Fire & Ice at Oil Creek State Park

The smoke gathers uncertainly just above the grate. The snowy mist outside is no more sure of itself.  One thing is certain: it’s cold.  Damn cold.  We’d taken down the tarps on the sides of the shelter because we wanted to leave.  But it was another kind of joy altogether to see the snow and the fire at the same time.  

 

Two Frigid Nights, Oil Creek State Park

I never knew what a cool place Oil Creek State Park was.  I mean, yes, it was literally cool and even downright frigid last night and the night before when a friend and I did our annual winter backpacking trip there.  It got as low as 13 degrees Fahrenheit overnight with a windchill of negative 5. 

But we had most of the park to ourselves in the winter doldrums of mid-February.  We usually do our annual winter camping trip on the Laurel Highlands Trail or at Quebec Run.  I’m glad we went north this time.  Whereas a ghostly sort of ersatz November lingered in Pittsburgh, it was full on winter in the North Country.

This is Oil Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny River.  The park encompasses much of the valley of Oil Creek, which famously caught fire during the oil boom of the 1860s.  

It’s interesting how the detritus of the old oil industry adds to the mystery and historicity of this beautiful place.  You might be hiking along, and you’ll see an old wooden shed with a tin roof, half fallen over, or old rusted out machinery sitting idle beside a lovely stream under hemlocks in the snow.

This’ll be a good place to bring the kayaks in the spring.

So this Adirondack shelter was our home for two nights.  A lot of backpacking shelters don’t have a fireplace facing the deck, and they’re completely open to the elements on one side.  In Pennsylvania state parks, most Adirondack shelters are designed like this one; there’s a fireplace with a gap on either side.  They’re great for winter camping if you bring small tarps to close the two gaps and then stoke the fire into a small conflagration.  You get a very…accomplished feeling when you spend a truly frigid night outdoors and manage to stay cozy and warm.

That’s the beauty of winter camping—staying comfortable outdoors in the snow.  Plus the silence…not a bug, not a bird.  And the solitude, you’ll probably have the forest mostly to yourself.  And the plain beauty of the snow falling outside with a warm fire glowing and crackling inside.  

Not that you stay inside!  We spent very little time at the shelter except in the mornings and evenings…and of course overnight.  During the day, we hiked the steep, slippery Gerard Trail, which makes a 36-mile loop around the entire park.  Here’s a view from the top of one very icy climb.  It’s Oil Creek with an old bridge at Miller Farm Road.  The Miller Family cemetery is in the woods just beyond the bridge on the right side of this photo.  I did not get to go to the cemetery, but there’s much I’ll need to explore next time I’m here.

It’s funny how it can be a bone-chilling 21 degrees, but when you get out in it and stay active—even just walking the trails—you don’t feel cold at all.

Kudos to the employees of this park who keep the camping areas so well stocked with firewood.  The lady at the park office told me this big park has only 2 full-time employees.

Our second night, just at dusk, we heard people calling out, “Shelly!  Shelly!”  Then when my friend was hanging his raincoat in the open triangular space above the blue tarp, we saw a headlamp headed our direction.  The beams shone through the tarp.  A young woman said, “Shelly?  Are you in there?”  I was worried about Shelly and was about to shout an answer to the woman: There’s no Shelly here. Did someone get lost? We’ll help you look for her!  But my friend spoke faster.  In a gruff tone, he barked, “No!”  The woman said, “Oh, sorry,” then left.  Later that night we heard a helicopter buzzing around above the trees.  Did Shelly get lost, and did they call out the copters to search for her?  I hope she’s okay. It was dangerously cold outside that night.

There were owls both nights, and a distant barking dog.  But other than that, silence reigned supreme.  You could hear the snowflakes touching down.

I’m glad this place exists.  And it owes its existence to public-minded “liberals” who thought it would be a good idea for the state to make outdoor recreation available to its citizens.  The Commonwealth tried to put a state park within 25 miles of every person within its boundaries.  What happens in a Trumpian hellscape where the only thing that matters is private ownership, and the state abdicates its interest in providing for the wellbeing of its citizens?  Republicans always want to privatize public lands or use them primarily for drilling and mining and lumbering—anything to turn a buck.  But money cannot buy what these places offer.  A soulless person can never understand that.

 

More Winterscapes + Links to Cameroon & Maine

This is the woods at Lone Pine, which seems so full of eyes and wretched things on hot summer nights... It's perfectly idyllic during the day, especially in the winter.

The wintry countryside has been an inspiration this winter.  It's like the 1970s.

Some roads the township doesn't bother with because everyone who uses them has 4 wheel drive.

I love it when a snowstorm traps me at camp.

"Whose woods these are, I think I know..."

Some pictures I put on my blog just so that I can pull it up and look at them when I'm bored with my life in town...

To access photos from my most recent trip to Cameroon, CLICK HERE. 

For pics of a beautiful autumnal trip to Maine, CLICK HERE.  

Wonderful Winter Photo Dump

I’ve loved this winter so far: a real winter with snow and ice and ridiculously sensationalistic weather predictions about snowstorms that never materialize.  We did not have a white Christmas here in Pittsburgh, but I did host my side of the family for the first time in years, and it was fun to see the old farmhouse come alive with feasting and festivities and crowds.  It’s usually so quiet here all by myself, and the dining room can go unvisited for weeks at a time.

But we had 20 people, and we all got along great…after I asked my MAGA nephew to keep his love of fascism to himself… How could the MAGA movement of hate and narrow-mindedness be at all appealing to people under 50?  Don’t they know that an administration of clowns who deny climate change is going to wreck their future and that of their children?  Ah, but it was a nice Christmas.  Good to see the old house resounding with life and being used as it was intended.

It’s a strange day in which to be Christian, since that word has taken on such an ugly political connotation.  And yet, I love being a minister in Advent and Christmas.  They’re my favorite seasons to do what I do.

We revisited this old rock city in the Allegheny National Forest, “Sleeping Giant.” 

We did not have a white Christmas in Pittsburgh, but on Christmas night, my little family and I went up to camp, “Lone Pine Lodge,” near the national forest, where a white Christmas awaited us!  It’s typically 10 degrees colder up there than down here, and a lot snowier.

Sometimes when I leave Lone Pine—my happy place up North—I take photos of what the place must look like in the absence of people—with the curtains drawn and everything put away.  It sits dark and silent most of the time, since I only go up there two nights a week, often less.  I like to think about the stillness, and darkness, and silence that reigns when no one is there.  It reminds me of a chapter in Virginia Woolf’s poetic novel To the Lighthouse, called “Time Passes.”  It’s a lyrical section of the book that describes a London family’s summer house in the Scotland, as it slowly disintegrates in the absence of people. The family that once summered there hasn’t visited it in years because World War I is underway.  Even the servants have stopped showing up to look after the place.  “Time Passes” describes the lonely rooms as the wallpaper begins to sag off the walls, as mice scratch and nibble inside the ceiling, as a shawl, which the mother once hung in the nursery, begins to unwind and fall to the floor.  The distant lighthouse sends its desolate ray into the still rooms regularly, illuminating dark corners for no one to see.  There is no other movement inside the forsaken house.

Here?  No lighthouse here.  But the owls cry at night.  We all must live for the several glories that abide within our reach.

Back in the city, the Christmas and New Year season came with plenty of…glory.

I actually bought a tuxedo for this event, at the William Penn Hotel.

Back in my lonely farmhouse in the suburbs, winter did indeed come in full force in January.  Now that my kids are gone away to college, I’d really like to get a smaller place.  The big old farmhouse was a great place to have a family.  It is not a great place to live alone.  Ah, but it was lovely to have a full scale 1970s-style January.  

Those Venango County winters.  This is on our property up at camp, or “Lone Pine Lodge.”  I took a bag chair out into the woods in 24 degree weather to look at the snow and meditate.  It was so restorative.

An actual road up there… Driving in the winter in some places is not for cowards.

Lone Pine in winter.  See the snow on the road out front?  I’m putting all these photos on my blog so that I can call them up and look at them in the midst of some painfully dull meeting here in the featureless suburbs.

Turns out, the Allegheny Observatory, in Riverview Park, is at the top of a peak that was available on the website of my peak-bagging club.  So I bagged a peak, though I was not the first person to claim this one.  Observatory Hill is actually a decent climb if you truly do start at the bottom and follow the meandering hiking trails to the top, where the observatory sits in resplendent dereliction, like so much of Pittsburgh.

Great hill for sledding…

A view toward downtown from the top of Observatory Hill.

And this is Oil Creek State Park, which is in Venango County and close to my camp.  A friend and I will be doing the backpacking loop up there in a few days.

We do a winter trek every year.  We get small tarps to tie into the openings of these Adirondack shelters, and we work up a good fire and keep it going non-stop.

There’s something so alluring about the winter woods, so pure and…beckoning.

At Oil Creek SP, they provide plenty of firewood for backpackers.  I’ve been around the various state-owned parks and forests in the Commonwealth.  Some have a busy, institutional feel.  They’ve got a squad of employees, all trying to keep up with maintaining the place and keeping it beautiful.  Raccoon Creek feels a little like this: an enormous park that gets lots of use and less-than-lots of love.

But Oil Creek State Park is different.  It’s only got 2 full time employees.  It’s almost as big as Raccoon Creek.  It’s got more miles of trails than Raccoon Creek.  But all the facilities are lovingly maintained and see a whole lot less use than all those big, busy parks in the southern part of the state, like Ohiopyle or Shawnee.

This is no state park, though it is public land: State Game Lands 263, near Corry.  I claimed this virgin peak known as Dowd Hill. Standing at a modest 1,732 feet, it checks a few of my ideal boxes: it’s taller than 1,500 feet, and it’s on public land.

It’s fun to explore the world in the snow.

Those old mountain lanes see very little winter maintenance—aside from the occasional scattering of gravel to keep cars from slipping on the ice.

And here’s the humble Dowd Hill from below.

Walking on the mountainside was difficult.  The snow had melted and then frozen again hard, leaving a very slippery crust with about a foot of snow underneath.  With every step, I slipped then fell through the icy crust and into snow halfway up my calf.  What feline creature made these tracks on the snow without breaking the surface?  I’m thinking maybe a bobcat?

The hat?  It’s a Belgium hat.  I picked it up at the Brussels Airport on a recent trip to Cameroon.  I’ve always loved Belgium, ever since the days when I rented a bicycle and explored its countryside alone at the age of 20.  I liked the fact that I was the only person I’d every known who’d actually been there.  But in addition to that, it was quaint and scenic, a place where Latin Europe and Germanic Europe meet, a place of tragic memory.  As an overlooked middle child, I guess I’d say I identified with Belgium.  I mean, if you were a country, which one would you be?  Yellow, black, and red are the national colors of Belgium.  I’ve begun wearing this hat everywhere in Trump’s America, just as a gentle protest against MAGA stupidity and nationalism.  No self-respecting Belgian would ever wear a maudlinly patriotic-looking hat like this, but that’s the whole point.  See how ridiculous it is when ANY nation of the earth glorifies itself and puts its colors on baseball caps?  See how asinine America looks to the world today?  Here’s how the unspoken conversation goes:

Semi-literate MAGA Boomer: “Make America great again!”

My Belgian hat: “Nah, Belgium.”

Semi-literate MAGA Boomer: “America first!”

My Belgian hat: “Nope. Belgium.”

But alas, most MAGAs have probably never heard of Belgium…