Blue Knob State Park, Part Two

           There's very little online about Blue Knob State Park, my new-found love.  (Find a fuller description of the park in the blog post just below.)  Ever since coming home from there yesterday, I can't stop thinking about the place.  It's vast.  It's beautiful.  It's remote, and quiet, and lush.  It's everything my life needs more of.  Why is it virtually unknown?

             Since the campground checkout time isn't until 3pm, I was free to hike much of the morning, leaving plenty of time to pack after lunch.  I headed toward the group cabin area in search of the Pavia Run Trail, which I never found--despite the fact that most trails here are well marked.  Instead, I ended up wandering around among the cabins, feeling very much as if I'd stumbled into a lost Alpine village.  The place is in good repair, and it seems to get used.  At least the dumpsters were full to overflowing from a recently departed group.

           The cabins look so easy to build.  I bet I could do it myself...if only I owned a patch of ground in the mountains to build on.  O, when the places in my life grow tired, when the gutters are too high to clean out, and the yards are too big to mow, just give me this.  A single-room cabin with a view, a sufficiently comfortable bed, some shelves for my books.  When the places in my life begin to weigh on me--this 4,000 square foot farmhouse with its mortgage, its plumbing, its damned appearances--let me come here.  Just a place to shelter from the weather, a little wildness and beauty in my fading years.

          I've often thought that if I ever became homeless, I would spend my winters in the remote cabins at Raccoon Creek State Park, which is close to Pittsburgh.  I could go nocturnal so that nobody found me: sleep all day and light wood fires in the fireplace at night, when no one is around to follow the smoke to my hideout.  But, reveries of homelessness aside, the cabin village at Blue Knob was way cool.  It felt like a Swiss village clinging to the wall of a steep valley, with mists obscuring the heights above.  There's a private pool for groups to use, a nice refectory, some trailheads to remoter regions of the park, and this cool metal ring (about five feet in diameter) to clang as a dinner bell.  I find myself thinking, "Hmm, surely I belong to some 'group' that I can cajole into renting this place for a retreat or something..."