A cold, bright Wednesday beckoned me out again to Hillman State Park--which is truly one of the least of the Commonwealth's many great parks. But it's close by, and I couldn't spend the whole day in the woods. It was a surprisingly pleasant drive down country lanes in the full light of the winter sun. It's been so, so rainy and gray that even melancholy souls like me are so happy for a little light.
Streaming as it does through the pine needles at Hillman, I don't know how I ever tired of it. But I do recall a drought when I muttered profanities about "All that goddamn light, it's enough to make a parson curse." (Quite truly.) But the forest floor was soft with years of pine needles. The forest was cold and fragrant. And my spirit sang to have just a few hours alone among the trees.
Hillman is mainly a series of shoddily reclaimed strip mines. That's why mountain bikers love the place; it's got twists and curves and crazy descents like this one. What would you do if you broke yourself out here on a hill like that? I've seen mountain bikers out here alone many times. They surely couldn't get an ambulance back in here. Ah, but people get broken in far more remote places than this, I suppose.
I don't often think of coming here because I wrote this place off as a brier patch years ago, a spooky place with strangling vines and poison ivy and labyrinthine trails where you might get lost for hours. And it is definitely all of those things. I hated this place because I moved down here from the Allegheny National Forest, and "Comparison is the thief of joy." But today, I left here contented.
Just as a historical footnote, I named this blog "Snow and Jaggers" because when I had an earlier blog up in the Great North Woods. It was called "The Allegheny Journal," and it explored public lands in and around the national forest. But when I tried to hike down here in the Pittsburgh area, all I ever saw was snow and jaggers (thorns). Now, in these days of rainy winters, I ought to just call the blog "Jaggers." But that's no fun.
This pleasant path among the evergreens bears the unfortunate name of "Airport Trail." That's because it runs around a little "airport" for model airplanes. The road to the airport is closed for the season, but I walked out there just to see if everything was much the same as the last time I was there. And it was. It's not worth photographing.
These pleasant little red pines in their grassy meadow are appealing in the winter. In summer, this place would be filthy with biting ants, and poison ivy, and ticks. I must remember that I like this place better in the winter.
It was a joy just to see the sunlight glinting off the rippling waters of a little brook. It's been such a dark time here--literally dark, but metaphorically dark, too. It's all of a piece. We get these endless rains because of climate change, and climate change is due to the same human greed that rules these times. Darkness begets darkness.
"To each their own," I guess. Not sure why anyone would want to fly a toy airplane when there are trees to walk amongst. In any case, I can see that someone is putting some effort into making Hillman a more user-friendly kind of place. Many of the trails now have names, and some are blazed. It's still a strange place though. It's both things: a park with no facilities and a state game land with stuff like an airport for toy planes and mountain biking trails. At 3,000+ acres, it's worth exploring.
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