WV Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge

 

My path into environmental history began when I was ten. That was a long time ago. So was the Pleistocene epoch to a ten-year old tom-boy who roamed the woods and old sand mines near her home almost like a feral animal. On one of those energetic expeditions found a shard of fossilized tusk. It was only about four inches long and heavily weathered but I knew right away what it was since I had been immersed in the Ice Ages at the local library, studying pictures of short-faced bears and saber-toothed tigers. My imagination burned with excitement when I learned that the piece of tusk belonged to a Wooly Mammoth. 

Add a short-faced bear and a few tapirs to complete the scene

The Pleistocene really wasn't that all that long ago. It's only been a geologic blink-of-an-eye since the great megafauna roamed this region as it was then, tundra, savanna, boreal forests, and vast wetlands. That piece of tusk I found when I was ten was gifted to a family dentist in my thirties because "it's a tooth and you should have it!"  since it was he who identified it for me. It was Dr. Silver who lent me several yellowed copies of Academy of Natural Sciences Journals to "graduate you from picture books" when I was in my teens. 

Canaan Valley NWR Visitor Center

I can easily rekindle that childhood excitement when I have the opportunity to explore a landscape that, minus its Ice Age animals, is pretty much as it was 75,000 years ago. Currently under ongoing restoration to revive historic Red Spruce forests that were destroyed by intensive logging in the early 20th century, I spent a day fully immersed in the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. I wanted to see what spruce forest restoration looks like thirty years in. 

Familiar tree seeds and nuts from the Port Kennedy Cave (Mercer, 1899)

Ringed by the mountains of the Monongahela National Forest, the valley is a center of tourist and outdoor recreation activity - ski slopes, resort-style communities, and golf courses. But there are many small farms, too, and the small Mon-Town of Davis. For the day's exploration, I brought my favorite Ice Age stuffy -my grandkids named him "Woolsey" to take fun pictures in his ancestor's native habitat. I also brought on my tablet a pdf copy of an 1899 article by Henry Mercer, a Pennsylvania  who worked in the Port Kennedy "Bone Cave" site at Valley Forge. I first learned of the exciting finds of the Bone Cave and Henry Chapman Mercer, a Pennsylvanian archeologist and historian, while reading those old copies of the ANS Journal. I am happy to see that Journal has been archived online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 

Add Mastodons and 

Mercer had been part of a crack team of celebrated American archeologists that excavated one of the richest troves of Pleistocene animal and plant remains ever found in North America at the time. His 1899 report is a classic telling of the dig site and what the remains meant to the developing story of North America's paleo past. It's a great read if you love the history of American paleontology (which I do) but it is also a trove of information about the plant communities that covered the Mid-Atlantic between 15,000 years ago to as far back at 2 million years ago, a period known as NALMA (North American Land Mammal Age). 

Bracken fern

I can imagine Teddy Roosevelt sitting on his veranda at Sagamore Hill in NY glued to a reading of this issue of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences Journal (for a copy sits on a table in the NPS restored Roosevelt home) and sharing his excitement with his children. What readers discover is that the plant material recovered from the Port Kennedy site represent ancient landscape populated by plant communities all very familiar to us today, plants that co-evolved with their herbivore mammal cohorts like Hickory, Walnut, Locust, Oak, Crab Apple, Red Spruce, Pine, Aspen, Poplar, Ash, Gum, Tamarack, Willow, Heath Berry (Bog Bilberry, Blueberry, Huckleberry, Cranberry) among others.

Remains of the Beale Road Bridge over the Blackwater River

To include the restoration of Red Spruce to the Canaan Valley, the forest and open grasslands  within the refuge is claimed to be a nearly intact Middle Pleistocene landscape minus its NALMA mammal assemblage, of course. The conserved landscape within refuge boundaries is classified as a high altitude post-glacial ecological complex that represents the climatic conditions, flora, and fauna of hundreds of thousands of years ago as glaciers to the north came and went. Everywhere I wandered I saw the efforts of the NFS and USFWS to restore the Red Spruce. But I also saw evidence that the restoration efforts were being challenged by invasive plants, habitat degradation, and development. 

Hornbeam and Hickory compete with Red Maple

Technically today we are still in the Late Pleistocene, still locked into the cycle of ice ages but challenged by rapid changes brought about by human-caused global warming. I asked a staff person at the Visitor Center about those challenges and what's ahead for the restoration of these sub-alpine environments. He explained that invasive plants arrive all the time with the landscape industry often destined for developments and resorts and are a constant threat to preserving the ecological integrity of cold-adapted landscapes. "These plants spread from more developed areas and are surviving and spreading into places that maybe a hundred years ago they wouldn't have thanks to warmer conditions and changing soil chemistries." 

Restored Red Spruce glades

Dr. Maria Wheeler-Dubas of the Phipps Botanical Garden in Pittsburgh states "It is important to note that while, yes, the global climate has always changed, we humans have caused a change in climate that is unprecedented in speed due to our greenhouse gas emissions over the past one hundred and fifty years. It is not accurate to compare the naturally changing climate to the human-made climate change we are unfortunately seeing today."  Knowing this, the park staffer explained, the effort to protect and preserve these very old landscapes is proving to be a real challenge. He described the constant battle against non-native and/or non-regional trees, grasses, and shrubs that spread into the refuge as ongoing and never-ending.

Restoration area reducing Red Maple.

He pointed out one of the areas that I had hiked around that morning on the Beall (pronouced as Bell) Trail where active restoration of a wet meadow grassland involves toppling hundreds of invasive Red Maples to make open ground for Alder, Witch-Hazel, and other wetland shrubs. While conditions now favor the rapid expansion of this southern native tree into the refuge's northern hardwood forests, he warns that Red Maple threatens to become a monocrop as it claims once open grassland. "It's the onslaught of Red Maple that threatens the biodiversity of our remaining hardwoods and meadows. Since periodic 'low' fires have not been part of the natural cycles of this landscape for over a century and saplings are surviving in conditions made even more ideal by warming,  Red Maple now seems to take over open ground and forest edges faster than ever."

American Crabapple (Malus coronaria) adapted to cold and wet conditions

The Beall Loop Trail winds along an old logging road close to the restoration area where tree crews have felled hundreds of Red Maples to allow an Alder wood to grow. A lone Red Oak stood against a backdrop of toppled trees and to someone who might not appreciate the work going on here, it does look destructive. But is also difficult to understand just how challenging this work is when even the rain that falls seems to be working against the effort. Acid rain, polluted by coal-fired power plants of the Ohio Valley to the west, falls here year-round and Red Maple, more tolerant of acid soils, seems to have the upper hand as regeneration of Oaks and Hickories are suppressed by leached soils. One strategy calls for felling of Red Maple in conjunction with application of lime-based fertilizers, selective use of herbicides, and prescribed fire. "It's an extremely complex restoration effort," he tells me.

A banded marsh - layers of native heath, grasses, alder, and forest glades

I visited the new Freeland Boardwalk Trail that offers a wonderful immersion into a vast wetland complex at the south-center of the refuge. Over 8,500 acres of wetland are protected across Canaan Valley with twenty-three different wetland types identified. The boardwalk trail gives a glimpse of some of the wetland complexity and biodiversity as well as a distance view of Red Spruce reforestation. It's pretty impressive and I have a newfound and great respect for the work being done here.

Prickly-tree Clubmoss 

There were many birdwatchers out and I spoke to one who seemed disappointed by the lack of birds today.  He said it should have been chock full of migratory songbirds, sparrows, and hawks. "No matter," he said, "That's what birding is all about, the spontaneity of those really good days against the days when it seems like nothing with feathers wants to show up." Just then a family of Ravens coursed overhead and they stirred up three Meadowlarks that flew into brush from the grass tussock marsh. Then a low flying Rough-Legged Hawk appeared and disappeared. "Oh! He's early!" And everything seemed right again. 

Basswood 

The sun was low in the sky when I finished the third of three hikes on the refuge and besides the group of birders out on the boardwalk and the staff  person I  met at the Visitor Center, I met no one else on the trails. This was the solitude I had been aching for over the past several months and for a few moments at my truck, packing to leave, I realized that I really didn't want to go. Instead and now at dusk, I walked down a short paved trail to an old dilapidated bridge across the Blackwater River as clouds filled the sky and the winds began to bluster. Rain was on the way. Can you imagine, I asked Woolsey, if we were to see a herd of  Wooly Mammoths plod through this floodplain or hear a Giant Ground Sloth crushing walnuts with his powerful jaws? 

Hickory Tussock Moth

As if someone had listened in to my talking to a plush toy, I jumped at a nasal growl followed by a big kerplunk. A Beaver cruised under the old bridge, annoyed by my presence, grumbling as he went and when I failed to vacate my sit spot, he gave the water another huge slap with his tail. Much smaller than his distant and extinct Pleistocene ancestors that grew to seven feet in length, this modern Castoroides has a much bigger brain than his long-gone giant-sized relatives. The decline of the Pleistocene Beaver coincided with the arrival of the Clovis people 75,000 years ago, the first of many human incursions into past and present landscapes of the Canaan Valley. That little guy under the bridge was not only smarter but part of a success story in the modern conservation landscape, restored to wild populations in West Virginia in the 1930s after having been extinct in the state since 1830. 

The Red Spruce forest restoration effort across the Dolly Sods and Canaan Valley high altitude landscapes is impressive and guardedly optimistic. Of the thousands of Red Spruce saplings that I observed while visiting the Appalachian Highlands I acknowledged that they had been planted by human hands. Started by the CCC in the 1930s, during a period of some of the first landscape-level restoration efforts to include forests and wildlife, the rewilding of West Virginia has been a multi-generation, nearly century long process. I can't wait to go back and see more.

Notes:

Henry Mercer's 1899 report "The Bone Cave at Port Kennedy" (Article IX, pp 269 - 286) in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Science, Philadelphia, Vol XI 1897 -1901.  Biodiversity Heritage Library online. Of the ANS Journal's most enthusiastic readers was Teddy Roosevelt. 

 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/36863427#page/8/mode/1up

National Park Service History Bulletin #23 (2) Fall 2005 "On the Trail of an Important Ice Age Fossil Deposit" by Matt Daeschler, et. al. 

"The Pennsylvania of Yesteryear" by Phipps researcher and educator Dr. Maria Wheeler-Dubas in Western Pennsylvania. 

Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge https://www.fws.gov/refuge/canaan-valley

WV Monongahela National Forest: Forest Road 75

FR 75

Forest Road 75 cuts across the high plateau north-south through the Dolly Sods Wilderness area and acts as a transect line that accesses a range of wetland types, forests types, and heath glades. All the popular trails through the Sods connect directly or via connector trails to this road but the trailheads on this day were very busy. I chose instead to avoid the high traffic areas and simply pulled off here and there to explore, taking a few short trails or by bushwhacking in. I used my Purple Lizard map for the Dolly Sods/Seneca Rocks area to find all those cool places most people miss or skip. 

Autumn Meadowhawk

The wetland complex that is the Dolly Sods Wilderness contains exceptional ecological treasures from moss and cotton grass bogs to beaver meadows to vast heathland swamps. But because they are high altitude at 4,000 feet or higher, these places are also highly sensitive to things like air pollution and warming. Numerous research sites are sprinkled throughout the wilderness area that collect data on how much pollution these wetlands are absorbing and more importantly, how very little it takes to alter the functionality of the wetlands - or even kill them off.  It is a wild but extremely fragile landscape. 

   

Beaver lodge and pond

The mystery of this place, however, is its ability to withstand change and recover from the trouncing human activities have inflicted upon it. How does something so wild and wet and lush claim once to be am artillery range or to have suffered a complete deforestation of old growth red Spruce forests?  How does a place so water-logged and sloggy hold  memory of fires so intense that sods were incinerated to dust? 

Garter Snake and Frog-Supper

This ability to withstand sometimes catastrophic change is the beauty and the beast of the Central Appalachian Highlands. It seems the harder we tried to destroy it the harder it embraces the rebound. I had to giggle a little when reading reviews on AllTrails about the various trails that spider-web across the highlands. "God-awful bloody mud!" "What idiot decided this place was good to hike in?" "Everything is wet! Water everywhere?!" Seems like a few hikers could not embrace the literal suck.

A grass bald with Red Spruce glade ringed with heath layers

Narrowleaf Bottle Gentian 

At the trailhead to the North Forest Loop Trail I parked in the shade of a Hemlock and Spruce transition woods and walked the road a bit before plunging down the trail. As I walked a group of very vocal Red Squirrels, screaming and chucking, came blasting to the edge of the woods and scattered in an explosion of fur and noise. My heart jumped into my throat as a big Fisher appeared, dark and thick and growling as chased a Red Squirrel into the open  road but when it saw me standing feet from it, it careened off into the shadows. The squirrel shot one way, fisher the other.

Stag-horn Clubmoss

Once on the loop trail I found the little Stag-Horn Clubmoss almost everywhere up to the very edges of a beautiful grass bald. Lycopods were once the dominate plant family in these ancient landscapes from 425 million years ago through the Carboniferous Age and its remains along with ferns formed the bulk of the organic carbons locked up in West Virginia's coalbeds. Some Lycopod species grew up to 100 feet tall while other species grew at every layer in the forest column.  The little Stag-Horn forest that lined the trail hosted a bunch of beautiful Smooth-tailed Hover Flies that sat warming in the patches of sun at the edge. Such beautiful little flies but my camera phone was inadequate for the capture. 

Inside a Red Spruce glade

Also missed by my phone camera was a very exciting sighting of a Yellow-Banded Bumble Bee, a rare sight anymore in the Mid-Atlantic except for these high altitude wetland meadows. I stood and watched two males bob and weave among the low Cranberry mat that grew tight against the edge of a Spruce Glade. Again, I wished I had brought my better camera and lens, both of which still need repair ($$).

Iconic Yellow Birch waiting for its next fan photos

Yellow Birch

Of course I had to stop to pay my respects to one of FR 75's most iconic trees, an old gangly Yellow Birch that grew up in a sunny glade now surrounded by young Spruce and Pine. Thanks to social media, this old soul has become something of a Dolly Sods celebrity for selfies and family portraits. I waited in line (!) to get my chance to photograph this great tree without people posing for the cameras. It was hugged on, patted, even kissed. A family was thrilled to have found it and told me that after the Sycamore on Hadrian's Wall was attacked by vandals (sawed down) they have made it their mission to find and photograph themselves with as many of the "great trees of our region" as they could this year. They named a dozen or more Champion and iconic trees in western PA, Virginia, and West Virginia they'd located each weekend since mid-summer. 

Tawny Cotton Grass

I stopped to explore several other wetlands and was so happy to add Smooth Greensnake to my list but again, unable to photograph it with my phone before it slithered away into the underbrush that encircled a beautiful Cotton Grass meadow. Old logging roads and a walk out to a hawk watch station led me to a field of red-berried  Mountain Ash and past some very impressive Allegheny Mound Builder ant mounds, where the ants were busy provisioning for winter.

Agueweed

American Mountain Ash

Witch-Hazel 

After hours and hours exploring along FR75 the intersection with the steep and winding FR19 had been reached, and so my exit for now from Dolly Sods. My ears popped as my truck angled down and down for the valley below with a stop to examine an outcrop of shale and the small shale barrens plant community that surrounded it. But it was not a safe place to be parked for long on a hairpin curve!

Notes:

Purple Lizard Maps are my favorite maps to use in the Mid-Atlantic and if you had one you'd know why. I used the Dolly Sods and Seneca Rocks map on this trip. Beautiful map!

WV Monongahela National Forest: Dolly Sods and Bear Rocks Preserve

 

Red Spruce and Blueberry 

The Appalachian Highlands region covers portions of nine Eastern U.S. States and is described as one of the wildest and most biodiverse mountain regions in the world. Embedded within the Appalachian Highlands region are some really interesting places that, like most of the Appalachian Mountain range are unique chapters in the ongoing story of industrial exploitation and ecological recovery of the last two centuries. I'm on my annual pilgrimage into the Pleistocene and have landed in the Monoghela National Forest to see what stories I can dig up. Yes, I have my Woolly Mammoth, Woolsey, in my backpack. 

Sandstone cliffs of the Allegheny Front 

The Bear Rocks Preserve is part of a 17,500 acre conservation area that contains a high altitude heathland, wetlands, and remnant Red Spruce forest known as the Dolly (Dahle) Sods. It is a remarkable sub-alpine landscape, part of a larger complex defined by cold winters, a very short growing season, and plant communities that resemble the upper boreal of Canada. To stand at the top of the sandstone block cliffs, weathered by water and ice, one stands on the edge of the Allegheny Front facing east looking into the Ridge and Valley Province. The Allegheny Front was one of the most serious impediments to westward expansion of the 1700s but once the fortress-like wall of the mountain was breached by roads through and over the steep water and wind gaps, settlers did come but they did not stay long. 

Frost-nipped fern frond

 

Red Spruce

Ancient Red Spruce and Hemlosk forests once covered the vast heathlands but industrial logging operations eliminated these highland forests in the late 1800s and early 1900s leaving tons of volatile slash behind. Lightening strike fires and careless fires started with railroad equipment ignited the mountain tops and several major wildfires burned hot and uncontrolled  with a most historic wildfire-firestorm consuming most of the 650-acre Dolly Sods area in 1930. With repeated burns that spanned three decades, this scenic area now afire with the red blaze of blueberry heath, was nothing more than a high altitude desert. At an altitude of 4,800 feet, Dolly Sods was biologically dead. 

Water-worn sandstone 

"A River Ran Through It" sculpted stone

To add insult to injury, the area was used during WWII as an artillery testing ground and firing range. The expansive desert-like plains exploded with shelling from 1943 to 1944 as mountain artillery divisions practiced for warfare in the Italian Alps. It is hard to imagine a place so beautiful now, laid to waste after fires and being fired upon. What makes it even more remarkable is that it even became a conservation area at all, given that private landowners that included the Western Maryland Railroad and Virginia Electric and Power refused to sell the land for decades even as the Monongahela National Forest was enveloping the mountains all around in protected land. It wasn't until 1993 that the Dolly Sods came under conservation management with large purchases made by the Nature Conservancy and  designations made during the Obama Administration under the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009.  

Flagged tree shaped by ice and wind

Flag trees at 4,800'

While exposed rock and vast plains of low growing heath plants mark the present character of the Dolly Sods plateau now, it is even harder to imagine a dense old-growth forest composed of ancient conifers that averaged ten to twelve feet in diameter.  These relic forests existed here for millions of years before the logging industry destroyed them in less than fifty. These conifer communities with understories of  fern and dense, peaty soils tens of feet thick contained untold numbers of peat community species including boreal bird species, salamanders, mammals, and insects. These relic communities originated during the Pleistocene Epoch when glaciers covered much of the Northeast and bitterly cold climates prevailed southward into Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains though no ice sheets extended beyond northeastern Pennsylvania into these parts.

The Pleistocene woodlands of the ancient Dolly Sods were rainforests, dependent upon ample rain and snowfall and thick blankets of fog that still blanket the mountains in fall and spring, sometimes for days on end. The forested plateau now devoid of any of its  rich peat beds due to 20th century fires, held vast amounts of water that ran beneath the cover of peat and humus as hidden rivers into the western basin of the present Canaan Valley. What we see today across this vast low plain of heath is a tiny fraction of the ecological wealth that once existed here. Whether we will live long enough to see those old Spruce forests return is unknown but efforts are underway by both the National Forest Service and the West Virginia Nature Conservancy to re-establish Red Spruce forests across the Dolly Sods conservation area and throughout historic high altitude and valley glade sites of the Monongahela. 

Notes:

West Virginia Nature Conservancy https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/west-virginia-dolly-sods-and-canaan-valley/

Forensics Guide for Unexploded Ordinance in Dolly Sods, Amy Richmond Aylor (2008) https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3608&context=etd

Monongahela National Forest  (NFS) https://www.fs.usda.gov/mnf

PA: York Iron Company Mines/ P. Joseph Raab County Park

 

As I hiked the short loop trail at P. Joseph Raab County Park in southwest York County, I imagined the sounds of this place during its time as a sprawling iron mine landscape, the voices of quarry men, who mostly likely spoke Welsh or the dialects of Northumberland and Cumbria, England. I imagined the sounds of heavy hand held star-bit drills and the clang of metal on metal as the  hammermen, who were trusted with good aim, pounded the drills into the hard Phyllite deep enough to make a blasting hole. 

Trench pit

The sounds of mules and horses whinnying was real enough coming from a farm nearby so it was easy to imagine the sounds of heavy ore wagons being pulled, thudding and creaking, over the rocky roads.  These were hand dug mines with their open pits and deep shafts that reached thick veins of heavy Hematite ore. The massiveness of mined landscape surprised me - all done by human hands. 

Milky Quartz

York Iron Company made a good bit of money off this large mine as it was a very productive site for over forty years.  Now grown over into mature Chestnut /Hickory hardwood forest the park still feels busy as if a team of mules pulling an ore wagon could come over the rise of the well-used path at any time. I imagine the smell of black powder and blasted rock and the metallic dust of the ore.  Ore delivered to York furances and foundaries during the Civil War was made into the cannons and cannon balls that roared and thundered to life at the Battle of Gettysburg and were used in the fierce atrillery engagements that followed down in Maryland and Virginia. 

Cut-Leaf Goldenrod & Green Metallic Sweat Bee

Finding big veins of quartz was an indicator of rich Hematite nearby and was often attached directly to it. It was dumped into waste heaps that line the old roads. I kicked a few chunks around and found several Hematite adhesions too small to be worth anything to the mine company but heavy in the hand, rusty black. Lying by delicate fronds of Cut-Leaf Goldenrod sat a big chunk of Milky Quartz and Amos licked a dark adhesion and immediately regretted it. The sharp metallic taste no doubt offended his finely tuned taste buds! 

Rimstones of weathered Phyllite slabs (fortress ramparts)

Amos and I ventured out to the rim of the largest pit, a deep cavernous trench that dropped a hundred feet at its deepest point from the weathered rimstones on top. It was so deep that I couldn't see the bottom from two different overlooks. The trail was faded and maybe not quite  "official" but signs of people having bushwacked up from the creek and across the wooded knoll were everywhere. 

 

Witch-Hazel

There were piles of stacked stone, spray painted outcrops, beer cans, trash. I picked up the beer cans and trash and stuffed all of into a trashbag then into my pack. The trail clung tight to the edge of the pit and Amos and I moved cautiously down, me mostly on my arse and him on his haunches, to the creekbed below. On the slide I picked up more trash but admired the fall-blooming Witch-Hazel. At bottom two American Crows swooped down to the creek and began bathe. I watched the sunlight play off their feathers as they stooped into the pools and splashed in the shallow water. There seemed to be an aura around the birds as the water flew in arcs around them in the humid air.  Such fun to watch.

Deep, steep pit! 

Overhead Crows were calling, rallying, gathering in dozens, and soon the woods were full of them. Thinking about Welsh folklore, it was easy to imagine the high cliff walls of mine behind me formed the ramparts of a castle while the Crows that perched and called over the pit became the Dinas Bran, the Fortress of Crows. In Welsh folklore Crows are the feathered prophets to the great kings and Amos the Coonhound, named for the Old Testament prophet ("Let justice rain down like rushing waters!")  may have met his Celtic cohorts if he hadn't been so oblivious to the racket being raised all around him. He along with the first two Crows to arrive continued to enjoy the creek bed while the feathered hoard decended into the pit and worked over the ground for acorns which were then raining down from the oak trees where branches bobbed from the weight of birds.    

Phyllite cliffs  (Fortress Walls)

We left the Crows to their fortress and acorn-gathering and walked up the creek until we came to a trail crossing. Floods had ripped an old open-grate fording bridge from its anchor points in the bedrock of the creek but it still served to carry hikers over the water. We walked  up the old wagon road past several open mine shafts gated now by the Pennsylvania Game Commission for the conservation of wintering Little Brown Bat colonies. Another hiker came down from the highest gated shaft and happily reported that he was the volunteer responsible for monitoring bat activity. 

Bat conservation cave (Mine shaft)

"We go in now and then and do proper counts, pick up trash people toss in and whatnot," he said. He was very proud of the fact that this particular mine shaft has been housing upwards of 130 Little Browns each winter. He thinks that number may be increasing and he was looking forward to the winter. He remembered coming to the old mines before it was a park. "Oh the fun we had here as kids!  This is where I first encountered bats and have loved them ever since." I agreed! As kids we had an abandoned sand and gravel mine near where we lived and we were always there exploring, playing, riding gravel before gravel riding was even a thing.  While we chatted, Amos was luxuriating in the spill of cold air pouring from the mine shaft. Glorious. 

Panicled Aster

A cool down for a hot hound. 

Notes: 

Jeri Jones is many years retired from York County Parks, but as a geologist and educator, his work on regional geology and industry is found on his website and in local papers. He appears frequently around the region for talks and tours. And he has a good Welsh name. 

Jones Geological Services https://jonesgeo.com/

Rock Zoom Room - (which often features my cousin Andrew "Rockhound" Eppig)  YouTube Channel (Jeri Jones) https://jonesgeo.com/zoom-rock-room/

York County Parks:  P. Joeseph Raab Park brochure  

Though some of the trail system in this park follows wide wagon roads, some of the trails are quite rocky and steep. A section of rim trail around the deep pit mine is "sort of" closed off but it is clear that many folks continue to use it, as I did.