Cross Creek Lake: The Poisoned Park

There's a kind of beauty in it, but I'm a melancholic who always finds sad things beautiful. Cross Creek Lake is a big, semi-wild park owned and operated by Washington County. There's a nice lake there, and at this time of year, the frozen surface is crisscrossed by ice-fishers' trails running from the beach to the little tarp huts where they spend their winters. [Indent] Winter has its many charms, and one of them is the silence of a deserted world. The solitude, too. I love the muffled quiet of an empty landscape. And the winter birds. And the animal tracks in the snow. [Indent] Many acres of land surround the lake. Some woods, a nice playground, a large picnic area. Most of the park seems to be hayfields, strangely enough. At least I think they're hayfields. They're vast expanses of contour-plowed fields alternating between fallow and harvested segments. I'm sure they look like a strange quilt from the sky. And it's fun to explore the lonely landscape. [Indent]

But this is Washington County--ever the slut for mineral extraction. There are exactly 14 marcellus shale gas wells being dug on the park lands. Fourteen! At 15 acres each, not to mention the many access roads being cut through the area, this once pleasant park will soon be another industrial wasteland. The diggers have already spilled massive quantities of their noxious chemicals, resulting in fish kills in the lake. It's nothing compared to what lies ahead. [Indent] But someone recommended this lake for ice skating and--come summer--kayaking, so I came to check it out. I liked it okay. There was a kind of windblown sanctity out there on those snowy fields. But mostly, I don't think I'll be coming back here much. The whole marcellus shale thing is such a depressingly shortsighted grasp. [Indent]

In this final shot, you can see the lake off in the distance. There's a kind of beauty here, but touched with the sorrow of impending ruin. The silence will be broken by endless convoys of trucks and the pounding of the "frack" drills. The beauty will be destroyed by access roads and tall wells. The air will be destroyed and toxic to anything that needs to breathe it. And the water will be poisoned for generations to come. It's all a grab for shortsighted gain. [Indent] I had a solitary winter picnic at the pavillion in the top picture. I love pretending that winter isn't real, treating January just like July.

Greer Road

You've got to love an abandoned farm. In terms of abandoned places, today's hike was a waking dream.

Greer Road, in Collier Township (Allegheny County), was once a public thoroughfare. When the county bought up the strip-mined land around here to form a park, the southern end of the road was closed to vehicles. Nevertheless, tracks in the snow prove that people still ski and walk their dogs along the route.

The old road rises away from Pinkerton Run Road just behind one enticing abandoned house and across the street from another. The old guard rails still stand rusting at the edge of a steep drop into the valley below. There's broken pavement beneath the snow. This road's been out of commission for at least two decades, probably three.

There's no longer a green and white street sign at the entrance to Greer Road, so you just have to look for it. Where Pinkerton Run Road strikes north off Noblestown Road, there's an empty house that's pictured in the last post. Immediately behind that house, Greer Road climbs up into the snowy woods along a steep hillside. It's little more than a wide trail passing along steep drops. It hugs a deep valley and snakes through empty forest.

The best part comes when the old road emerges from wooded country to pass through an abandoned farmstead. I couldn't believe my luck. Nothing stirred here except two blood-red cardinals in the bare branches and a fat black cat in the tumbledown garage. The cat bolted when it saw me.

The barn isn't used, and it's boarded up tight. The garage is standing wide open, but I didn't go in for two reasons: I didn't want make life any harder on that poor feral cat by invading its home, and the floor didn't look safe to walk on. There's nothing inside but a huge stack of rotting storm windows, which I assume got taken off the farmhouse and stored there one May afternoon about thirty years ago. Come November, there they remained. Then the next November. Then the next. Isn't that how decline happens?

The farmhouse itself is a little disappointing. For one thing, it's not a proper kind of farmhouse. (I hate to brag, but I own one of the last truly spectacular farmhouses in Allegheny County.) I imagine the original house burned down and they put this thing up in about 1920. It's just a regular town-style house typical of the region: one gable, big front porch, yellow bricks. In industrial towns and mining towns, these places were built for middle managers. Maybe the farmer's wife had citified tastes, urbane for the day but relatively banal today.

The farmhouse stands there all enticing and wearing its neglect like an invitation, but upon closer inspection I discovered that it houses the park office. That's the most disappointing thing about the place. Ah, but for my purposes, it was abandoned. The whole farm site is a ghost of its former self. The road leading to it is a ghost. And on a Sunday afternoon in 24 degrees and two inches of snow, this place might as well be one of those derelict hamlets on the plains of Eastern New Mexico.

On the bright side, very close to this place, I did scout out two thoroughly abandoned houses for future winter treks. Actually, after reading the novel "American Rust," I'd been working up my nerve for a trip to the Monongahela Valley in order to go ghost-towning in the derelict neighborhoods of those old steel towns (Brownsville, Duquesne, Braddock). Who knew there'd be this much abandon so close to home?

Still, don't tell my wife, but I have got to spend more time exploring the Mon Valley...