A Mountain Named “Wolf Benchmark”

Wolf Benchmark is a mountain just inside Pennsylvania, near the New York border.  The ascent to the summit begins on public land--the Allegheny National Forest--but passes onto unmarked private property without warning.  The summit, standing at 2,205 feet, is definitely on private property because I found a dilapidated old hunting camp up there.  (More about that below.)  This ferny meadow is the tippy-top.  There are no views.

I parked about 2.5 miles away and walked the entire length of quiet old Forest Road 174.  It's a gated gravel lane, so there was no traffic--not that there would have been traffic without the gates.  This segment of the national forest has been heavily exploited for timber.  Also, the trees are so tattered and bedraggled by the near-drought conditions that affect much of the country this summer, not to mention the extreme heat, which finally began to relent yesterday and today.  The raspberries were fruiting.

It was such a joy to walk an old forest road back here in my beloved Allegheny National Forest.  When I finally get a new phone, it will have a camera worthy of this lovely scene: about half a dozen butterflies of different colors and patterns, on a patch of purple thistles.  The forest was perfect today, 74 degrees and not at all humid.  

So.  Who gave the order to put a stop sign here at the end of an unmarked, unmapped forest road where it intersects with a gated forest road in the middle of...the forest?  

This modest view is brought to you by recent tree-harvests on this segment of the national forest.  I've been wondering how a mountain gets a name like "Wolf Benchmark."  What kind of benchmark does a wolf need?  Maybe even a wolf needs standards by which to measure its lupine progress.  But I googled it and found that there are a lot of mountains called "benchmark."  The summit must have been used as some sort of navigational landmark in earlier times.

Speaking of views, this is about the only view you get on Wolf Benchmark, and it's not at the summit.  This is taken from a harvested section of the forest on the flanks of Wolf Benchmark.  Pictured near the center of this photograph is Tuscarora Mountain in New York State.  Why is it that the peaks get suddenly taller, and sharper, and more inspiring as soon as you get inside New York?  I mean really, right at the border, things become instantly more dramatic.  There's a reason.  Let's talk about it.

Look at this screenshot from my peak-bagging club's app.  The orange mountain in centerfield is Wolf Benchmark.  The blue circle is me, approaching the summit.  The horizontal line that crosses the photo is the New York / Pennsylvania border.  Notice something strange?  There are about 30 peaks just across the border on the New York side and only one peak on the Pennsylvania side.  At first I thought this was just another example of living in New York's shadow--which New Jersey and Pennsylvania have done for centuries.  I thought maybe people had reported the peaks in the Empire State but didn't even bother with the Keystone State.  Not so.  There really ARE more peaks right up to New York's southernmost border.  And they really do become infrequent the moment you cross the border southward.  Here's how it all went down:

In eons past, the glaciers were depositing low mountains all over southwestern New York State, long before anyone had a name for the place.  They reached that place that would someday become the Pennsylvania state line, and one glacier said to another, "You goin' in there?"  The second glacier said, "I'm not goin' in there.  Are YOU goin' in there?"  The first glacier said, "Ima stop right here."  A third glacier spoke up and said, "C'mon guys.  It's safe for now.  Gettysburg and the 2016 election are still a long way off.  Things aren't gonna get spooky and weird down there till white people evolve out of the primordial ooze and then devolve into swing-state voters."  The first glacier held his ground, quite literally.  "I'm boycotting that place on principle.  Ima stay right here and melt.  Them backward sumnabitches can go unglaciated.  They won't even notice."  And they didn't...until The-Blogger-Formerly-Known-as-the-Snowbelt-Parson returned to the snowbelt and uncovered their ancient scheme. 

Here's the derelict hunting camp at the summit of Wolf Benchmark, just beyond the ferny meadow that's shown in the first pic, above.  It's kind of a nice little place.

I took the liberty of stepping inside.

Someone put a fair amount of work into slapping this shack together.  They installed a woodburning stove and insulation and glass windows.  It's sad to see it so disused.  

Looks like this really was an off-the-grid place where guys came to get away from their wives.

Ah yes, the carved glass ashtray.  This really is a beautiful object--solid, heavy, time-worn.  I'm not sure who needs to tap their cigarette ash daintily into an ashtray when the whole shack looks like a dirty ashtray.  I liked this ashtray a lot.  But you know the rules of urbex and rurex--which is to say, exploring abandoned buildings, urban or rural: Leave nothing, take nothing, break noting.  Even if the owner never returns, this ashtray does not belong to me. 

Beware of dog? It oughta say, “Beware of Wolf,” because this is Wolf Benchmark!

Links to Dolly Sods & Lower Counties Beach Trip

 This is a view from the road up to Jakes Rocks in the Allegheny National Forest. And here’s a link to a recent backpacking trip to DOLLY SODS, which was way too crowded, as well as the beach in THE LOWER COUNTIES, which sometimes fondly refer to themselves as “Delaware.”

Return to Rimrock and Jakes Rocks

As many times as I’ve been to Jakes Rocks and Rimrock, I always believed Rimrock to be the more beautiful—until I did them both in one trip with my elder daughter and youngest brother.  Now I’m pretty sure I like Jakes Rocks a lot better.  This is the vista from Jakes Rocks.  This area of the Allegheny National Forest is largely designated for mountain biking, so you have to be careful on the trails, which you share with fast-moving bicycles.

Jakes Rocks again.

Just over a bridge and across the valley you’ve got a sister peak to Jakes Rocks.  This is Rimrock, which is in an area of the national forest that’s much more developed for the casual visitor.  There’s a picnic area here and a long trail down to the swimming beach far below.  The trails here are better groomed than at Jakes Rocks, and there are cool stone steps between the boulders.  And yet, the view’s just not as good.  It’s is beautiful, but I think a little less beautiful than Jakes Rocks.

Rimrock also has a much larger viewing platform, also crafted out of stone

My youngest brother…you’d never guess we were brothers, despite some family resemblance.  He wanted to see my hunting camp (where I don’t hunt; I write).  He lives on a farm and raises chickens out in Ohio.  He works the night shift at a factory, and his two nights at my camp, away from his wife and four kids, were the longest he’d ever been apart from them.  He also said that he’d never seen a sight as beautiful as the view from Jakes Rocks—which both saddened and pleased me.  It pleased me because I love to share my forest with people, and I know that he really felt its beauty.  It saddened me because I’ve seen so many places much more beautiful than this—Switzerland, Colorado, Hawaii, Malawi.  There are so many ways to live a life, so many places to settle or get stuck, so many different directions two children of the same parents might go.  My brother showed my daughter and me how to shoot his several varieties of hunting rifles.  I’m actually a pretty good shot, as is she.  He wants to come back here and hunt turkey in the spring, which I would try.  I’m no hunter, but I might take aim at a turkey bird.  

A Summer Night in Pittsburgh

I’ve got an old college friend I only see every two or three years.  I like him a lot, and I actually feel like both of us talk pretty openly when we’re together.  There’s an immediate bond that the years and long silences haven’t eroded.  But we would never call or text each other just to check in, and we only ever get together if it’s convenient.  Probably we could have been much closer, but at this point I’m not sure our friendship would bear the weight of too much time together.  Now he looks me up when he’s in the Pittsburgh area, which is rarely, and I look him up when I’m in the Asheville area, which is occasionally.  Still, it’s always good to see him.  He has a keen memory, and he holds pieces of my story that I have lost.  He was my last college friend to get married—just five years ago at the age of fifty!  He rolled into town back in June with his wife and four-year-old son, and they stayed at this really great old mansion-hotel place on the Northside.  It’s called The Inn on the Mexican War Streets.

I love a nice deep porch with furniture and curtains—a porch that’s set up to function like an open-air room.  And this place has one heck of a porch.  My friend was here on a Sunday night and almost all the nearby restaurants were closed except a strange little bar that serves sandwiches and calls itself Leo. A Public House.  (I don’t know what the period in the bar’s name is about, and I don’t know if the A functions as an indefinite article or as an initial…) The public house was kind of seedy and kind of fun with a youngish urban clientele of the less fashionable variety, very much a genuine Pittsburgh hangout.  While I can’t recommend it for its fare, I can definitely vouch for its charming sort of devil-may-care atmosphere on the first floor of another old mansion.  We walked back to The Inn on the Mexican War Streets by way of the very Brooklynesque Beech Avenue, my favorite street in the city.

My friend’s wife had to take their son to bed, then he and I walked a bit around the city, which was cool and pleasant in the gathering dusk.  This friend and I used to hang out with each other whenever our closer friends were out on dates or whatever.  We would explore abandoned houses in the winter at night, or climb through the window onto the roof of the dorms, or go to the local community college and put No Smoking signs in the smoking lounges (this was the late 80s), and turn all the chairs to face the wrong direction in the classrooms.  After graduation we both went on to make a life for ourselves overseas, which is what adventurous 20-something’s were doing back in the 90s.  Now?  Now we get together for a few hours and talk about fatherhood, and marriage, and our philosophies of life, and our journeys thus far.  I should really make an effort to see him more often…and to spend more summer Sunday evenings walking around Pittsburgh.