A Video from the Peak, Mt. Columbia

It’s not a full 360, but here’s what the world looks like from the very top of the magnificent Mt. Columbia in the San Isabel National Forest of Colorado.  It's humbling to climb one of these so-called 14ers and think that only four states in the nation have mountains as high as the one you just climbed.  Those states are California, Alaska, Washington, and Colorado.  A few of Alaska's peaks get a lot higher, but Colorado has more of them.  Somehow I just always used to assume that all the states that share the Rocky Mountain ranges had 14ers, but even Wyoming, and New Mexico, and Utah top out well below 14,000 feet.  Make it full-screen when you watch the video, but do yourself a favor and turn off the audio.  It's just the inane prattle of peak-baggers (and me), profaning a sacred moment with senseless blather....

Mt. Columbia, Colorado: My 1st 14er!

This is Mt. Columbia, as seen from its less impressive western face--the face you'll probably climb if ever you climb it.  Mt. Columbia shall forever be MY mountain.  It's the very first mountain I've ever climbed that exceeds 14,000 feet.  And--because coming down off that mountain took me so long--it might just be the last 14er I ever do.  So...it's my mountain, the one I chose, the one I climbed, the one I'll always talk about and remember.

I'm staying in Buena Vista, Colorado, and there are five "14ers" near here, all of them named rather pretentiously after prestigious universities: Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Columbia.  Together they're known as the Collegiate Peaks, and they're located in the incredibly beautiful Collegiate Peaks Wilderness in the San Isabel National Forest.  I had a day to devote to climbing a mountain, so I picked Columbia in much the same way I pick many things: Because, although it was good, no one else was choosing it.  If Mt. Columbia were, say, 20 miles from Pittsburgh, it would be swarming with climbers.  But because it exists in a place of so many choices, it tends to get overlooked.  Mt. Columbia is massive and beautiful, but it's the least popular of the five.  This is in part due to an infamous steep field of "scree" that causes climbers to lose the trail and to have a hard uphill slog in crumbling dirt and gravel, which makes footing treacherous.  See in this second photo how the trail hugs the mountainside.

Very close to Buena Vista is a narrow dirt lane leading into the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness.  I followed the track at 6:00am and thought, at that hour, I'd be the only person at the trailhead.  But when I got there, I found probably 30 cars already parked there.  Much to my relief, if not to my surprise, most of the people were not headed to Mt. Columbia.  They were headed for Columbia's taller and handsomer brother, Mt. Harvard.  (For me to shun you, all you gotta be is popular.)  But some of the folks there weren't headed for any mountains; they were just camping in the wilderness area, or fishing, or hiking.  I did see a mother moose and her two calves on the long road out to the trailhead.

Mountain wisdom says to go early, get up the mountain, take your selfies, and get down ASAP.  The mountains make their own weather which is unanswerable to the weather app on your iPhone.  You might see that there's only 30% chance of rain in Buena Vista, but that's 7,000 feet below the summit that you're aiming for.  Those summits typically start to collect clouds by about noon and there can be thunderstorms, rain, snow, or hail.  The later you stay up there, the more likely you are to experience any of these.  It glowered and threatened up on Mt. Columbia, starting right on schedule at noon, but the weather held the whole time I was on the mountain...which is to say 11 freaking hours!

Yes, it took me 11 hours to complete this 12-mile trek.  My guidebook listed an average hike time of 8.5 to 10 hours.  I started this trek at the parking area at 6:15am, and I didn't come trudging wretchedly back until 5:30pm--utterly spent and barely able to lift my feet.  The outward and upward leg of the journey was not too hard, the views kept getting better and better, and I was spurred on by the excitement of reaching the summit.  The return was less fun and less easy.  

Here’s a view of Mt. Columbia as seen from the Collegiate Peaks Overlook, which is in the hills east of Buena Vista.  By the time you get above the mountain’s treeline, the trail is rocky and well cared-for, as seen in the second photo.  In places, it's truly a stone staircase, where enormous natural blocks of stone have been arranged into steps, and stone guardrails have been erected, as well as stone supporting walls.  I have no idea how you do that kind of stonework on a steep mountainside, so I was pretty impressed.  

The rocky trail makes long, long switchbacks slowly up the lonely mountainside.  The climb is gradual and scenic.  But then it comes to a certain point where the switchbacks end and all you see underfoot is loose, dusty gravel and dirt.  This is the screefield.  It's long, and steep, and hazardous.  You can't really build a trail on it because it won't hold anything.  Your foot will slide on the loose dirt and gravel, but don't trust the stones here either.  Many stones look stable, but they're planted in loose earth, so your foot will cause them to slide away beneath its weight.  For many years, there was no established path up the infamous screefield on Mt. Columbia.  But within the past two years or so, someone has gone to the considerable effort of establishing a slippery route (if not a trail) through the scree.  And they've marked it with cairns.  It was sometimes hard to locate the cairns on the upward climb, but they were very visible when seen from above, on the downhill return.  

Click on this photo to enlarge it.  This little fellow here is a marmot, and she has set up her mendicant operations at the very pinnacle of Mt. Columbia.  When you top a 14er, you pull out your snacks and drinks to celebrate.  This little friend wants nothing more than to help you celebrate.  But look at the big world beyond, so vast, so lovely.  I wonder if the marmot has eyes for such a view.

Just past the screefield you're rewarded with a saddleback ridge-walk that follows the crest all the way to its peak.  It's rocky but relatively easygoing, and the views are truly amazing.  I wish I knew which of the other peaks were visible in these photos, but I don't.  I do believe the one in the background of this picture is Harvard, but I'm not sure.

Here again is the mirrorlike Bear Lake, which sits isolated and treeless high among the mountains.  It seems that there were only seven of us who peaked Mt. Columbia that day.  We all ended up meeting sooner or later either on the summit or else somewhere else on the mountain.  Four were guys in their 20s, and they peaked at Mt. Harvard first and then followed "the traverse," which is a high, treacherous ridgeline connecting Harvard to Columbia.  In fact, I got the impression that most people never bother with Columbia's peak except as a "2-fer" with Harvard's peak.  Can you imagine being noteworthy in your own right but being constantly overshadowed by others--others that are better or only slightly better than you?  That's why I chose Columbia.  I longed for its loneliness.  I related to it.  Ah, but that's just projection anyway.  The mountain is not blighted by the curse of ego.  The mountain and the marmot are free of envy, free of comparison, free of desire--except to eat, in the marmot's case.  The mountain doesn't care.

There's the summit in the center of the photo, and this is the long saddleback walk to it.  If you look closely you can see in this photo a young couple with whom I shared the trail for much of the distance.  I would pass them, then they would pass me, and the process would repeat.  It was his 38th 14er and her 1st.  She was such a sweet girl.  She asked if we could take a photo together at the top, since it was the first 14er for both of us.  But then we forgot to swap contact info in order to share the pic, and I lost them on the way back down the mountain.  Their 25-year old knees were able to take the descent A LOT faster than me.  I saw her looking back at me worriedly from time to time to see if I was okay.  I mean truly, I don't think I could have made the descent without two trekking poles, which I used like crutches at times to lower myself down onto the next stone.  I think of myself as a relatively vigorous, healthy guy--all things considered.  I'm 52 but thin and physically active.  And yet, the mountains will teach you humility.

There's snow up there year-round.  

I read in a 14er guidebook that there is delicate plant life near the mountaintops.  It was beautiful to see these unfamiliar and yet strangely lush plants growing in the rocks all along the switchback trails just above the treeline.  So many kinds of wildflowers I'd never seen before.  The guidebook also said that many of these plants can live a decade or more.  I kept thinking I smelled marijuana up there on the rocky heights, but it turns out that one of the humbler-looking plants smells remarkably like cannabis when the hot sun is on it.  

And so, will I do another 14er?  Hmm.  My kids are coming out here to join me in the near future, and I'd hate to deprive them of the opportunity of doing an easier 14er--for there are much easier ones to do!  But will 14er peakbagging become my new hobby?  No.  Like so many things, I came to it too late in life.  When I was younger and more physically capable of descending mountains, I hated Colorado for being so popular, and so I never allowed myself to embrace its wonders.  Ironic, isn't it?

Grimfield, New Mexico

It was about 7:50pm when Shirley Milroy got home from her 12-hour shift at the Union County Hospital down in Clayton.  27 miles to and from work is actually a pretty short commute around these parts.  It's not the drive she minds; time behind the wheel gives Shirley a chance to prepare for her work as an emergency room nurse, and debrief.  Doing urgent medical care and triage at the only ER for many miles in all directions, she's seen some strange and disturbing things in her day.  No, the drive doesn't bother her.  What Shirley hates even more than Joe Biden is these damned 12-hour shifts.  Yes, it means she only has to work her nursing job three days a week.  And it means that she gets the other four days off--except she spends three of them cleaning toilets at the rest area off US-87.  But 7am to 7pm for three days straight?  It's enough to make you wanna find another way to live, another way to be.

It was June, still perfect daylight at 7:50pm.  "You've got to do what you've got to do," Shirley thinks to herself, pulling into her driveway.  "If you wanna to stay out here in a place like Grimfield, then you've got to do what you've got to do," including 12-hour shifts and long commutes.  All of Shirley's childhood friends moved away years ago--decades!  But Shirley never had the heart to leave, even though it means gazing daily at her friends' old houses standing vacant and falling into ruin.

"You've got to do it," Shirley repeats...for she's a gal of few words, but when she commits herself to crafting a sentence, she sees no sense in using it only once.  "You gotta do what it takes if you wanna stay in a place like Grimfield."  It was then she thought she smelled cigarette smoke coming from--where?--from the abandoned church across the street. 

Shirley's grandmother, rest her soul, had been a pillar of the old Grimfield Congregational Church.  Shirley herself had been baptized there and remembers attending occasionally on Christmas Eve.  The church was closed by the time she got married to her first husband, Gene.  They'd had to get married at the Methodist Church of Grimfield, which also withered up and died just months after the couple said "I do."  And there both churches have sat ever since--since about 1985 maybe?  The Congregational Church was now home to a monastic flock of mourning doves and rattlesnakes who, like the Prophetess Anna, never left the temple.  Tired as Shirley was, she smirked a little when she thought what old Reverend Stokes might have said if he knew someone was smoking inside his church.  

By June already the grass all around town is dry as tinder.  Lord knows any stray spark could set this whole village alight.  No one would miss most parts of it.  But Shirley had called her tidy little bungalow "home" ever since Grimfield's last mayor had moved away in the late 1990s, and Shirley claimed her house--the nicest dwelling left in town.  It was only then she finally moved out of the now-deserted house she grew up in, just two blocks away.  Cigarette smoke or no, she had to give Ed the Subway sandwich she'd picked up for him back in Clayton, then make him some coffee.  Dinners are rarely formal affairs at the Milroy house.  Ed's her second husband of just a few years.  He got his left arm taken off by a combine harvester some fifteen years ago, and now he sits home and collects disability checks all the while cursing and bemoaning those damn socialists in Washington.  If there's a soul in Union County who has less to say than Shirley, it's Ed.  Deaf as a yucca bush, too.

"You smell cigarettes?" she asks him.  Ed thinks for a moment, looks at his sandwich, which is getting soggy, a meatball sub with provolone and hot peppers, his usual Thursday evening fare.  He looks at his wife, squints, pretends to be concentrating on what she's saying when in fact he's only trying to remember the question.  "Cigarettes?" he finally manages to mutter before pausing.  "No."  And that's the extent of the dinner conversation in the Milroy home.

But there was indeed smoke over at the old Grimfield Congregational Church, and cigarette smoke it was.  As night drew on, Shirley glanced out the window of the vacant front bedroom just to see if there was anything going on over there.  The state police are a long way off.  She finds herself musing on the collection of hunting rifles Ed keeps in their bedroom.  At one point, staring out into the deep New Mexico darkness, she caught a tiny glimmer of dim light, as if someone had flicked a lighter.  But with her aging eyes she couldn't be sure.  It might have been a firefly.  It could have been an isolated flash of lightning; that kind of thing happens all the time on summer nights on the High Plains.

Friday morning just before dawn, Shirley is up early and looking again out the window of her front guest bedroom, staring at the derelict church across the street.  She calls it a "guest bedroom," though most women her age just name their empty bedrooms after the children who used to sleep in them.  Whenever Shirley's friend in Albuquerque invites her to visit she says, "You can have McKenzie's room tonight."  Of course, McKenzie moved to Santa Fe right out of high school to make turquoise jewelry for tourists.  She's never coming back, yet the room still bears her name.  Shirley never had kids, so vacant bedrooms are just guest rooms...even though she's never had many of those either.  There hasn't been an overnight visitor to sleep in the front bedroom since Ed's brother was too drunk to drive back to Raton on their wedding night.  There were no churches left in town by that time.  It was a backyard wedding officiated by a local cowhand who got ordained online.  Still, it was an occasion for drinking and thus for using the two extra bedrooms at Shirley's house--where Ed moved in on their wedding night and a number of unexpected houseguests made the windows rattle with their drunken snoring.

Shirley was sure she'd heard some kind of ruckus coming from the church this morning.  This time it sounded as if someone was over there...moving furniture, sliding things across the dirty floors, maybe even sweeping them with a broom.  If it weren't still dark outside, or if Ed were awake, she might work up her nerve and march across the street to see what was happening.  But despite its great beauty--or maybe precisely because of it--New Mexico is a place of vagabonds and drifters, some harmless, some unfriendly, and others downright menacing.  Shirley's no coward, but an encounter with a dangerous wanderer is the last thing she needs today.  She gets ready for work and tells herself she'll check in on the church this evening, before it gets dark.  

Friday night, not a sound issues from the old house of worship.  "Maybe it was just me," Shirley tells herself.  And because she'd crafted a sentence worth saying one time, she proceeded to tell it to herself a few more times.  "Maybe it was just me."  Why bother to investigate when the trouble has apparently passed?

Think of the things we tell ourselves in order to avoid facing the truth.  Shirley knows there's someone over there in the church, or at least that there had been someone over there, trespassing and probably up to no good.  She knows it, but she'd prefer to believe otherwise.  So she convinces herself that all is well, that she and Ed and a few elderly neighbors will have this little town to themselves forever, that nothing will ever change here, that Grimfield can just go on being the Grimfield she's always known--sans people.  You might expect the few remaining denizens of a near-ghost town to welcome a new resident, even a come-from-away who's taken rooms in the rundown church.  It might push the village's population into the double digits....

On Saturday, things were quiet again.  Shirley had to go work a few hours at the rest stop on the highway.  Ed was home alone all day, re-watching old episodes of "BJ and the Bear" on DVD.  If he heard or smelled anything coming from the derelict church, he didn't mention it when she got home.  "It's frozen pizza for dinner tonight," Shirley announces upon returning from her second job.  "Now I gotta run across the street and check on things."  Ed barely grunts his reply.  It never occurs to him to ask what Shirley might be checking on "across the street" when every building over there has sat empty for decades. 

The sun is blindingly bright, which emboldens her.  "Just gonna check on stuff across the street" she repeats to herself as she marches toward the ramshackle little church where she'd been baptized so long ago.  "Just gonna check on stuff."  Ducking inside the doorway and through the tiny narthex, Shirley is reminded again of Christmases long ago, when there'd be a dozen stationwagons and pickups parked along the snowy street, and the interior of the church would glow warmly with candlelight and carols.  Old Reverend Stokes would be dithering absently about shepherds and angels and stars, and everyone was always so happy.  Shirley hadn't been inside in a very long time.  The building had fallen into the hands of some rancher down in Clayton.  He used it as a personal storage shed until he died and most of his belongings slowly disappeared.  Last she knew, it was just an empty room with busted out windows and the ceilings collapsing here and there.  The remains of old theater seats sat strewn about, along with some rotting mattresses.  But things were different now.  It looked as if someone had cleaned the place up a little.  All the old debris was moved into the choir loft, an alcove along the side of the sanctuary.  The main part of the church was clear with the floors swept and the old theater seats all pushed into neat rows.  Someone had placed a kitchen table up on the dais.  What did old Stokes call that area?  The chancel!  Someone had put a table up there on the chancel as if there were going to be a communion service.  There was a rickety podium up there, too, with a tattered old King James Bible opened to Psalm 84.  These words were underlined in scratchy pencil: 

"My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord. Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself where she may lay her young, even at thine altars.  Blessed are they that dwell in thy house.  Selah" 

"Selah?" Shirley whispers, as a new mystery sends a spooky thrill down her spine.  Two mysteries!  "What's 'selah'?  And who's been sweepin' up in here?"  Troubled by what she'd found, she turns around and goes home to Ed.  But Shirley's not the kind to talk about the things that upset her.  To Shirley's way of thinking, you give things power by talking about them.  And she doesn't dare lend strength to some religious nutcase who's taken up residence in her church.  Talking about him will just make him real.  But...and this thought terrifies her.  But why would anyone straighten up over there unless he intended to...stick around?  And what's this stuff about 'dwelling in thy house'?  Whoever or whatever it was, Ed couldn't do anything about it.  Her first husband, Gene?  So energetic, so attentive, so handsome.  He'd have looked after things.  He'd know exactly what to do, how to protect her.  But Ed?  Just look at him, staring glassy-eyed at the same damn episode of "BJ and the Bear" that she saw him watching a few days ago...while the house fills with the bitter smell of a frozen pizza left in the oven too long.  She and Ed eat their scorched pizza in silence, and Shirley takes the mystery of the church to bed with her--as she has always done with all of life's mysteries.  Why did the Lord take Gene so young?  Why didn't the Lord give me children?  Why do all good things have to die--things like her town?  These are among the mysteries she's taken to her pillow.  And she meets them with the same reply.  "The night brings counsel," she tells herself.  It was an African proverb she'd read in a book when she was a child.  "The night brings counsel."  The repeated phrase comforts her, its sameness, its long tenure in her mind.  It was a bit of wisdom she'd trusted for many years.  It gently rocks her to a fitful sleep.  "One thing's for sure: The night brings counsel."  Even Ed's stertorous snoring lends the house a sense of safety and reassurance.  At least she's not completely alone...

Everything changes on Sunday morning when Shirley wakens with a start at about sunrise.  A long, tuneless moan seems to be rising like a tornado siren from inside the church.  She listens close as a chill sweeps over her whole body.  Is it...is it...singing?  Yes, it sounds just like singing--one of those old hymns she used to hear on Sunday mornings when she lingered in bed half-asleep.  This time, instead of a congregation singing, all in harmony, there's just a single voice, ghostly, thin, haunted.  It sounds shrill and ragged against the silence of the morning, and it sings, "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms, leaning, leaning, I'm leaning on the everlasting arms."  Inside the darkened church, hidden away from the searing near-desert sun, a troubled wraith formerly known as The Snowbelt Parson had "found an house and a nest for himself" in Grimfield.

Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area, Monongahela National Forest

                                       

I'd been eyeing a certain "wilderness area" adjacent to the famous Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia.  It's called the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area.  At 6,792 acres, it's no small place.  But Roaring Plains is dwarfed by its more popular neighbor to the north.  There are only a few trails in the RPW, but there are also views like this one, which is very far from the madding crowds of the Sods--and pretty hard to find.  A view like this is worth a four-hour hike on uncertain trails--unmapped and unmarked.  Fortunately, my companion downloaded the All Trails app, otherwise we might not have found the overgrown pathways leading out to this beautiful and unvisited quadrant of the forest.  I've rarely taken a photo that I loved as much as this one...

Of course, I'm always looking for uncrowded places.  I also frequently choose second best over the best--for the mere fact that I don't want to share.  That's to say, I like to find the beauty in things that I can have largely to myself.  Take Philadelphia for example.  It's a beautiful, modern city where historic buildings and old streets lie hidden in the shade of gleaming glass towers.  If it weren't 90 miles from New York City, it would be famous and noteworthy in its own right.  But people often push past Philly en route to its more glamorous neighbor, and they miss out on all it has to offer just because there's a city nearby that has more.  It's too bad.  I think of the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area as the Philly to the Sods' New York.  You rarely see more than a handful of cars parked along the trailhead parking areas to get into the RPW.  The Sods?  They could build a parking garage on that side of the road!  There are three trails going into the Roaring Plains.  The South Prong Trail is like walking through a muddy, misty garden.

Lady slippers, pink mountain laurel, and spruce trees "flagged" by constant wind--these all stand over broad fields of gray boulders and mountain streams and pools.  The wind blows fast and hard out over this plateau, giving it the evil-sounding moniker "Roaring Plains."  There's also a Roaring Plains East and a Roaring Plains North, which are not within the bounds of the Wilderness Area.  Together with the adjacent Flatrock Plains, this is the highest plateau in the Eastern United States--ranging from 2,300 to 4,700 feet above sea level.

If you compare the RPW to the Sods, it's no wonder few people ever bother to venture into it.  The Sods is bigger, has a more diverse array of topographies and flora, and it has glorious sweeping vistas out over grassy meadows and distant hills.  In the Sods, Red Creek and its tributaries meander among enormous, scenic rocks.  By contrast, the RPW is mostly just laurel and rhododendron thickets with muddy, easy-to-lose trails.  It feels almost...monotonous in places.  But!  But...if you get out away from the official trails and onto the unofficial and unmarked trails, you get views like this--our first grand vista on the Hidden Passage Trail.  There's a dry campsite here.  You'd have to pack in a lot of water.

This is where the pipeline swath makes the leap out over the edge of the Allegheny Front.  I don't know why there are no official trails out to this most stunningly beautiful part of the wilderness area!  You have to find information on YouTube and outdated websites.  We left the South Prong Trail in the Monongahela National Forest and took a narrow little side trail, frequently overgrown and entirely unmarked, a few miles out here to this marvelous place.

If you stick only to the official trails that run through the Roaring Plains, you'll have a nice long walk among thickets and boulders.  You might see some handsome birds and hear woodthrushes in the evening.  If you come at the right time of year, there will be wildflowers, and the land will be fragrant and blooming in pink and white.  It'll be nice.  But better by far to find one of the unofficial trails that will take you to the undiscovered glories of the rim.  If nothing else, you could even just walk down Forest Road 70 to the place where it meets the pipeline swath.  Then turn left and walk southeast on the pipeline toward the great rim of the Allegheny Front.  You'll be rewarded with magnificent views of mountainous grandeur.

This is the pipeline swath where the Hidden Passage joins it.  See where it disappears over the lip of the valley's steep wall on the horizon?  That's where you wanna be!  We chose a series of unmapped paths because they follow the rim and provide excellent panoramas of the world below.  Actually, one of the trails we did not have time to discover in the RPW is called the Flatrock Run Trail.  It runs north down a very steep descent known as "the sliding board," where views out over the Sods are said to be excellent.  Maybe next time.

This and the photo at the top of this post are among the best I've ever taken.  See how the entire view lies in folds.  The clouds above are laid out in grand, dramatic folds.  The hills too appear almost like pleats in a skirt.  The furthest mountains are the bluest, and the shades of blue grow waterier as the distance increases.  Finally, the foreground too is folded in enormous rocks.  This is the view from the so-called Canyon Rim Trail--which you can find online but not on any maps.  We took the Canyon Rim Trail to a very overgrown connector trail known as the Tee Pee Trail, which led in turn to the official Roaring Plains Trail.  I loved having this vast wilderness to ourselves

The pipeline provides an easy roadway, though it is steep and acts as a sort of rain gully in places.  It runs perfectly straight through those dark, Appalachian evergreen forests, crowded down in the understory with wild flowering bushes.

We arrived at about 11:00am on Sunday and planned to stay till Thursday morning, but my backpacking friend had a sharp pain in his shoulder that grew increasingly worse the longer we were here.  On top of that, he started to develop welts on the same shoulder and assumed it was from a bug bite.  This is the misty wilderness garden along the South Prong Trail as we headed home early--on Tuesday--after one full day and two half-days in the RPW.

Turned out he had BOTH shingles and a cervical sprain--aka, "whiplash"--the latter from mountain biking.  Poor guy was in so much pain we ditched our plans, and I took him straight to the ER as soon as we got back to Pittsburgh.

Take Forest Road 19 up the mountainside.  This road runs along the southern length of Dolly Sods.  You park at the trailhead for the South Prong Trail, which is shortly before the picnic area.  Take the South Prong through the misty gardens of the upland Monongahela National Forest.  You can camp anywhere here--it's public land--but you're supposed to stay out of view of the trail.  I saw only a single campsite along the South Prong, which was strange.  Just across the road in the Sods, you find them all over the place.  Here's the first view we got out over the Allegheny Front, from a dry campsite.  

To find the Hidden Passage Trail, I'd estimate that you go just short of two miles on the South Prong.  Then look for side trails off to your left.  If you arrive at Forest Road 70 you've gone too far; turn around.  There are two of them, and they lead to pleasant, remote campsites along the brook.  Beyond these campsites, the unmarked trails lead on further into the woods and to a confusing network of paths.  All of these paths end up converging (I think and hope) onto an overgrown and unmaintained "unofficial" trail commonly known as the Hidden Passage.  Some YouTubers call it the Jonathan Jessup Trail--after a photographer who came out this way to take pictures many years ago.

The Hidden Passage and many of the other unofficial trails are marked only by rock "cairns," little human-made stone piles which are meant to show the way.  But the cairns are inconsistent and frequently missing.  The Hidden Passage takes you to the pipeline beyond which lies the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area.  This was the view from our campsite on Tuesday morning after a rainy start to the day.  It was such a joy to lie on my hammock with the rain coming down hard on the roof, napping into the late morning.

This is the kind of thing you see along the South Prong Trail.  It's pretty in a haunting sort of way.  Boulders, wildflowers, grand spruce trees, all veiled in a ghostly mist.  This trail has no vistas, really--aside from a very small one that looks off to your right, in the opposite direction away from the great rim that is obscured by trees to your left.  The marvelous views only start after you exit the South Prong and the Hidden Passage begins hugging the rim of the Allegheny Front.  

Then views like this are commonplace.

And this.  Just look at the beauty of this scene...

The flanks of the wooded hills in the foreground are also part of the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area, but there are no trails of any kind there--official or unofficial, marked or unmarked.  Somewhere very far out in that direction there is a thing called the Mount Porte Crayon Nature Preserve.  It's the 6th highest mountain in the state.  Hikers are strongly cautioned not to go there unless they are skilled with a map and compass--which I am not.

This rocky meadow was just at the place where the pipeline swath goes over the steep edge of the Allegheny Front.  Click on this photo to enlarge it.  See the first mountain in the near distance?  It's got white, stony cliffs all along its crest.  That's a geographic feature known as North Fork Mountain, which has a 23-mile trail running along its ridgeline.  The problem with that trail is that there are no reliable water sources up there.  Otherwise it could be my next adventure!  On our way up Forest Road 19 in my little plastic Kia, we came across a lady and her teenage daughter trying to push their Cadillac SUV out of the ditch on the side of the road.  The lady was a pediatrician from Charleston, West Virginia, with the deepest southern accent.  She'd run the car off the road trying to avoid sharp rocks.  We only succeeded at pushing her deeper into the muddy ditch.  Another West Virginian--this one a medical doctor too, a PCP--happened along in a big Ram Truck, and he tried to pull her out with a cable.  Like us, he only succeeded at getting her more deeply stuck.  When we came back down the mountain on our way home, the Cadillac SUV was gone, but the muddied and torn up road bore witness to the events that took place there.  I love it when West Virginians speak with southern accents.  It makes me feel so right about things.... (I’ve been saying for years that it’s a southern state because of Stonewall Jackson and the presence of cornbread…and the usually-gentle southern drawl, like Jody Foster in “Silence of the Lambs.”)