Sunday, 7/6/97
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The temperature was 42 degrees F in the trailer just before daybreak. Both
of us made a non-verbal, non-visual, extrasensory agreement to sleep in today. I
finally felt the temperature rising when direct sunlight hit the trailer, so I got up.
By the time I boiled water and mixed my instant oatmeal, it was too hot to eat oatmeal.
Brennan opted for the usual Wheat Chex. We got on the road by 10:15 am.
Casselman Bridge was right there in Grantsville where it was once part of the National Road. Now it is a State Park that is one
of the Maryland parks that I had never visited, so we stopped to bring
the negative count down to ten. When it was built, it was the longest span stone bridge in the nation. Bob composed a shot with Brennan's guidance to show the plaque at the approach to the bridge as well as
the bridge itself. It is a problem in depth of field but should work with a long
exposure on the tripod. The strong morning sunlight put good shadows on the stone
surface and under its enormous arch.
Then Brennan walked up the ramp of the bridge to the apex close to a hundred yards from Bob, who noticed that there
was a dead tree trunk on the far side of the bridge that bothered the artistic composition, so using hand signals, Bob guided
Brennan back and forth until his body obscured the ugly tree. Then got him to
turn sideways and hold still for the photograph. After the shot, Bob clapped
his hands twice to get Brennan's attention and signal a thumb up so he would know he was free to roam now. There is something very satisfying to be able to communicate effectively with your children, especially
non-verbally.
The bridge deck is built as two perfectly flat inclined planes meeting at the top without rounding off the edge. It is as if a child was building a bridge for toy cars out of two wooden boards propped
up against each other. As Bob started up the ramp, Brennan played a game on him. Brennan backed down the other ramp at the same speed that Bob was going up, so that
all they could see of each other was what looked like a human head perched on the apex of the bridge. Bob did not see his entire son again until he reached the apex, and then Brennan was fifty feet down the
other side. Back together again at the top, we found the date 1911 in the cap
stone in the tall side wall.
At Bob's request, the next destination would be to revisit the overlook on Sugarloaf Road near Ohiopyle to see if the morning light would be better for photography. With Brennan's usual expert navigating, they would have gotten there without incident,
except that just before they got there, Bob spotted a point of interest sign (brown wood with inset white lettering) that
said, "Overlook - Fire
Tower Rd." We turned right onto a rugged dirt road and found an overlook at a Tee in the road,
but no fire tower was in sight, so we tried the right leg of the Tee first. It
just looped down to the main road again, so we tried the left leg of the Tee.
Of course, dirt roads in the mountains are always an adventure. You have
no idea where they might take you, maybe even to a dead end.
After many miles of rough and rougher road, going down hill all the way, we found ourselves in civilization near a
railroad, a river, and a town like Ohiopyle, bustling with kayaks, mountain bikes, and white water rafts. But we soon discovered that we were not in Ohiopyle, but in Confluence.
A check of the map showed that we were twenty miles away from Ohiopyle on good paved roads including a retrace of Sugarloaf
Road past the innocent "Overlook - Fire tower Rd sign (the one with no fire tower).
Eventually, we found the previous night's overlook and took pictures just so we would not have to come back again. We drove on to Ohiopyle and were going to park at Cucumber Falls so we could have lunch down at the river again, but the lot was full so we drove way back into the Cucumber Run Picnic
Area and ate there.
We drove on to Kentuck Knob, and got into a tour of this Frank Lloyd Wright designed house that had only been open
to the public for a year. At the visitor center, they asked if we had a reservation,
and since we didn't, they said we could wait around on standby in case there was a no-show.
There was room on the next tour so there was not much of a wait. This
house is still owned and lived in by the second owner, but they have a staff showing it to the public because they believe
it should be shared. This house is More of a "home" than Falling Water. There are lots of magnificent wood surfaces, and repetitions of hexagon shapes. The furnishings are of course grand, but they do look livable. There are the usual Frank Lloyd Wright narrow corridors between rooms that remind me of spelunking in a
limestone cave. The yard outside had a set of steel wind chimes that looked like
the wetland plant we call Cat Tails. When the breeze picked up, they collided
with each other making lovely tones. Brennan commented that his books on architecture
do not do justice to the magnificence of his designs.
After the tour, we asked if we could walk down the drive to the public parking instead of riding the shuttle bus that
brought us up. There was no objection from the "oh so proper" guide. So Brennan and I walked slowly back down the half mile twisting driveway past the four foot wide, eight
foot high section of the actual Berlin Wall, past the twelve foot high sculpture of an apple core complete with giant bite
marks, all part of the art collection of the owner, a member of the Upper House of England's Parliament.
From Kentuck Knob, we stopped at the Ohiopyle State Park Campground to get a map of the park, and selected a trail
to hike that would get us down to the Youghiogheny
River to watch the rafts in heavy duty rapids. We started at the Old Mitchell Place parking lot, which is more accurately, the river runner's takeout parking lot. There is a gated road, open only to the shuttle busses, to bring rafters up from the river to their cars
parked in the lot. It was already late afternoon, so the parking lot was buzzing
with the sound of wet suits being peeled off by exhausted paddlers. We followed
the Mitchell Trail away from the mobs through an overgrown meadow, a mixture of tall grasses, short trees, and shrubs that
reduced visibility off the trail to just a few dozen feet. The green grass path
seemed to have been maintained by a large riding mower driven across the meadow with the blades just two inched off the ground. At the far end of the overgrown meadow we took a turn onto the Kentuck Trail that
headed into the forest as a more reasonable rocky narrow path. That turned into
a steep downgrade then an even steeper grade down to a paved bike-bike trail on an abandoned railroad bed that paralleled
the river far below.
We searched along the hike-bike trail for a route down to the river, first for about a half mile to the left. But that was the down river direction. The
trail stayed level and the river kept getting lower and thus further away. We
tried a difficult foray down what first looked like trail to a spot too steep to continue.
It was amazing that after ten minutes of scrambling down the slope holding onto tree roots to keep from falling that
we didn't seem to be any closer to the river, and had to turn back.
So we doubled back on the bike-hike trail the other way past Sugar Run to Jonathan Run and found a way down to the
Yough. Once there, we realized that there were no rapids on this stretch of the
Yough and not many more rafts on the river, since it was so late in the day. We
started the long hike back up the hill and felt proud to make it back to the junction with the Mitchell Trail in just a half-hour. But instead of going back across the overgrown
meadow, we decided to take the longer way back to the parking lot by following the rest of the Mitchell Trail loop around the ridge, about twice as far. By the time we got back to
the car, the lot was nearly empty and we both agreed that the hike was one of the top ten most boring hikes we had ever taken.
We drove back to camp at Old Germany State Park and had Dinty Moore Stew with apple and orange slices on the side. We
were two tired puppies by the time we got to bed.
