Ryerson Station State Park

The old Chess Cemetery sits on a lonely hilltop deep in the woods of Ryerson Station State Park, in Greene County.  Most of the graves are pre-Civil War.  The trails at Ryerson have great names: Pine Box Trail leads to the graveyard.  Today I hiked a loop-trail called The Three Mitten, but I had time afterward to revisit this patch of hallowed ground.

 Ryerson is a gem of a park.  At 1,164 acres, it's not enormous, but it's got a decent campground with two cabins that can be rented, a good network of hiking trails, and a soon-to-be-restored lake.  

 Apparently Martha Stewart Living Magazine once named Greene County, PA, one of the best places in the country for fall foliage.  It is a pretty place, with undulating green hills, idyllic little farms, tin-roofed old farmhouses sitting back away from the road with steep valleys opening up just behind them, the wooded hills rising up behind their shuttered facades.  It's a mysterious place of winding back roads that skirt the hills and descend into dark hollows.

 But it's no fun to drive in rural Greene County because the pretty hills and 18th century farms are crawling with great convoys of frack-trucks--many with Texas plates.  The frackers do one of two things: They will either get in front of you and roll as slowly as a herd of elephants, or they will come careening down those narrow country lanes, going around blind corners at deadly speed.  One road I traveled was blocked by a guy in a pickup trying to pull an SUV out of a deep hollow by the roadside.  I don't know if it was leaf-peeping gone awry or if a frack-truck forced the SUV off the road.  

 This is deep in the coalfields and the gasfields.  I would go to Ryerson more often; Waynesburg is just a little over half an hour away.  But once you arrive in Waynesburg, you've still got half an hour of wending through the scenic, semi-industrialized countryside before you get to the park.  

The best and the brightest scenery was along the narrowest, most winding of lanes, where it was impossible to stop to take photos.  I always enjoy coming to Greene County.  It's so tragically lovely: torn apart by the coal industry, in the process of being torn apart again by the natural gas industry, with pipelines being spread out in every direction, devastating forest and field.  And yet, despite it all, each time I come here I think to myself, "Look at these beautiful old houses, these enormous barns, these quaint village churches.  I wonder how much a little place down here would cost."