Creek on one side, but don't miss the gated old Forest Road 600, which follows the creek on the opposite bank.

My guess is that this road used to be a railroad track. Only 3/4 of a mile downstream, it crosses a small tributary called Mead Run and becomes a narrow, difficult trail. You'll have to find a way to ford Mead Run because the bridge is long gone. I shimmied across on an oil pipeline, which goes to prove that even evil, reprehensible things have their better moments. This little riverside trail runs the whole length of the Tionesta, all the way to the bridge at Lynch, to Minister Creek, Mayburg, and eventually to the borough of Tionesta, where the creek becomes Tionesta Lake and joins the Allegheny River. Henry's Mills to Tionesta would make a very cool linear backpacking trip if you didn't mind being right across the water from a lesser-known, little-used, and sinisterly named state highway.

One of my long-term hiking goals is to explore a Tionesta Creek tributary known as Lamentation Run, which enters below Kellettville. I wonder how a body of water gets the name "Lamentation Run"?

Clear Creek in the Snow

Not a prime day

for trekking into the Big Woods,

since

the snow accumulation

has been overwhelming,

but you take the day you're given.

Trails were impassable

to all but snowshoers,

and bushwacking

was out of the question.

I was in the neighborhood

and ended up at

Clear Creek State Park.

Last fall, I accidentally rediscovered Clear Creek

while exploring the southern end of the ANF.

The streamside beach looked strangely familiar,

and it all came back to me:

My grandmother (and favorite adult)

used to take us swimming there.

She called the place "Clear Crick."

That weird rediscovery

and those memories

make Clear Crick

a sacred place for me.

Hiking the gated road

(closed for the season)

back to the log cabins

by the Clarion River

was good enough.

It was great to hang out

on the snowy porches

of empty cabins,

watching the snow fall,

absorbing the silence.

Getting the old Toyota

up out of that valley

nearly killed me. Twice.

"Their Smoking Hearth"

These old photos were taken in the late 1890s somewhere around Galeton, just east of the ANF. My guess is that the setting is in or near present day Lyman Run State Park, but I'm sure nobody knows. Like many of the public lands in the Commonwealth, Lyman Run was so devastated by the logging industry that Harrisburg had to purchase it and nurse it back to health over a 90 year period. By 1900, the logs were all gone, leaving behind eroded hillsides, polluted streams, and a sad collection of broken and barefooted people.

Alas, our state has always sold its resources, its people and their wellbeing, not to the "highest bidder," but to the very first bidder. We'll have to wait a few years to see how all the rampant drilling for Marcellus shale affects the cancer rate in the Keystone State. But tomorrow has never been our most pressing concern.
In his semi-fantastical book A Winter's Tale, author and rightwing pundit Mark Helprin describes the endless appetite of the ever-growing metropolis of New York at the turn of the century:

"Builders and machinists came from everywhere to layer the city in new steel...Pennsylvania, an entire wilderness, became their smoking hearth. They stripped the forests just for frames to help the ironwork. They mined, logged, and blasted, and brought everything to the city..."

It just gets to me, the way history repeats itself! Our home is still somebody else's smoking hearth, with people in faraway places despoiling its resources, then leaving the mess for us to clean up, or live with, or die from. The guy who got caught dumping toxic waste into old oil wells (above link) doesn't have to bathe and feed his own children using local tap water... He lives in sunny California, and his cynical lackey in Sheffield surely uses bottled water when he tries to wash the blood from his hands. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Judge McLaughlin is going to give these guys a slap on the wrist before inviting them back to his place in suburban Erie for a single malt Scotch.

Ah, I really need to get out into the woods this weekend. Last Sunday was a perfect day for hiking, but I had to finish a paper that was due Monday. Now, everything is turned in for the semester, and this Saturday and Sunday should be a go.

Kinzua Bridge, part two

Kinzua Bridge State Park is usually the domain of railroad buffs, nostalgic old-timers, and Harley dudes. And yet, there's some rugged and scenic back country here to discover, too. You have to be willing to bushwack, and I don't know how passable the terrain would be in high summer, with all the brambles that surely cover the valley floor. It's hard enough to climb over all the fallen trees; rose cane and thorn bushes would make it well nigh impossible.

So, I think this is best as a winter hike. Besides, this is a scene of waste and desolation, and I always find that destruction is best served with a bleak season to bring out its full flavor. Winter complements this place beautifully: the silence, the cold, the absence of greenery. It all goes very well with the twisted metal, the tumbled bridge, and the vast swath of mangled forest. In fact, when I was here, a flock of crows circled above me most of the time, calling out in their almost human voices, as if waiting for me to expire like everything else in sight. (Isn't a flock of crows called a "murder"?) This is a February outing, or early March.


From the parking area, there's a broad, grassy walkway labeled "General Kane Trail." This leads eventually to an electric line that it follows for some distance. Where the electric line and the path make a clear turn to the right, the bushwacker goes straight, past a gated sapling plantation and down, down onto the valley floor.

Here at the bottom of the valley, you're standing right in the tornado's path, and it's awe-inspiring to see the things the wind destroyed and the things it left. It seems so random. Consider the sheer power of that storm! What was it doing so far east?

There's a lane here that follows the valley back toward the bridge. Seeing the bridge from the underside is tempting, but that's an adventure for some other day. A lone bushwacker would rather cut across the tornado valley, strewn with tree trunks, and make for the rock city on the opposite wall. It would be pretty easy to twist an ankle or even break a leg bushwacking through such a big blowdown under the snow. That's why I located a nice set of deer tracks to follow. Deer are heavy and sure-footed. Following deer tracks saves you from getting your foot caught in the crotch of some long-dead tree, hidden beneath the snow.

From down here, there's a nice long line of boulders visible on the opposite wall of the valley. That's the destination: a place of wonders, a good place to spend two hours exploring. Here, too, there are great views of the ruined forest below, distant scenes of the remains of the bridge, and access to deeper woods at the crest of the hill. Up under the overhang of a huge boulder, I found the most beautiful sheet of ice I've ever seen. It looked like pure glass. It was perfectly smooth, five feet tall, and almost a foot thick in places, but perfectly translucent. This photo doesn't do it justice.

It might be rewarding to follow this summit back to the side of the Kinzua Bridge that no one ever visits.

Kinzua Bridge State Park

I'm not as taken with the Kinzua Bridge as many folks around here are. I don't have fond childhood memories of it. I never rode my motorcycle across it drunkenly, as so many citizens of Kane and Mt. Jewett did back in the 70s and 80s. No one ever dared me to walk across its railroad ties, 300 feet above the valley below. To me, it's always been a colossal railroad bridge laying half in ruins on the floor of an equally ruined forest...in perhaps the lamest PADCNR "state park" in an otherwise outstanding system.

Now, I'm all about ruination and the sad, jagged remains of bygone industry. (To my knowledge, I'm the only person documenting the ghost towns of the Allegheny.) So you might think I would have always liked Kinzua Bridge. I do admit that there's a stark beauty about the half-fallen structure, like the skeleton of some oversized dinosaur, sprawling where it collapsed, spread across a tornado-ravaged landscape. It speaks to my sense of human tragedy and my deep, abiding conviction that everything we raise will eventually fall. And there's something riveting about ruination on such a massive scale. It's hard to take your eyes off the spot where the remaining portion of the bridge meets thin air, as if daring you to take that last step, as if saying, "Here, I'll take you this far, and after that, you're on your own." As Bugs Bunny used to say, "That last step's a doozy." All of those things are admittedly lovely.

Kinzua Bridge is the only state park in McKean County, and for that reason I've been trying to make myself like the place for a few years. I mean, it is at least an outpost of the awesome PADCNR, right? And yet, I never did like it for a variety of reasons: 1) In the summer, there are always swarms of loud Harleys there; 2) in every season, there are always two or three colonies of trailers and modern industrial equipment all over the place, as if they're going to get right to work rebuilding the bridge; 3) the "General Kane Trail" is a short loop that follows an ugly utility swath through an uninteresting woodlot; 4) much of the forest there is tree carnage from the same 2003 tornado that destroyed the bridge.

And yet, today I was surprised and happy to discover that there are things at Kinzua Bridge State Park to enjoy. You have to go in the dead of winter, when the post-tornado jaggers are buried under the snow and the Harley dudes are all gone. And you have to bushwack out away from the bridge, crossing the awesome path of the tornado's wreckage, and into the rock cities on the opposite wall of the valley. That trek will be described in the next posting. For now, here's a photo of the fallen bridge. (As always, click on any photo to enlarge it.)

Winter Sun

Oh that winter sun, when it decides to shine
after long days of featureless gray!
It's like forgiveness,
like a long overdue reunion,
like a state of grace.

February's a hopeful time,
as the days begin to lengthen,
and the sunlight comes in at new angles,
penetrating those long-dark corners,
chasing away old shadows,
casting the same old world
in a whole new light.

The light of late winter touches old situations with fresh, new perspectives. It can even help you to re-see the old-seeming people and the same old places of your life. The woodlands of Northwestern Pennsylvania have their beauty in any season, but they take on a haunted feel after months of glowering gray and bitter cold. February is here, with its new radiance and new vision.

It's still winter, as it will be for a good long while. But the world is rolling back around to the light. Ah, light! You can turn your face away from it. You can avoid it, deny it, glory in its absence. But it always comes rolling back around, in time. This is the way of the world: new life, stasis, decline, death, new life, stasis, decline, death, new life, stasis, decline... Why is the old, eternal cycle always so surprising?