Elk Rock, State Game Lands 51

Elk Rock is a peak along Chestnut Ridge, and happily, it's on public land and open for exploration.  Getting to Elk Rock is half the fun--following winding, narrow gravel lanes through hollows and up mountainsides.  There were a few views out onto neighboring mountains, but no views from the true summit, which stands at 2,277 feet.

I was on a peak-bagging mission.  How has Elk Rock never made it onto my radar before?  An unclaimed peak (at least in my peak-bagging club) on public land and only 62 miles from home?  Throughout the mountainous regions of Pennsylvania, you'll find palatial old homes standing behind iron gates--like this one here.  Upon closer inspection, this house looks a bit stark and monastic.

This is the type of road you'll travel if you drive from Pittsburgh to State Game Lands 51.  

Here's a new interest of mine: Wildflowers.  The best ones appear in late summer.  When I parked alongside the gravel lane to pick Joe Pye weed, and goldenrod, and Queen Anne's lace, it occurred to me that--in the world I come from--men aren't supposed to care for flowers...and I never did until just now.  In the world I come from, men are certainly not supposed to stop and pick flowers just because they're pretty.  The only thing that gives a man license to pick flowers is the intention to give them to a woman.  I wanted these for myself.  What if a Dodge Ram pickup truck full of tough guys sees me out here picking posies?  Will they stop to beat me up?  And then, I had a freeing thought: Who cares?  I'm 56 years old, and if I wanna collect wildflowers by the roadside, I'm gonna pick 'em without fear of what people think.  Besides, I've already done a lot of the traditional stuff to establish my non-toxic masculinity: marrying, having children, supporting my family, wasting my Saturdays mowing grass...

You have to park your car and follow the gated road steeply to the ridge, where you see the woods darkening to your right.  Something denser than trees is in there...rocks, big ones!  It's easy to climb the tallest ones to their tops, where all you'll see is more trees.

But the rock formations were enormous and beautiful and fun to explore in their chilly shade.

This rock was about 20 feet tall and larger at the top than at the bottom.

Another angle on the same boulder.

On the descent back to the car I came across a 4-foot long timber rattler.  He was sluggish and, like a lot of wildlife, maybe just a little less excited to make my acquaintance than I was to make his.  I also saw a really big buck on this trek, but by the time I unsheathed my camera, he'd silently disappeared.

After my sudden urge to pick flowers, I even came home and ordered a guide to wildflowers of the Mid-Atlantic.  How am I only just now discovering the joy of birds and flowers--so late in life?  The joy of trees was never wasted on me, not even as a child.  I've always loved trees and had favorite trees in various places in my life.

The bugs were savage up in the mountains.  The Minister's Black Veil came in handy... Actually, mine is more green than black, but there's no short story by Hawthorne called The Minister's Green Veil.

Abandoned Farmhouse Near East Hickory

I've had my eye on this old "bando" for many a long year.  It's a large farmhouse sitting on the edge of a U.S. Highway, so finding a way in--without getting caught--was always the thing preventing me from exploring the place.  But I woke up today with a real urge to find a way.  Far too often, I'll spy a bando that I want to explore, and I'll put it off for years, always worried about getting caught.  Then, while I'm hesitating, the place either gets demolished or becomes too dangerous to set foot inside.  Once the roof starts to go, stay out!  I didn't want this house to be added to my long list of bando regrets...

There are plenty of sweet bandos in this area, and I've got my eye on a few others.  Actually, this old farm sits on public land, but there are clear "No Trespassing" signs posted out front.  The only way I could see to get in was to park along a side road and bushwhack through the woods behind the house, approaching it from behind.  Again, this is public land.  I had every right to be in the woods here (just not the house).  Here's the farmhouse as seen from the overgrown back field.

The structure itself is still in pretty good condition.  I'd guess it's been sitting empty for about 20 years.  There were still withered ears of corn in the corncrib, a shower curtain in the bathroom, a container of Ajax on the kitchen sink...and those last sad curtains still in that upstairs window.

I could feel the love that this home once knew.  This is the backyard, between the large garage and the kitchen door.  Look, here's the root cellar--or maybe it's a springhouse--with an old basketball hoop beside it.

I was tempted to enter through the kitchen window, pictured here, but I didn't like the look of the kitchen.  It's spacious and must have been an inviting place in its day.  But there were strange little piles of excrement on the floor that made me nervous.  I got chased by a raccoon once, so now I'm a little jumpy around piles of excrement...

Someone sweet lived here.

Without entering the room, I did stand at the kitchen doorway and take a peek.  This room once had a big family table right in the middle.  It was the living heart of the home, where loved ones gathered, and talked, and cooked, and did their homework, and paid their bills, and wrote paper letters, and maybe even prayed.

This small room was just inside the front door.  I'm not sure if it was the farm office or a formal parlor.

The living room was immense.

The front porch was enclosed and looked down at the road with a famous river just beyond.  The barn stands across the road, and the river would have been visible in olden times, when the banks were open pastureland.  What a beautiful place this must have been.

Those of us who do "urbex" and "rurex" avoid disclosing the locations of the bandos we explore for two reasons: 1) we don't want vandals to find them, and 2) we don't want anyone to identify the place and get us in trouble for trespassing!

The old summer kitchen was separated from the main kitchen by a small breezeway.

This just screams 1980s, right?

The tattered curtains still hanging in the window on the landing made me a little sad...

With a bit of trepidation, I mounted the staircase to take a look at the bedrooms.  But when I was on the landing, I heard a strange scurrying noise in a room down the hall.  Probably just a bird, but I feared the worst--a rabid raccoon!  Even if it's not rabid, you don't want to corner a raccoon.  I never went the whole way up.

There was a lot of old debris in the woods beside the house.  Anyone know what kind of car this was?

Glove Dryers from Gimbels

Sounds like a "First World Problem."  Notice the ancient Gimbels sticker in the upper lefthand corner.

And this is the Nate Bargatze show at Paints Arena--a photo taken well before the show started.  I think every spot in the 18,000-seat venue was sold out.  

I'm not a huge fan myself, but my brother in Ohio wanted to go...

Tanbark Trail Rock City & Making Music with Coyotes

My backpacking friend had time for just a single night in the woods.  And because time was short, he did not want to travel more than 2.5 hours from home--which is a fair request, right?  My immediate thought was a certain unnamed rock city along the Tanbark Trail in the Allegheny National Forest, Watson Township.  Click on this photo to see how big this boulder is with the tents beneath it for scale.

At dusk, just after we'd gotten a fire going, I pulled out my pan flute and serenaded the trees with sad medieval hymns.  "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence."  "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers."  The pan flute is a forest instrument, which is part of the reason I chose it as my own.  Pan--its most famous instrumentalist--is the god of the forest.  But otherwise, I've never met another soul who plays the pan flute, and I do like having things to myself.  

The first note on the pan flute at dusk sent the local coyotes a-howling!  There were A LOT of them, and they were close-by!  Unlike a lot of coyote choirs, in which each voice will take up a slightly different phrase, these guys just howled.  They must have a den up in these rocks somewhere.  They occasionally wakened us in the night to sing their doleful songs.

We didn't do much hiking except to follow the Tanbark northward to Sand Springs and the "free little lending library" at Watson Grange.  Most of the books in their little glass cabinet were old, out-of-print novels by lowbrow popular writers of the last century.  But I did find exactly one book that I'd consider reading.  In fact, it's one that I'd been thinking about reading: Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad.  (Ever since my days in Africa, I've read colonial literature--mostly things about white people coming to tragic ends in tropical places.)  My friend asked me to read it aloud as we hiked back to camp at the rock city, which was hard to do because the Tanbark Trail is pretty overgrown in places.  I'm considering becoming a trail volunteer and asking for the whole 9 miles of the Tanbark to maintain.  It passes through some undisturbed--if unspectacular--sections of the Allegheny National Forest.