PA State Game Land 117

Pennsylvania State Game Land # 117 is as bleak and destitute a place as you'll find to hike.  It conjures images of the Australian Outback, except that there are no interesting rock formations here.  No aborigines or dingoes or wombats.  No, this place is all brown grass and sky, with an occasional stand of malnourished trees.  Like most of the countryside around Burgettstown--in Washington County--it was strip mined long ago and left for dead.  Its barren, almost lunar landscape is the scarification of a bygone day, when coal companies weren't even required to make a pretense of cleaning up their mess.  Nowadays, they're at least made to regrade the land, replace some measure of topsoil, and plant trees and grasses.

Although this place is relatively close to where I live, I've avoided it for two reasons.  First, recovering strip mines sometimes depress me; they remind me of a witchy kind of place where I once lived as a child, just across the line in Ohio.  (Most things about the Buckeye State make me a little sad.)  And secondly, I've avoided this patch of open country because evil things have happened here--and I don't mean the paranormal. In recent years, two separate murder victims have been discovered here in SGL 117.  Cops speculate that the murders were actually committed at First Niagara Pavilion, the region's biggest concert venue, which is just a few miles away. Doesn't matter too much to me where they were murdered; SGL 117 is clearly an ideal dumping ground.  Chancing across a dead body would ruin any hike.  Also, a large marijuana plantation was discovered deep inside this game land back in 2009.  It's just a place where weird stuff goes on. It's the kind of place where you find yourself glancing over your shoulder...

My brothers and I used to play in the strip mines as kids.  A voracious reader, I romantically called those eerie, shelterless wastelands "the moors."  To me, the strip mines were the mysterious, shrubby uplands of The Hound of the Baskervilles and certain hopeless domains that Frodo and Sam had to traverse in The Lord of the Rings--which I read when I was 10.  It will be centuries before these barren wastes return to any kind of rich, generative state natural to the region.  All the same, a shadowy kind of life-as-usual does go on here.  Whole generations of wispy grasses and trees will have to live, and die, and collapse into the earth in order to replenish the area's topsoil.  That's the thing about normality.  It returns in time, but it can take a very long time, and it may never look quite like it did before.  We can torture the earth, and abuse it, and poison it, and tear it to pieces, and plant toxic waste deep in its crust, but we cannot kill it.  Only the sun can determine Earth's final fate.  The sun can incinerate the earth with a sudden flare, or the sun can burn out and leave the earth without orbit, or atmosphere, or gravity, or heat, or light.  Either way, humanity may destroy itself, but it will never fully destroy the planet.  (That doesn't stop Governor Corbett from trying.)

There's a strange loveliness to the sad, open country.  It seems to be saying, "Here I am.  There's no hiding here.  Discover me or pass me by."   And there is enough to discover, and I get the impression that the sparse vegetation hides plenty--corpses notwithstanding.  I bushwhacked away from the old road to discover a steep valley with a very large pond at the bottom--third photo.  There's a little gated road that runs all the way across the game land, two and three quarter miles from a parking lot on Bavington Road, just north of Burgettstown High School, all the way to PA18.  In places, you can hear US-22 screaming to the north.  It's a surreal sort of trek.