Wild Chartiers Creek

I have a friend who is forever promising me a kayak trip down Chartiers Creek.  He says that it's navigable from his father-in-law's horse farm in Washington County all the way to the Ohio River, at McKees Rocks.  

 In fact, he claims that it passes mainly through woodlands, and I don't doubt it.  When you come upon the creek from the steep, wooded hills in Boyce Mayview Park--Upper St. Clair--you could almost believe that you're the first white man to discover the place (assuming you are a white man...).

 You couldn't make that assumption about Pierre Chartiers, his European-sounding name notwithstanding.  The half French / half Shawnee fur-trader had a post at the mouth of the creek in 1743.  Today, much of the creek valley is suburbanized in the ugliest kind of way.  But the segment that runs alongside the backside of Boyce Mayview Park is protected woodlands.  

This is the infamous Mayview State Hospital, across the water.  It sits derelict, but guarded, above a deep, still section of the creek.  The far side of the water (where the old insane asylum sits) is South Fayette Township, Allegheny County.  It's there that my old farmhouse occupies one of the long, gradual wrinkles of land that descends toward Chartiers Creek.

[UPDATE: 2 May 2013: Sadly, the view from this last photo is now entirely obliterated, as the main buildings of the old hospital have been reduced to rubble.  The company that purchased the land asked South Fayette Twp for an exception to its zoning law that prohibits strip mining.  Happily, the request was denied; otherwise Chartiers Creek would suffer even more pollution from irresponsible coal mining.]