Bear Cave Mountain, Westmoreland County

According to family legend, January 26--my birthday--always has the most dismal weather of the year.  And this year it was indeed pretty dismal.  I decided to do a solitary peak-bagging trek in the Allegheny Mountains near the town of Derry.  There was a 2,505 foot ridge out there that had never been claimed by any other peakbagger.  In fact, it wasn't even named on the peakbagging site.  Once again, I parked my car at the trailhead, 1,500 feet below the ridge, where it was only just barely winter.  But despite the fairly warm temps, it was an exceedingly dark day, 32 degrees, and strangely spooky in the unfamiliar forest.  There are overcast skies and then there are dingy, almost eerily dark skies.  This was the latter.

It seems that this area is private land that's been opened to hunting and is overseen by the PA Game Commission.  From the village of Millwood, I followed Mill Street to the place just past the last house where the street becomes a narrow path.  You could probably drive most vehicles on this narrow track, but soon enough you reach a sign saying that all motor vehicles are forbidden.  From here, it's a 3.2 mile uphill climb to the summit of the mountain.  

Once you get up around 2,000 feet above sea level, winter's icy grip on the landscape is firm.  I regretted the fact that I left both my gloves and my crampons at home.  Why am I forever underestimating the differences in weather between Pittsburgh and the hills?  Ah, but see how much nicer this is than the gray and brown woods in the first and lower photo?  

The higher you go, the deeper the snow, the stronger the wind, the colder the temps.  It was probably 25 degrees up on the ridge with snow pelting down from the skies and gusts above 30 miles per hour.  Following the dirt track that Mill Street becomes--always sticking to the most-traveled route when you reach a juncture--you'll arrive at a saddle crest at 2.1 miles with a gated road off to your left.  You know what gated roads mean, don't you?  Fire towers!  And fire towers mean high points.  Follow the gated road another mile or so to the summit.  See this radio tower looming menacingly through the mists?

I was proud of the map-work and guess-work that went into making this 53rd birthday trek a success.  I know there was once a fire tower on this ridge because maps call this track Fire Tower Road.  I assume the old tower was torn down when these new radio towers went up.  Or else the old fire tower was further down this road than I was able to go.  Walking was slow in the snow, and my hands ached without gloves.  Besides, my time up top was limited because my daughter was scheduled to take her 4th driver's exam at 3:30pm back in Pittsburgh.  (Poor kid, her 4th failure, too.)  I had to hurry back down to the gray Novemberlands to get her to the license bureau.

Because I've always known my birthday to be a day with such terrible winter weather, it was nice to escape to the highlands again on that day to find fearsome conditions up on the top of Bear Cave Mountain.

Actually, I assume this peak is called Bear Cave Mountain.  It was not named on any map, and it was unnamed on the peak-bagging website where I log my climbs.  And so, so I submitted it as Bear Cave Mountain, and they added it to the site.  But I only got the name from this sign on the chain link fence around one of the towers.  They did already have listed a peak called Bear Rocks some six or seven miles north of here, and I have half-wondered if they weren't confusing things.

A perfect January day on Fire Tower Road at the top of Bear Cave Mountain....

If not for rush hour traffic, this place would only be about an hour and twenty minutes from home.  It's a nice escape, and I might want to go looking for the other supposed ridge around here that's named after bears.

I'm grateful to the landowner for making this place available to wanderers, wayfarers, explorers, and even hunters.  It was good to get a dose of wintry white, and the chill on the mountaintop was worth the hike, even if there were no views.  Actually, there was one spot where I thought there would probably be views on clear days, which this day was not.

I did make two recent trips to Africa, and I'll need to put those photos up on the annex site soon.

Sugar Camp Hill, State Game Lands 42

At 2,910 feet elevation, Sugar Camp Hill is no slouch--for these parts.  This was my first time back in the woods since--when?--October?  It was a joy to return to the Laurel Highlands for a few hours.  Whenever you see the word "sugar" attached to a place name in the Northeast, it always means maple syrup.  There must have been a large scale maple syrup processing camp on this mountain at one time.  It would have hummed with life in February and March: sweet wood smoke, the scent of maple on the cold breeze, the lilting music of harmonicas and laughter.  It was almost 50 degrees down in the lowlands today, but a semblance of winter still reigned in the highlands east of Pittsburgh.  Of course I brought the wrong car; I had to park it along Boy Scout Road, near Boswell, and hike into State Game Lands 42 to reach the summit of Sugar Camp Hill. 

Oh how I miss winter! The generous, monochromatic, Bergmanesque winters of my childhood.  But a thin ghost of January still holds an exiled court up in the highlands east of Pittsburgh, like some grand queen who has been forced into hiding.  November's gray forces have occupied all her old domain except these remote upland holdouts.  The 21st century has seen dull November conquer everything between Halloween and Easter.  Our winters now are bland limbos, sluggish and colorless.  Instead of the snowy, cold, brilliant winters of long ago, now we have a chilly, rainy, soggy gray and brown season that lasts about five months.  Insipid November with its oatmeal skies and its 40 degrees!  I actually used to like November for its melancholy, before its expansionist tendencies overtook almost half the year.  Once-powerful winter is now reduced to guerilla tactics, issuing the occasional brutal counterattacks like the savage blast of deadly cold we saw just before Christmas.

But they are the lashings-out of a wounded animal.  At least we did have a white Christmas in 2022.  But such brutality is an act of desperation, the last refuge of the enfeebled combatant.  Like some bloodthirsty African warlord, winter comes out of hiding just long enough to lay waste to a string of villages, sparing no one, before hurrying back to its refuge in the hills.  Everyone hates the cold, I know, but I do love January, real January, which hides up in these sheltering heights.  I'd like to construct a winter retreat and call it "The Januarium."  Ponder the rare beauty of disappearing things, unfashionable things.  Consider the beauty of scarce or even persecuted things, things that are hunted and haunted and ghostly like the remains of winter.  I recall my grandfather in his woodworking shop or in his vegetable garden; my mother at her sewing; an organist at the bench, skillfully making those grand old pipes sing.  Basement woodshops, backyard vegetable gardens, maternal sewing, organ music: all of these are disappearing from the world. But they were lovely in their time, and they are especially lovely in their passing.  

These hills will soon be unequal to the task of harboring winter, the exiled queen.  They're too low.  As climate change accelerates, they'll be no match for the encroaching dullness, the sameness, the gray monoclimate.  Winter will flee from here like the elf queen Galadriel abandoning Lothlorien.  Her nearest refuge will be the higher ground of West Virginia and far upstate New York.  She will be entirely gone from here.