A Night in Oil Creek State Park, Wolfkiel Camping Area

I had some exploring still to do at Oil Creek State Park, and so I ended up spending a Saturday night up there.  Unlike state forests, where you can just show up and pitch a tent, you always have to have reservations in a state park.  And the only way an individual can camp at Oil Creek is to use the camping areas provided for backpackers doing a 30-mile loop of the park.  Only one night is allowed.  (There are group camping areas, too.)  So, with a ripped backpack, I trekked in from the road to one of the Adirondack shelters at the Wolfkiel camping area.

I've never actually stayed in one of these things before, but it was nice--kind of like a little cabin.  My only complaint is that the fireplace made the bedroom too hot, so I had a fire in the afternoon but not in the evening before bed.  Also, I was a little nervous about whether those screws were going to hold up or if my hammock might collapse in the night, dropping me dead-weight onto the edge of this wooden floor.  It made me so nervous that I eventually got down and slept on the floor with an airpad.  But I did like being up in the hammock when the raccoons came to call in the night, with the creepy guttural clicking noises they make.

It was nice to have a table, too.  I arranged my maps on it and planned some upcoming adventures.  Actually, when I called to reserve one of these shelters for later that same day, the lady told me they were all reserved that night except two.  I was worried that this little campground would be overrun.  In reality, only two of the sites were occupied.  

 There was one very distant barred owl that made its call near morning, nothing like what I heard at Cornplanter.  Mostly there was a band of howling dogs, probably on some nearby plot of private ground, and they moaned and barked much of the night.  Then their owner came out and started shooting high-powered rifles.  

A Night in the Cornplanter State Forest

The Cornplanter State Forest is composed of a few scattered tracts of woods in unexpected places.  Not the most inspired or inspiring place to do an overnight.  The biggest tract is just outside the river town of Tionesta, and nestled up against the edge of the Allegheny National Forest.  It's nice enough, I suppose, but it would never be my first choice in an outdoor destination.  I walked its trails many years ago, and my impressions of it are about the same: pleasant, unremarkable, more a walk in the woods than a wilderness trek.  (To see that article, click HERE.)  But my plans to stay at the Kennerdell Tract of the Clear Creek State Forest were dashed pretty late in the day by the fact that my backpack had ripped badly.  So, many miles from home, I needed to find a place where I could pull off the road and camp relatively close to my car on a Friday night.  It had to be close to the car because I didn't have a backpack to transport things very far into the woods.  I remembered Cornplanter and thought it would work.  

And it did.  Beautifully.  I dragged what gear I could about half a mile into the trees in a big duffel bag.  I bushwhacked about 200 feet off of the Hunter Run Trail and set up camp.  At first, it all felt too rushed, too perfunctory, too much a campsite of necessity.  But I put up my hammock and watched the night go dark around me.  It was so quiet and so calm.  I really loved it.  Before long, the most wonderful owl started calling into the night: wild, mournful, persistent.  Now it was close-by, now far away, now a bit to my east, now to the west.  It called all night long and into the early hours of the morning.  I always hope to hear an owl when I'm out alone at night, but never have I gotten such a terrific earful as the one the humble Cornplanter State Forest gave me.  

 And though I did occasionally hear the odd nocturnal vehicle out on the nearest road, it was rare.  Mostly I was just a guy alone in the woods, and it was nice.  In the end, it was a really beautiful time in among the trees there.

Resplendent Decay: A Few Shots of Oil City

Oil City, my birthplace.  I wish you could see just how steep this street is.  My grandmother used to fret that a car was going to come sliding down this steep street in the winter and come barreling straight into the front window of our house...

There's a lot of abandoned property here--though not as much as you find in the towns of the Monongahela Valley.  A lot of houses in Oil City just LOOK abandoned; they've actually got people living in them.  And they're big.  And they have a lot of nonsensical doors opening onto porch roofs.  Upstairs exterior doors to nowhere are pretty much a feature in most of these homes.  Our house has a door in the bathroom that opens onto a three-story drop.

When we were kids, the round tower on the top of this house served as a kind of landmark.  It used to be so lovingly maintained... Now everything looks like an abode of witches, or vampires, or goblins.

 The dereliction is such a waste, such a betrayal.  But who can maintain a house like this in the local economy?  I think this place went from private home to funeral home and now back to a private home--or maybe an apartment building.  It'd be weird to live in a house that used to be a funeral home...

An Abandoned Church Near Franklin, Pennsylvania

I believe this poor, sad, swaybacked old place was once known as Hebron Methodist Church, though it's been abandoned now for many a long year.  It sits along Old Route 8 between I-80 and Franklin, in Venango County.  I'm back up here for a planning retreat.

It sits in the sparsest little cemetery along a partially forgotten thoroughfare.  They're doing a lot of construction on the 4-lane now known as PA Route 8, but I've heard that they're actually reducing it back to a 2-lane--since Franklin and Oil City are mere shadows of their former selves.  I don't know.  Did most of the headstones in this cemetery get knocked over or stolen, or is the cemetery pretty empty?

Even here in the hinterlands, a church has some flights of fancy, some rural pretensions to ecclesiastical glory, like the playful design on these plain old wooden window panes.  You might catch a ghostly shadow in this window, too: the blogger formerly known as The Snowbelt Parson.

I love sacred architecture, but this place has a strangely hollow feel to it, almost creepy.  The honeybees seem to like it though.  

Are there people buried in this churchyard, in unmarked graves, or does it sit mostly fallow, so to speak?  

Someone may have loved this place at one time, but that was long ago.  

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock."  And you'll knock a long time before anyone opens this door.  It's nailed shut.  I was able to take a few interior shots through the windows.    

 This is the chancel--which is to say the "stage" or "dais."  See the rail?  That's sometimes known as "the altar," though it's technically an altar rail.  It's where old-timey Methodists would have come to kneel in penitence to confess their sins and "get saved."  Methodist services back in those days always closed with an "altar call" to invite penitent sinners to change their ways.  You can see where they tried to lower the ceilings to save on heating bills.  But it all came down in the end...as all things will.

Oil Creek State Park and Rural Venango County

This is my native country, Venango County.  The woods are dark hemlocks.  There's water everywhere, and ferns, and big rocks, and beeches.  There's also an occasional Biden sign in people's yards!

For some ridiculous reason, I did not think to bring my hiking boots with me and ended up doing a few miles of trails here in deck shoes.  Look at these steep hillsides.

Venango County--especially the Oil City area--is strangely eccentric.  Though the main hiking trail through Oil Creek State Park does a very long loop--something like 20 miles--I made a loop back to my car by taking some rural roads near the park.  This is an antique car museum that was closed...and looks like it's been closed for a long time.

Pleasant if unremarkable countryside.  I like the way the clouds cast passing shadows over the hills.

Oil Creek is a lazy stream that meanders between the hills and joins the Allegheny River at Oil City, my wildly eccentric hometown, where grand old houses sit abandoned and rotting into the hillsides, where businesses sit empty, where they've got a really good little independent coffee house and some very colorful characters.  I like to come up here to check on our house, which now sits empty and is no longer ours... Actually, back in Oil City's heyday, when Wolf's Head, Pennzoil, and Quaker State were all based here, Oil Creek once caught on fire.

This is the gated road that leads to the camping area inside Oil Creek State Park.  It's technically for backpackers, but locals come and set up camp, too.  

 This lovely old farm sits on White City Road, which is just a country lane.  The farmhouse had an old, worn picket fence around it, with the wire gate hanging open between the shrubs in a most inviting way.  A walkway  leads up to a shady porch with comfortable looking furniture.  What a beautiful place to live.

Buchanan State Forest

The Buchanan is officially my favorite state forest.  Here's a roadside overlook in the Buchanan State Forest.  Pretty enough, but nothing like the views that await the one who's willing to hike or travel the lesser roads.

This shale face was steep and probably 100 feet from top to bottom.  I walked to the top and discovered that a family had driven up there and set up camp.

Nice view from up there.

This is a spot in the Buchanan State Forest where hang-gliders get launched.  I put up my hammock in a shady area in the nearby trees and waited on a Tuesday to see if anyone would come and take a flight, but in the three or four hours I spent, I saw not another soul.  This is from the summit of Sideling Hill.  If you've ever driven the Pennsylvania Turnpike, then you've probably seen the name of the hill on road signs.  
The view from the trees wasn't quite so grand, but it was cooler in the shade, and I exited the hammock frequently to go and look again at the nearby vista--just to make sure it was still there.  

Here's another view from the crest of Sideling Hill, but whereas the top photo looks east, this one looks west.  I believe that other hill over there is known as Harbor Mountain.

Can you imagine speeding in a little hang-glider straight for that spot where the land falls away?  I like to believe I would do it, but I've never even braved the hang-gliders that skip across the sand dunes at the Outer Banks...

And here's a view looking south from Harbor Mountain.  This is also a hang-glider jumping-off-place.  It would be fun to fly low out over that country.  From up here, you'd never know that it's crawling with ignorant Trump chumps, with its orderly farms, its quaint villages, its grand old farmhouses, and dark forests, and pretty churches surrounded by ancient cemeteries; its rivers, and ponds, and contour-plowed hills.  

Around Schellsburg

This is the Colvin covered bridge, which is probably named for the Colvin Farm, very close by.  It's also just adjacent to Shawnee State Park.

Shawnee State Park is a beautiful place with a large lake, a swimming beach, and a decent campground.  I used it to put up my hammock and, at last, read through some of the journals I kept during my Africa years (1995-2000).  In the 20 years since I came back to the States, I've never once opened any of the journals that I wrote in over there.  

This is the wonderful bed and breakfast that, I think, used to be the Colvin Farm.  I stayed here for three nights to explore the nearby Buchanan State Forest, visit the Old Log Church, hang out at Shawnee State Park, and poke around the abandoned stretches of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  By the way, you can find this place on Airbnb.  Highly recommended!  It's called Woodhaven, and it hosts events like weddings, too: https://woodhaven1796.com.  

I love central Pennsylvania.  There's so much beauty and history there.  But there's also a CRAZY amount of Trumpism.  I would say nearly half the houses in Schellsburg had Trump signs out front.  It really makes you wonder.  I mean, they can't all be evil people who hate minorities and want to lose their social security and their mail service.  What do they see in that hate-filled airbag?

Sideling Hill Tunnel and an Abandoned Stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike

This is the first four-lane interstate highway in the United States, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, also known as I-76, which must surely be a reference to 1776.  This section was bypassed in 1968.  See the Sideling Hill Tunnel in the distance.

Notice how narrow the lanes are and how small the median.  They repurposed old railroad tunnels under the mountains here, but they were too narrow for four lanes, so traffic through the tunnels had to merge into a two-lane: one eastbound and the other westbound.  It was cheaper just to reroute the road than to widen the tunnels.  There's at least one other abandoned tunnel, but it's on private property.

I didn't follow the abandoned stretch of road very far, but it runs for several miles through the Buchanan State Forest.  It was so stinking hot in the forest that day, and even hotter to walk on pavement.

Notice the observation deck above the mouth of the tunnel.  There's also a little garage off to the left and some offices, too.  The air blowing out of it was so cool and pleasant.  There was a singer-songwriter from Gettysburg performing there!  He was just practicing, I think, but he did have his guitar case open as if he wouldn't refuse a donation.  He was good; I wish I'd asked his name.

A Return to the Old Log Church, Schellsburg

I just love this old church near Schelllsburg--which is not far from Bedford, Pennsylvania.  It doesn't look like much from the outside: just an old log structure sitting amid an enormous cemetery.  Many buildings around this part of the state date back to the 1700s.  This one is from the first decade of the 1800s, so a bit of a late bloomer.

But it's wonderful inside!  And it's unlocked daily in the summer for visitors to enjoy.  It is only used as a church once a year, for some sort of Memorial Day service, I think.  Locals have bedecked the place in flags, which NEVER would have happened back in the 19th century.  It would have been considered blasphemous to have national symbols in a holy place...

    Here's a view from the high pulpit.  Look at those torturous straight-back pews!  This building was shared by German Lutherans and members of the German Reformed Church--which are essentially Presbyterians.  Both groups eschewed a lot of unnecessary religious adornment back in those days.

What a beautiful "wineglass pulpit" with balconies to the left and right.

 This is Anna Marbourg, wife of Jordon Marbourg, though Jordon appears to be buried elsewhere.  I liked the name Jordon (or Jordan) Marbourg so much that I Googled it to see if there was any information about him.  And there is!  He was murdered in the streets of Johnstown in 1864 for having an affair with another man's wife.  How do some guys get cool names like Jordon Marbourg, and others get names so common that you can never find them on Facebook for the multitudes that share the same name?