Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area, WV

This was the view from our campsite right on the Allegheny Front in the Roaring Plains West Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia.  Apparently, there's also a Roaring Plains East, but even the Google can't tell you anything about it.

We spent three nights here, and let me tell you, Roaring Plains Wilderness has finally been discovered by the outside world!  We must have come across 25 or 30 other backpackers and hikers in our time here.  In previous visits, I've usually seen not a single stranger...one or two at most.

Ah, but it's October and a long weekend for many folks.  

The spruce trees in this area are lovely and fragrant.  Fall colors were well underway.  Teaberries were ripe and minty on the forest floor. 

To get here, we rode bikes 3 miles from Forest Road 19 to the entrance to the wilderness area.  I've been to Roaring Plains 6 or 7 times already; it makes a nice alternative to the uber-crowded Dolly Sods Wilderness just immediately to the north.  The 3-mile dirt road is mostly uphill from where we parked, but it was a joy to coast back down the same road on a rainy Sunday afternoon on the return trip to the car--entirely drenched!  Everything in our backpacks was drenched, too.

As we were collecting firewood for our second night at Roaring Plains, my friend came across this desiccated tree trunk that he loved. I mean, he LOVED this thing.  He set it up like a totem to preside over Appalachia from above.  I thought it would make a nice addition to the evening blazes, but he was passionately opposed to burning it in the fire. 

It grieves me that Roaring Plains is being discovered.  It was always one of the places where I could usually count on total solitude.  But its beauty is beyond compare, and it's no wonder people are starting to seek it out.

My little REI Camp Dome 2 tent is a trooper!  I've had it for 15 years, and I've used it in all terrains and conditions.  Torrential, sideways-flying rain pounded it hard from 9:00pm to 10:00am on Saturday evening and into Sunday morning, but it held firm and dry...unlike my friend's new hammock tent.

This is a view of Haystack Knob as seen from a certain campsite along the upper reaches of the Roaring Plains Trail.  We hiked here just to drink coffee and talk about whether reality creates consciousness or vice versa.  (We're real fun.)

There's an unofficial trail from the established Roaring Plains Trail to the edge or "rim."  This secondary path is called the Tepee Trail, and it's a beast of a way.  We traveled it 6 times in 3 days.  Muddy, rocky, overgrown, and beset with many false or misleading routes, the Tepee Trail nonetheless leads to where we wanted to be: the cliffside edge of the world!  Our first two days out there were so dry that we had to retrace our steps daily along the Tepee to collect water at a clear, deep pool right on the pathway.  Little did we know that on our third day at Roaring Plains, every trail would be a 10" deep river of whitewater.  

I'd love to bag the peak of Haystack Knob, which is as yet unclaimed in my peak-bagging club... But like many things out here, there are no known trails, and it's much easier to get lost than you might expect.  In fact, on our second night, while camped out on the rim, we heard 2 hounds baying and baying all night and into the day.  Someone in a valley below honked a car horn endlessly.  I'm sure a hunter was out here training his hunting dogs; two of them got lost, and the hunter returned to his car to blare the horn at them in hopes that they'd come running.  But they were nowhere near the car.  Poor things.  I'm glad they didn't find us and attach themselves to us, as lost dogs will do, but I hope they're okay.

This is what the forest looks like here.  It seems to resemble Alaska more than West Virginia.

Our first two nights at Roaring Plains were calm and dry, and we camped along the rim with magnificent views.  I played the pan flute out over the world below, we gazed at the stars or the fire and went to bed early.  The third night, we relocated to a campsite a little further from the rim because my friend needed more mature trees to hang his hammock tent in the coming rainstorm.  We decided to make that a movie night inside my tent, since it would be nasty outside--and it was.  He requested "Moby Dick," the antique 1956 version with Orson Wells and Gregory Peck--which I downloaded on my phone beforehand, and which is very entertaining.  That Saturday had been gloomy, chilly and gray.  We were just finishing dinner by the fire when 2 women in their early 20s came out of the woods, clearly lost.  They had no jackets, though it was cold, and no gear.  They said they wanted to use the All Trails app to follow the rim back to their car.  We warned them that it was only an hour and a half till nightfall, and they'd never get back to their car on time.  Their best bet would be to go back the way they came and try at an earlier hour tomorrow.  They dismissed our advice and continued along their merry way, following the rim...though we had to show them where the trail was.  I hope they're not lost somewhere out there with the hunting dogs.   

We got saturated on our way out, Sunday.  The trails wound through implacable mountain laurels, dense to the right and to the left, which made footing treacherous.  Mountain laurels will reach out and grab you, and slap you, and take hold of your clothing and refuse to let go.  At our feet, fast-moving water coursed down the trails.  Every path was now a raging brook.  Finding footing in those wily laurels was impossible, so we eventually gave up and just walked in the water, which sometimes reached my knees.  After the bike ride back to the car, we stopped at a new coffee shop-and-bookstore in the town of Thomas to get some coffee and to change our clothes in the restroom.  But my change-of-clothes was drenched, despite being tucked deep into the driest part of my backpack.

Why do we spend our lives in ugly places?

Chautauqua...and a Birdcage

 

This birdcage sits birdless in a corridor in the grand wooden lakeside hotel at the Chautauqua Institution.  The hotel is quite pretentiously named The Athenaeum.  It's a rickety old place with rotting cornices and sloped floors, no air conditioning, and outlandishly costly rooms--narrow old rooms with mismatched antique furniture that could give you splinters...  Actually, I'm glad there are no birds imprisoned in this ornate cage.  No matter how spacious and beautiful, a cage is still a cage.  I need to remember that.  Maybe you do, too.  

By the way, the Chautauqua Institution is what you would get if NPR tried to have a campmeeting.  It's where upper middle class white people go to talk about what poor people need.

The Flatiron Mountains and around Boulder

A lot of people like Boulder, but compared with the Breckenridge area, I found it hot and barren.  Here are a few ridges in the Flatiron Range at a place called Chautauqua Park.  I never tired of telling my brother that it's nothing like the real Chautauqua.

And here's the town of Boulder as seen from the heights above.  It was hot here, and dry, and the sun was blindingly bright and searing.

But the Flatirons are interesting.  My brother and I were just a little worn out, so we didn't give this place the exploration that it deserves.

A ponderosa pine, such a beautiful tree.

Here, too, is a thing of beauty....

Prospect Hill, White River National Forest, Colorado

This is the view from the summit of Prospect Hill in the White River National Forest of Colorado.  This peak stands at a lofty 10,704 feet above sea level, but here in Colorado, it's just a "hill."

Here are more views from the top--which is reached by traveling gravel roads and hiking trails and bushwhacking through ugly clearcuts.  I had to come here because it was only minutes away from our Airbnb, and it was the only mountain near Breckenridge that was left unclaimed in my peak-bagging club.  It's not a 14er, but I decided to aim a little lower for the sake of nabbing the first ascent of a virgin peak.  Almost every mountain out here has been climbed many times over.  But I got this one!  The first ascent of Prospect Hill in my peak-bagging club is mine, all mine!  

Why do I never stop to ask myself WHY no one has ever done the thing I'm trying to be the first one to do?  Maybe others see clearly that it's a foolhardy thing to try--like climbing Zavitsa (see below).  Maybe they know at a glance that it's just not worth their time or energy.  I will not say that nabbing Prospect Hill was not a worthwhile pursuit, but it was a less scenic spot than some mountains in Colorado.  At first I thought Prospect Hill probably got its name from the sweeping vistas it afforded.  After spending a little time there, I discovered that it more likely got its name from all the many ugly strip mines that prospectors dug there in the 19th and 20th centuries.  See how these old barren slag heaps still scar the mountainsides?

Rusting tin cans, broken crockery, discarded barrel hoops...  The miners on Prospect Hill had no sense of preserving the place for future generations...or even just cleaning up after themselves.

This is the view from a different slag heap, which creates a broad overlook above a ruined stream valley where stone "tailings" from gold mines were left to clog the creek.  See the huge gray seam of stones on the valley floor?  We explored that area on foot later the same day.  It's blazing hot out there on all those displaced rocks.

But back up here on Prospect Hill, there's this nice cabin sitting unlocked beside the road.

I wonder if this place was once used by miners.  A mop and broom could make it fully habitable. 

Now, come down off Prospect Hill into the stony wasteland valley below, where gold mining has left such hideous scars.  This thing is called a "dredge."  Not sure how it worked, but it was a gold mine and refinery.  The water in the pond looks deep.

And here we stand out among the horrible rocks that have been left to choke the valley of the stream at the foot of Prospect Hill.  Click on the photo to enlarge it.  It seemed a sad sort of place with the snowcapped peaks of happier mountains in the background.

Click on this photo to enlarge it.  It's a fox!  My spirit animal--if such things there be.  This little red fox was wandering about along the roadside at the edge of the ugly stone "tailings."  Maybe it was looking for a snake to eat.  It's not everyday you see a red fox in broad daylight.  We also saw a mule deer doe up on the mountaintop.  

This is the ubiquitous summit shot at the hitherto-unclaimed peak of Prospect Hill.

The Ghost Town of Dyersville, Colorado

The Boreas Pass Road is right treacherous.  It's a dirt road in the White River National Forest, and it skirts the unguarded tops of high cliffs.  The road is narrow in most places, and the drops are long and sheer.  Not even the flimsiest of guardrails exists for emotional support.  In places, the road squeezes narrowly through rock fissures.  Boreas Pass Road ascends the steep flanks of Bald Mountain over bumpy rocks and deep potholes.  It's maybe a 6-mile drive uphill to Indiana Creek Road, where you hoof-it down to the scattered remains of the old mining camp of Dyersville.  The scariest thing about this road is that it's pretty heavily traveled.  People haul their big campers up here with pickup trucks, and they "camp" along the edges of cliffs.  (By my standards, it's not "camping" if you've got a camper, but you do you.)  I really didn't want to meet one of those rigs coming toward me on Boreas Pass Road, and fortunately I did not.

And this is Bald Mountain as seen from Indiana Creek Road, the place where you park to hike into the ghost town.  These ugly clearcuts are found throughout our national forests, increasingly so as the Trump regime monetizes our public lands for the sake of his billionaire cronies.  

From all that I can find online, Dyersville was a short-lived mining town that was founded in 1881 by a tough Methodist clergyman and prospector named John Lewis Dyer--affectionately known as "Father Dyer."  All we found at the town site was a ruined boardinghouse, pictured here, and a livery stable, pictured below.

A livery stable was a place where you could pay someone to care for your horses while you were in town.  You could rent a horse or pack-animal here as well.  Rev. Dyer took refuge in this valley from the raucous frontier settlement of Breckenridge, along with his third wife, in hopes of leading a quiet life.  But the good parson staked a claim here and opened a lead mine, which attracted the exact sort of people he was fleeing--hard-up miners from all the world over, desperate men who up-and-left all they knew for a chance at striking it rich.  Many of these newcomers were drinkers, and carousers, and gamblers, and brawlers.  Father Dyer and his wife didn't like the element that had followed them here, and so, after just a few years in the town they founded--the town that bore their name--they moved on.  The lead mine dried up, and the town was abandoned.

This shot was taken inside the ruined boardinghouse.  It's not a large place, but it has a lot of windows for a log structure.  The interior was probably partitioned flimsily in order to created a degree of privacy for lodgers.  

Here's Indiana Creek Road, wending its long dusty course down to the path that leads to Dyersville.  Colorado has a whole lot of things named after Midwestern states.  Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa feature prominently in the place names of Colorado.  My brother had never seen a ghost town, so we learned about this one online.  It's not a commercialized ghost town with tours and well-preserved buildings.  It's a genuine ghost town with little left to prove that 150 souls briefly called it home.  I found out after returning to our Airbnb that the old lead mine is only a quarter mile from the town site, along a clear path.  After the harrowing drive up the mountainside in a rented car, I told my brother that he could drive back downhill while I went fetal in the backseat.  But once we got back to the car, after exploring Dyersville, I recovered my courage and drove the downward course as well.  That night, I dreamed of falling off cliffs in a Nissan Sentra.

White River National Forest, Colorado

A wedding called me away to Colorado, so I decided to go out a few days early with my youngest brother and make a mini-vacation of it.  We stayed in Breckenridge and hiked a few days in the White River National Forest.  What a beautiful place...

We did the Blue River Trail...which was neither blue nor within view of any river, but still lovely.  We bagged the scenic peak of Little Mountain--another Colorado misnomer: at 10,046 feet, it's hardly "little." However, it is shorter than all the peaks surrounding it. 

The White River National Forest is vast and mountainous.  The temps were cool, but the sunlight was gruelingly hot.  All the living world bore the calming scent of sunshine on evergreens.

The rare deciduous trees were mainly aspens.  There's not as much diversity in tree populations out there, for all the striking topography.

My brother doesn't get away very often, and he certainly never gets very far from his home--on a farm in Ohio.  When he was young, he and a gaggle of his stoner friends heard that the casinos in Las Vegas served free drinks, so they all four piled into his pickup truck and moved out there.  Between the four of them, they rented a cheap apartment where they all slept on the floor.  The bank started threatening to repossess the truck, so he parked it in the lots of local grocery stores and plazas to prevent them from finding it.  They did eventually locate and take the truck, so our parents flew him back to Ohio--where they were living--after just a few drunken months out west.  Turns out, those casinos don't give free drinks to just anyone who shows up, so there wasn't much point in staying.

All of that is to say, he hasn't seen much of the world, so this Colorado trip was a big adventure for him.  Happily, my brother stopped drinking long ago, and now his life revolves entirely around his family of 6--for whom I am by far the favorite fun uncle.  That's nice, too.  He'd never been away from them for more than one night.  After we'd been in Colorado for 3 days, my 7-year old niece said to her mother (my brother's wife), "I don't even remember what it was like when daddy still lived here."  His 9-year old daughter told him, "I dreamed you died out there and we played rap at your funeral."  

Greece, Part 8

And now the woeful tale of Zivitsa must I recount--the wild Greek peak pictured here.  Looks easy to climb, doesn't it?  You avoid the brown rocky parts and stick to the green gradual parts, and you walk to the top, right?  My glorious ascent was an odyssey, a journey of body and soul...except a weird and weary one with lots of gaffs. My descent was a little less than glorious.

This is the sleepy inland village of Kato Doliano.  On our last full day in Greece, I wanted to bag an unclaimed peak called Zivitsa, which was near our Airbnb.  According to my peak-bagging club's app, no one had bagged it yet despite the fact that there's a trail from Kato Doliano straight up to the summit.  The peak is only 2,445 feet above sea level, but the climb begins at 300 feet--so it's a respectable ascent over rocky terrain.  With an existing trail all the way to the top, I thought it would take me just a few hours and precious little effort.  But you know that I'm sometimes wrong, right?

I arrived in Kato Doliano on a Sunday morning, just as all the little old ladies--and the occasional husband--were getting out of church.  A tiny grocery store was open on the main street of town, so I stopped in to buy some additional water for the trek (which turned out to be a good thing) and to ask about the trail to the summit.  I did a Google-Translate screen shot of my question and showed it to the shopkeeper.  "Can you show me the trail to the top of the mountain?"  But Greeks?  Greeks are not amused by our shenanigans.  They've seen too much wickedness and stupidity to suffer fools.  They're understandably wary of the affluent tourists flooding into their country and asking dumb questions, like how to get to the top of that hill!  The shopkeeper irritably barked my question to the lady in line behind me, who read my phone and tried--in badly broken English--to tell me how to find the path to the top of their mountain, which none of them had ever been foolhardy enough to climb.  Elizabeth was her name.  Her husband was Alexander, and her 3-year old son was Theodore.  Such kind people.  But their directions gave me nothing, so I struck off with only my peak-bagging app to guide me.  A certain village street leads uphill and out of town, diminishing into a narrow dirt lane and wending through olive groves to this view out over Kato Doliano.

It was a pleasant uphill hike on a late Sunday morning, and I had good hope that the narrow dirt track would lead me all the way to the virgin peak.  The whole trek would take me 2 hours, tops.

I was taken aback when snarling, snapping guard dogs jumped at me from inside this abandoned complex.  But they appeared to be chained, so I continued on my merry way.  I pretended I was Orpheus, who sang so charmingly to Cerberus--the guard dog at the gates of Hades--that the dog wept and let him pass.  A little further up, I heard pickup trucks traveling noisily up and down the adjacent lanes through the olive plantation.  I was surprised that fieldhands were made to work on Sundays in such a devoutly Orthodox country. Whenever a truck came close, I resisted the urge to hide behind trees.  I decided instead that if they stopped to ask me what I was doing, I'd simply show them the Greek questions that I'd screen-shot from Google-Translate onto my phone.  Not only was I Orpheus, I was Jason and the Argonauts!  No one could prevent me from accomplishing my mission.

Shortly before the little lane turns left and abandons the app's theoretical trail, ruins of an old orchard-keeper's cottage appear.  Look closely at this photo.  But where the road turns, the app instructed me to keep going straight uphill, traveling a barely-discernable path directly into the Greek woodlands, where (I told myself) the forest god Pan awaited me.  If I were a polytheist, Pan would be my guy!

But Pan?  Pan, too, is a Greek.  He spurned my admiration and met me with thorny, prickly, jagged, scrubby little plants that reached out to grab and cut.  The trail was badly overgrown in most places, but the mountainside smelled gloriously of oregano and something lemony.  The sun was getting hotter, and the morning's sense of ease and excitement soon ebbed as I started to regret wearing shorts and the wrong kind of shoes.  By the time I made it back down the mountain to this spot, my legs and arms would be bloodied and scratched and torn and imbedded with splinters.  

But the trail occasionally emerged from the scrub and led me on a wide and easy course, albeit over slippery gravel.  

The higher I got, the harder the trail got.  Briar patches became more frequent, and the broad gravelly pathway gave way to steep rock cliffs that had to be carefully circumnavigated by bushwhacking into yet more brush.  Past a certain point, this "trail" existed only online.

You know how those foolhardy souls who climb Everest are always finding the frozen bodies of other climbers on the mountainsides?  Not too far along, I met up with the skeletal remains of another mountain climber.  This is a large turtle shell, upside down, with my--as yet--not too badly scraped up  leg for perspective.  Note, O Future Self, how you foolishly tackled a wild Greek peak in ankle socks, shorts...and whatever the hell kind of shoe that is...with no traction and no ankle support.

But as the way got harder, steeper, and more dangerous, the views just got better and better.  Whenever the trail was discernable at this height, which was rarely, it was composed of slippery, gravelly rock.  I continued to follow the way that was marked on my app, but which was usually invisible to the eye.  It frequently ran into the base of tall stone cliffs, and I knew that I'd eventually have to climb one or two of them.  Now...real mountaineering requires three things I do not possess: 1) Gear; 2) Knowledge; and 3) Courage.  At this point, I asked myself if sparing my own life was worth the loss of what little self-respect I had.  But I couldn't turn back.  This was my last opportunity to bag a real Greek peak before heading home on the morrow, and I'd be the first in my club to bag Zavitsa!  Plus, I wanted to see the Aegean from the top.  After a lot of brutal pushing, I finally reached a spot where a crevasse appeared in a rock face before me.  I thought I could use it to climb past the first round cliffs near the summit.  (Why do so many mountains--even in humble Pennsylvania--save their steepest, rockiest ramparts for the area just below the peak?  Must have something to do with the violence of the force that created them.)  I'd have to use both hands to scramble freehand up the crevasse, but it looked far more possible than climbing the sheer face itself, which was much too steep and smooth.  The crevasse was only about 15 feet high, leading onto another jaggery bushwhack.  But it was still scary with the world so far below.  The trick would be to remember where this passage was located so that I could use it again to bypass the cliffs on my way back down the mountain.

Hansel and Gretel left a trail of breadcrumbs.  I left no trail at all.  The views from the top of the mountain were nice.  I did indeed see the Aegean Sea.  But the sense of accomplishment was overcome by a nagging, persistent fear.  I was not at ease up there.  First, there were clouds of blackflies swarming.  Second, I smelled cow dung pretty strongly.  I might compare myself to Orpheus (who charmed the hell hound--Cerberus--with a song)...but Theseus I am not!  I did not care to face the Minotaur.  I'm scared of bulls and did not wish to meet one on a mountaintop.  But more than a fear of flies and cows, I had a looming sense of dread ever since making it to the top: Would I really be able to find the crevasse that got me up here?  

No.  No, indeed.  Click on this photo to enlarge it.  Here's the clear blue Aegean in the distance.  I tried backtracking to the crevasse that I'd used on my way up, but it was no use.  There were no recognizable landmarks to guide me.  I tried finding another downward passage, but I kept arriving at the treacherous, gravelly tops of long, steep drops--sheer stone cliffs, some 50 or 60 feet high.  I was running out of water and starting to panic a little.  What if I get stuck up here?  What if night falls around me?  What if my family has to call a rescue team and we all miss our homeward flights the next day?  And for that matter, why isn't my family texting?  What if--in my weakened and frantic state--I slip and fall over the edge?  What if I die on this remote mountain?  I have a daughter and a godson in Africa who will be very sad about that.  In mounting desperation, I made for a radio antenna about half a mile away, thinking there must be a maintenance road leading to it.  I could follow the road down the mountain and hitchhike back to the village and my car.  But there was no maintenance road.  (Did they fly the antenna in by helicopter?)  Eventually, I followed my app back toward the original trail as closely as possible, which led me to a long drop over a rocky cliff.  Keeping that theoretical trail as close as possible, in weary trial-and-error, I managed to find a gradual descent down to a lower cliff face and onto another crevasse that could be descended with a little freehand scrambling.  After about an hour of this, I made it back to the trail, but I was tired!  I still had a 4-mile descent ahead of me.  By the time I stumbled back onto the little lane through the olive grove, it was early evening...and I'd only intended to be gone for 2 hours.  My clothes were torn.  My shoes were ruined.  I had deep, nasty cuts on both legs and arms.  And my self-confidence (already low) was at a real deficit.  I trudged heavily, like a zombie, to the place in town where I'd parked my car, hoping I would not run into the kindly Elizabeth and Alexander and Theodore.  Then I drove away slowly, on a narrow road following dangerous seaside cliffs.  I never looked to the left or to the right.  I gazed straight ahead at the road because those cliffs had lost their beauty...

But you know what?  I bagged Zivitsa...