Friday, 7/4/97
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Rise and shine time was - 8:00 am. We both had Wheat Chex for breakfast. I
decided it was going to be a good day. We drove to the town of McHenry, Md. at Deep Creek Lake to find out where to sit to watch the fireworks that evening. "You can
just park along the side of Rt. 219 up on the hill across from Wisp Ski Resort. Everybody
from all around watches the fireworks from there."
Our next destination, via back roads, was the Cranesville
Sub-Arctic Swamp, an ecological preserve under the care of The Nature Conservancy.
Sitting in a "chill pocket" in the mountains at 2500 ft, it harbors plant and animal life that normally prefers habitats
much farther north in the tundra. It was a little hard to find the parking area,
located a half mile back a gravel drive, even with the signs that we saw.
We started hiking through mixed deciduous and evergreen forests and small meadow patches on trails that seemed to have
been left alone for some time without maintenance. Sometimes, we could find a trail marker or blaze that indicated we were
on an actual trail, but mostly we could not be sure we were not following an animal run.
One stretch had clear signs showing the way every thirty feet. Another
place we did not see any markers, even though the trail forked with no clue which way to go.
Every now and then we found a post with an information plaque describing some special vegetation at that spot. We noticed that most of the signs had grammatical errors such as "The tree's to the
left are ..." They seemed to like to use an apostrophe to set off the "s"
of a plural noun.
Through great guesswork at a few intersecting trails, we found ourselves at an extensive boardwalk built out across
the bog area of the swamp, a very pretty place, but the boardwalk was in a bit of disrepair.
At the beginning was a warning sign, "Uneven Surface." The boardwalk,
with loose, weathered boards, some rotted out, stretched for a few hundred yards across the bog with a few turns and several
spurs off to the side that got you closer to some feature. I estimated that the
boardwalk had been decaying for ten years or so. It was safe walking if you watched
your step. Fifty feet from the start, there was a very nice park bench with slats
in perfect condition; no rot and no splinters. Oh! Its slats were made of solid
two inch thick molded gray plastic. I estimated that out in the open direct summer
sunlight and extreme cold weather conditions existing during the winter, the bench will decay in ten millennia or so.
When we got to the other end of the four foot wide ribbon of boards, it just ended in swamp. No trail, no sign to tell you to turn around, just soggy bog all around.
We backtracked to the beginning of the boardwalk and then followed a different series of mysteriously distributed trails
in the general direction of the parking lot.
At one point, a wide swath of former jeep trail continued straight ahead, and a tiny whisper of a trail snuck off to
the right. Naturally, we took the whisper.
Lo and behold! We found more nature information plaques on posts. We reached
a junction where the track we were following continued up a hill, but a very clear sign with an arrow pointed to the left. As we obeyed the sign I noticed a peculiar large rock up the hill. The rock was nearly rectangular in cross section, about three feet wide and five feet tall. A slight bulge on the right side broke up the rectangularity.
Eventually the trail broke out onto the gravel road to the parking lot. So
we followed the gravel drive back to the car. On the drive out, we explored the
paved road a little further past the gravel drive and spotted a large stone tablet that was actually the other side of the
rectangular rock we had seen earlier. It appeared to once have had a metal plaque
embedded in its road side surface, but the plaque was gone.
Note: The Nature Conservancy has rebuilt the boardwalk since this trip.
We headed south to Swallow Falls State Park. There, we made and consumed PB&J sandwiches at the top of a
huge boulder overlooking Swallow Falls, then hiked the trail to Muddy Creek Falls, the higher of the two falls. We then hiked back to the car
and continued driving south on back roads. Suddenly, Brennan said he had been
there before. It seems that his high school Cross Country Team had August training
camp in this area so we poked around a little and found the house where they stay, and several of the places that they ran.
When we got to Herrington Manor State
Park, we rented
a canoe and, with Brennan in front and Bob in back, paddled south to a small island where Brennan went ashore and claimed
the island for himself. Then we paddled all the way to the south end of the lake,
and found a maze of creeks draining the lake that were navigable with some careful steering.
The route was a series of twisty, turny little passages all different. We
paddled quite a ways down the main creek that seemed to get narrower and shallower as we continued down stream. Eventually we got stuck trying to pass over some tree branches just under the surface, so in the middle
of the creek, we switched ends so that Brennan, the lighter of us, was in the back.
That got us passed the barrier. We also passed under a bridge that was
so low to the water that we had to duck our heads down into the canoe to fit.
We had been gone half of our rental time when the sky started getting dark and distant thunder was telling us to turn
back. So we tried to turn around and discovered that the canoe was longer than
the creek was wide. You would have been in hysterics if you had been standing
on the bank watching us try unsuccessfully to turn around, then start paddling backwards up the creek to a wider spot and
get turned around, then encounter the sunken tree branches with Bob in front. We
had to switch ends again. We made it back to the dock just as our hour was up
but the anticipated rain storm never arrived.
Late in the afternoon, we got back to McHenry and played
some air hockey and miniature golf before driving the car up to park on the hill opposite Wisp on US Rt. 219. We were not the first to arrive, but there were plenty of places to park.
Since it was dinner time and we had several hours to kill before it would get dark enough for the fireworks, we hiked
a mile down the road to have dinner at "The Point", restaurant where Brennan was introduced to the fine taste of broiled rainbow
trout.
We hiked the mile back to the hill and discovered many more people had arrived and the place was really getting to
be a festive event. Eventually, it looked like the entire population of Garret County and several nearby counties had come here to enjoy the fireworks. During
the display, I counted the time between the flash and the boom and calculated that the fireworks were 3300 feet away.
After the "Fan Granola", a HUGE traffic jam ensued, but Brennan's fine navigating got us out of the mess fairly quickly
over back roads and through the dark for many miles, some of it on questionable dirt roads, back to camp.
