Hot Springs National Park ’24

Posted on April 30, 2024 by admin

We arrived at Quapaw Baths in Hot Springs National Park on April 14 in time for a late-afternoon soak.

Or rather, a series of soaks in its indoor pools, which are heated at various temperatures. I might have skipped it, but Yuriko is keen on hot soaks, having come of age in Japan, where they take their hot springs seriously. The bathhouse has been well well restored, considering its former decrepitude.

Good to see Bathhouse Row again after so many years. All together, eight bathhouse structures line Central Avenue in the town of Hot Springs, and are part of the national park; two offer baths. In 2007, because the Quapaw was still unrestored, only one did, so we took the waters at the Buckstaff, which was a more formalized experience than at the Quapaw.

The Lamar.

“[The Lamar] opened on April 16, 1923 replacing a wooden Victorian structure named in honor of the former U. S. Supreme Court Justice Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar,” says the NPS, a fact that amuses me greatly, for idiosyncratic reasons. Mostly it’s NPS offices and other space these days, but I bought some postcards and a refrigerator magnet in its NP gift shop.

The Maurice.

And of course, The Fordyce, now the park’s visitors center and a free museum highlighting its bathhouse amenities. Named for its founder, Samuel Fordyce, one of those roaringly successful business men that the late 19th century unleashed.

“He was a major force behind the transformation of Hot Springs (Garland County) from a small village to major health resort,” the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says. “The town of Fordyce (Dallas County) is named for him, as is the Fordyce Bath House in Hot Springs.

“He enjoyed friendships with Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley, all of whom asked his advice on matters concerning appointments and regional issues.” Ah, there’s the trip’s presidential site, however tenuous.

As for the building, it was “designed by Little Rock architects Mann and Stern and constructed under the supervision of owner Sam Fordyce’s son John, [and] the building eventually cost over $212,000 to build, equip, and furnish.” That’s 212 grand in fat 1910s dollars, or $6.5 million in present value.

I believe I took somewhat better pictures this time around. Maybe.

Directly over Hernando de Soto and the maiden is the Fordyce’s famed stained glass aquatic-fantasy skylight.

Not the only stained glass around.

The Fordyce is an expansive place, and in fact, the largest of the bathhouses, according to the NPS.

Mustn’t forget the spring that made it all possible, whose presence is noted in the basement.

Bathhouse Row is at the base of a steep slope. Climb some outdoor stairs and soon you’re at the Hot Springs Grand Promenade behind and above the row. Not many people were out promenading. True, by the time we got there, it was the morning of April 15, a Monday. Still, people were missing out on one pleasant walk.

The bricked trail was an early project (1933) of the lesser-known but no less remarkable Public Works Administration.

“Unlike the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, the PWA was not devoted to the direct hiring of the unemployed,” the Living New Deal says. “Instead, it administered loans and grants to state and local governments, which then hired private contractors to do the work.

“Some prominent PWA-funded projects are New York’s Triborough Bridge, Grand Coulee Dam, the San Francisco Mint, Reagan National Airport (formerly Washington National), and Key West’s Overseas Highway.”

Further up the hill is the abandoned Army Navy Hospital, whose therapeutic heyday was WWII.

The promenade passes by some of Hot Springs’ hot springs.

The path also offers views of the back of some of the bathhouses, including the wonderful Quapaw dome.

The crowning bit (literally) on a marvelous piece of work.

Pukaskwa National Park

Posted on August 17, 2023 by admin

My old friend Geof Huth has been known to post images of figures – glyphs – he draws in the sand, and so I took some inspiration from him. His glyphs are unique, probably in the history of the world. My are a touch more conventional.

I took a similar image on my crummy cell phone camera, but one good enough for snaps, and sent it to Geof. From the edge of the wilderness in northwest Ontario to a tower in Lower Manhattan, the message went.

It might look like the wilderness.

But no. Edge it was. I might have been within the bounds of Pukaskwa National Park, but only a few miles in, with access by road.

Pukaskwa (PUK-ə-saw), a sizable slice of Ontario (725 sq. mi.) on the shore of Lake Superior, is mostly back country. Rugged is the inevitable term for its back country, so much so that the mostly wooded terrain mostly thwarted efforts to mine and even log it, back when that was legally possible. The park reportedly protects the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline on Lake Superior and, indeed, the Great Lakes.

A feature of the park: there are clusters of Pukaskwa Pits at remote locations. Wiki is succinct on those human-made structures: they are “rock-lined depressions near the northern shore of Lake Superior dug by early inhabitants, ancestors of the Ojibwa. Estimates of their age range from as recent as 1100-1600 CE to as ancient as 3000-8000 BCE.”

That’s a pretty wide range of age estimates. You might say their origin is “lost in the mists of time,” but that lacks academic rigor. Modern Canada created the park in the 1970s.

I wasn’t anywhere near the pits. At least, I don’t think so. The park’s single road leads to a few trailheads, such as Southern Headland.

It winds around some hills near Lake Superior, with a variety of under-foot topography as you walk along. Nothing that hard. This time around, I had a walking stick and water to go with my decent hiking shoes.

The trail eventually leads to a deadwood-strewn beach.

A different, much shorter trail from the beach leads to another beach. I spent a few hours there, cooling my heels and drawing a few words in the sand. That is, I did once I’d crossed a horizontal forest of driftwood.

A long stretch along Superior.

There were about ten people on the whole beach. And as few on the Southern Headland trail, where the rocks meet the water and sky. From the beach, I captured an image of hikers on the rock outcropping where I’d been earlier in the day.

Rocks meeting water and wind and sun, because the sun came out in the afternoon. The four elements all together.

Grand Portage National Monument

Posted on August 13, 2023 by admin

So far since taking office, President Biden has proclaimed five new national monuments under the authority granted him by the Antiquities Act of 1906, including one only last week, with the lengthy name of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, which is in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. (For those keeping score, his immediate predecessor proclaimed five over four years.)

How can we keep up with all the new ones? For now, there are 133 national monuments, with more coming, I’ve read.

Grand Portage National Monument has been around a little longer. Longer than me, but not much, being one declared by President Eisenhower. It occupies land very near the tip of the arrowhead region of Minnesota, within a few miles of the Canadian border, which happens to the Pigeon River at that point.

I arrived fairly late in the afternoon of July 30. The U.S. flag, Minnesota and – what’s the other one?

The flag of the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa; the national monument is entirely within their reservation. More about them is here. Gichi Onigaming = The Great Carrying Place.

“Grand Portage was a fur-trade depot and route of the voyageurs at the western extremity [sic] of Lake Superior,” says the Canadian Encyclopedia. “It was the first and most strenuous of the 29 portages from Lake Superior west to Lac La Croix, requiring that each voyageur carry four loads of 80 kg over some 14 km of rocky trails around the cascades of the Pigeon River.

“The North West Co. (NWC) established an extensive post at the mouth of the river, which by 1784 was the wilderness capital of the fur trade, providing a meeting place for the voyageurs bringing supplies from Montréal (porkeaters) and the traders bringing furs from the North West (winterers). Within the post, which was protected by a 5-m high palisade, reinforced with a bastion and a heavy gate, were the Great Hall, living quarters, shops, warehouses and a stone powder magazine.”

The NWC packed up and left after it was finally determined that, according to the Jay Treaty of 1794, the site was in the United States rather than British North America, though it took some time for the company to actually leave (1802). In more recent times, the United States reconstructed the Grand Hall and the wooden palisades.

Along with Native structures of the period outside the palisade.

Inside the palisade, work still seems to be under way, or at least renovation. The Great Hall wasn’t open.

The North West Co. flag still flies.

As you’d expect, the Great Hall faces Grand Portage Bay. Once upon a time, it was a busy place in the short northern summers. Now, not so much.

Another view of Grand Portage Bay from the edge of the national monument.

Way off in the distance – though not really that far, about 20 miles – is Isle Royale National Park, a large island in Lake Superior, which was more distinct with the naked eye than in the digital image.

Still, I was a little surprised that it is visible at all. Except for some of the Alaskan properties, it’s pretty much the definition of remote among national parks, with only a few more than 25,400 visitors in 2022, according to the NPS. The fifth-least visited park in the system.

Since getting there and staying there is an involved process, I couldn’t make Isle Royale work logistically as a destination. This time.

Big Bend Camera Failure

Posted on April 30, 2023 by admin

Though I grew up in Texas, I never got around to visiting Big Bend NP until five years ago in April. Didn’t give it much thought while I schemed to go other places. The distance to the park is more psychological than geographic, I think. From San Antonio, for example, it’s a full-ish day’s drive to the park (six hours), but since when have Texans ever said, That’s too far to drive?

I had two cameras with me on the trip. One, my sturdy Olympus, model number I can’t remember, a standard and not especially expensive digital camera I acquired in 2012 so I could take pictures at events for a new freelance job. It took good pictures, better than I expected. The other digital image-maker at Big Bend was my camera phone. It was newer than the Olympus, since I got it to go to Mexico City a few months earlier. Even so, it only intermittently produced good pictures.

I started capturing the Big Bend scenery with the Olympus, as usual. It started taking vastly overexposed images, often the second or third of the same scene.

A thing that made me go hm.

Still, I got some decent images with the Olympus. It’s hard to go wrong in Big Bend.

By the time I got to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande, the Olympus had quit taking anything but overexposures. So I resorted to using the camera phone, producing lower-quality pictures that were sometimes OK.

The Olympus revived to create some good images later in the trip, but was increasingly unreliable. That was its last trip. Later I checked its settings, tried different settings, tried different data storage cards, and poked around online for some reason for it taking overexposures, to inconclusive results.

Once upon a time, you’d have taken your broken camera to a shop for examination and possible repair, but now? I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth out of the Olympus, and soon acquired just as good camera — better in some ways — in the form of a used iPhone that was no longer a communication device.

The failure of my camera on a trip was a kind of inconvenience, though barely even that. Back when Ann went to Washington, D.C., with a junior high group, some camera error or other meant she returned with few images. This upset her. I told her I was sorry she lost the images. But as worthwhile as capturing images can be, or sharing them, seeing a place yourself is the important thing.

West Virginia, #48

Posted on April 17, 2023 by admin

One thing you’ll find in Moundsville, West Virginia, which is in the panhandle not far south of Wheeling, is a mound of impressive height – 62 feet. The Grave Creek Mound.

Look carefully enough and you’ll note that a footpath leads to the top. We were too tired for it at that moment, but it was a moot point anyway, since the Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex had just closed for the day when we arrived, though the gift shop was still open.

“The Grave Creek Mound is one of the largest Adena mounds and an impressive sight for any visitor to Moundsville,” says the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “A massive undertaking, the total effort required the movement of more than 57,000 tons of sand and earth. Construction of the mound took place from about 250-150 B.C. and included multiple burials at different levels within the structure.

“Although Grave Creek Mound is today an isolated feature on the landscape, the flat area now occupied by the city of Moundsville was once covered with small and large mounds and associated earthworks. Unfortunately, these structures and many others all over the region have been destroyed by treasure-hunters and farmers who plowed over these in the past.”

The complex takes up a large town block in Moundsville, but even larger is the West Virginia Penitentiary, which is across the street from the mound. I’d asked the clerk at the Grave Creek Mound gift shop about its hulking presence, and she told me it had once been a state prison, but was long closed as a prison.

I was reminded instantly of Joliet, and it seems that the state of West Virginia took direct inspiration for its new pen from the Illinois prison.

“No architectural drawings of the West Virginia Penitentiary have been discovered, so an understanding of the plan developed by the Board of Directors must be obtained through their 1867 report, which details the procurement of a title for ten acres of land and a proposal to enclose about seven acres,” says the prison web site.

No cons have occupied this particular stony lonesome since the 1990s and now the old pen supports a cottage industry of tours, many stressing the macabre or supernatural stories clinging to a place that saw the execution of dozens of men. Seems like a good use for the imposing old structure, whatever you think of ghost stories. We’d have been in the market for a daylight (non-spook) tour ourselves, but again the timing was wrong.

We passed through Moundsville twice.

Once on a cold, windy day, then a few days later when it was warmer, when we were able to eat at a picnic shelter in a small park along the Ohio River. The park has a view of the elegant Moundsville Bridge, which crosses to Mead Township, Ohio.

Officially, it’s the Arch A. Moore Bridge, named for the longest-serving governor of West Virginia, who also did a spell in stir for corruption. Moore was in office, still unindicted, when the bridge opened in 1986. He was a Moundsville native son, so perhaps a little corruption isn’t enough to scrub his name from the bridge – if in fact anyone calls it that anyway.

In the southern reaches of New River Gorge NP, near Grandview, a trail wanders through outcroppings of what I take for sedimentary rock.

Reminded me a bit of Cuyahoga NP, though that park’s rock formations seemed larger and more extensive.

Near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, and just off U.S. 60 – which follows the Midland Trail at this point, another lost-to-time road – is a wide place in the road that marks access to Cathedral Falls.

Easy access, since it’s less than a minute from the parking lot to a close view of the falls.

Nearby is a homemade memorial to one Hugh Rexroad, who is clearly this person. Did Hugh die here, say of natural causes while admiring the fall, or was he merely very fond of the place? Whatever your story, RIP, Hugh.

The channel takes the waterfall flow to the Kanawha River, which U.S. 60 follows into Charleston.

Kanawha was a proposed name for a breakaway entity from Virginia, but in the event the more pedestrian West Virginia was picked.

A number of memorial statues rise near the West Virginia capitol, but rain kept me from lingering too long. I did see the coal miner, dating from 2002.

Sorry about your mistreatment, especially before you were able to organize. Here’s your statue.

The industry has contracted in recent decades, of course, not just in West Virginia, but the entire country. Still, in 2020, West Virginia provided about 5% of the nation’s total energy, more than one-third of it from coal production, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reports.

“However, because of increases in natural gas and natural gas liquids production from the Marcellus and Utica shales in northern West Virginia, natural gas surpassed coal for the first time in 2019 and became the largest contributor to the state’s energy economy.”

After spending a couple of nights in West Virginia, it occurred to me that I now haven’t spent the night in only two states: Delaware and Rhode Island.

Thurmond, West Virginia

Posted on April 9, 2023 by admin

I was thinking ghost town, but the data says otherwise. Someone lives in Thurmond, West Virginia — five people as of the 2020 Census. They must be in the few houses perched on the enormous slope over the historic core of the town, which is formed by a string of commercial buildings and railroad structures at a flat place next to the New River.

Thurmond was a small railroad town at a waystation, back when that meant coal-burning giants among locomotives, which came to pick up shipments of coal, or acquire coal, water and sand for their own use. Maybe the shades of long-gone people wander Thurmond, if you believe that sort of thing, and if so, the rattle of pouring coal, the venting of steam, the screech of metal on metal, are echoing on as well.

What does every railroad town need?

The National Bank of Thurmond failed in 1931, but there were successor banking entities of some kind in the building into in the 1950s, when the town essentially shut down. The fact that the last bank paid 3 percent reminds me of a shorthand for the way mid-century savings and loans did their business: 3-5-3. Pay 3 percent to depositors, charge borrowers 5 percent interest, and close up to go play golf at 3 pm.

Other commercial buildings fronting the tracks, with the river just a little beyond them.

The mostly hidden ruins of a grand hotel on the slope. Burned down.

The bridge that brings trains and motor vehicles to Thurmond over the New River. One track, one lane.

The station. I thought it was merely for tourist use now, but no: it’s an active Amtrak station, reportedly the second-least used, after one in West Texas. So not that active.

The steam went out of Thurmond pretty much when the steam went out of Thurmond. That is, coal-fired steam locomotives disappeared, replaced by diesel, and the contracting coal industry as natural gas gained a foothold nationally probably didn’t help either.

Trains still transit Thurmond, but the land around — most of it, anyway, as boundaries are invisible — belongs to the national park. The star of modern Thurmond, I believe, is the ruin of the coaling tower.

Near the coaling tower. Maybe where the crew boss stayed, and members of the crew when no trains were in town.

Both are full of the ravages of time, but still standing. Barely? I’m not engineer enough to make an assessment, but my layman’s opinion is that chunks of stone drop off the tower now and then, so watch out.

A selection of graffiti.

Bleak, O.G. Bleak.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve: The Vistas

Posted on April 6, 2023 by admin

Late morning on our first full day in West Virginia, we found ourselves at the Endless Wall Trail. It’s not only a place for horizontal walking motion across the landscape, but the vertical motion of rock climbing too, as the park sign points out.

How we got there (that is, besides driving in our car to the trail head) is best characterized as a misreading or misunderstanding of a map on my part. So the trail wasn’t the one we’d been looking for, but it seemed like a good trail, so we headed in, with a place called Diamond Point as the goal.

Not a particularly difficult trail, for the most part, though there were roots and rocks and mud patches, but they never rose past the level of sometime annoyance. Nowhere was it steep, but the trail rose slowly in elevation much of the time.

It takes a fairly healthy old man about 30 minutes to get to Diamond Head. I mean, Diamond Point. Odd the things you think about sometimes, such as a land form in the tropics while tramping through some temperate zone mud, just because of a coincidental name.

Close to the destination.

Some of the glories that were Diamond Point.

There isn’t agreement on the exact age of New River among scientists, but it is measured in the hundreds of millions of years. Guess it was worth climbing a slope to take a look into deep time.

But you don’t need to walk that far to see a sweeping vista at Grandview, in a part of the park that’s some miles south-southeast of Diamond Point. We went there toward the end of the same pleasantly warm day, driving on local roads through Beckley, as well as short stretches of I-64 and West Virginia 9, to get to a large NPS parking lot, playground and ball field, occupied that day by small groups of parents and kids.

A walk of five minutes or so led from the play area to Grandview overlook. It is.

Nothing like a horseshoe bend, large or small.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve: The Bridges

Posted on April 5, 2023 by admin

I didn’t appreciate the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia until I’d driven across it more than once, and more importantly, seen it from a distance.

A handsome design for a magnificent setting. Elegant. Sturdy. Spanning the gorge spider-web like. Imagine a species of large, intelligent arachnids that can extrude metal and spin webs of steel across the many gorges on their forested planet. Artful shapes like the New Gorge River Bridge, maybe.

Even better, such an artful shape was made by us clever apes here on Earth. Within my lifetime, completed in October 1977. If I’d been in that part of West Virginia then, I could have driven across the newly minted bridge carrying my newly minted drivers license, obtained in some haste that summer to take a girl I’d recently met on dates. But I wasn’t anywhere near the bridge in my South Texas adolescent driving days, and never heard of it till much later.

“The bridge reduced a 40-minute drive down narrow mountain roads and across one of North America’s oldest rivers to less than a minute,” the park service says. “When it comes to road construction, mountains do pose a challenge. In the case of the New River Gorge Bridge, challenge was transformed into a work of structural art — the longest steel span in the Western Hemisphere and the third-highest in the United States.

“The West Virginia Division of Highways chose the Michael Baker Co. as the designer, and the construction contract was awarded to the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel. In June 1974, the first steel was positioned over the gorge by trolleys running on three-inch diameter cables. The cables were strung 3,500 feet between two matching towers. Cor-ten steel, with a rust-like appearance that never needs painting, was used in construction.”

Good to know, but if anything, the experience of driving across the bridge is too detached from the sense that you’re passing over an 800-foot void. The opaque fences along the edges of the bridge obscure the drop, though you do get a glimpse of the far-away cliffs of the gorge.

The bridge transits New River Gorge National Park and Preserve land on either side. A few minutes walk from the park’s visitor center takes you to a view of the bridge, which we saw on the morning of March 23, the brightest, warmest day of the trip.

The gorge, looking away from the bridge.

The old way to cross the gorge by vehicle involved spending 40 minutes or more on small roads that switchbacked their way down into the gorge, to just a few feet above the river, where there’s a much shorter bridge.

Stop there and you see the postcard-Instagram view of the New River Gorge Bridge in all its glory.

We drove down to the river the morning of March 24, the day after we’d seen the bridge from near the visitors center. Cold rain fell periodically and clouds clung to the side of the gorge.

A small aside. I saw that a number of things are named after Sen. Byrd in West Virginia, and I’m sure if I’d stayed longer, I’d have seen more. Why not this grandest of Mountaineer State bridges? Than again, maybe the thought of it being the “Byrd Bridge” has given policymakers second thoughts on a renaming.

The bridge down near the banks, where a few generations of West Virginians before 1977 made the crossing, does have a name: Tunny Hunsaker Bridge.

I had to look him up. I thought, local politico? A local man who didn’t return from a war? No, he was a prizefighter who later was police chief of nearby Fayetteville, West Virginia (d. 2005). I’m not up on the history of boxing. Now I’ve read that Muhammad Ali’s first professional win, in 1960, was against Hunsaker.

The current bridge dates from 1997, built to replace an earlier iteration. You can’t walk across the New River Gorge Bridge (except on Bridge Day), but you can walk across Tunny Hunsaker any time. So we did in turn. When you can cross an interesting bridge in an epic setting, you should.

Tri-State Appalachian Equinox Road Trip

Posted on March 26, 2023 by admin

Old Chinese proverb, I’ve heard: even a journey of 1,000 leagues begins by backing out of the driveway. That we did on Friday, March 17. We pulled back into the driveway on Saturday, March 25. In between we traveled 2,219 miles, using the ragged marvel that is the system of roads in the United States.

My fanciful name for the trip refers to three states that were the focus: Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We actually passed through seven states, also including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and very briefly, Maryland.

We saw a lot of places, but two in particular motivated the trip as a whole. One was Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright sculpture – I mean, house – perched over an irregular drop on Bear Run, a creek in rural Pennsylvania. Visiting Fallingwater had long been an ambition of Yuriko’s, maybe since before she lived in this country, since FLW is known far and wide; but I needed no persuasion to go myself.

The other was New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in eastern-ish West Virginia. This was my suggestion, since I keep up on national parks. But I’ve wanted to go there a good while, long before Congress promoted it to national park, which only happened in 2020. Besides, it was high time I spent a little more than a few minutes in West Virginia which, for whatever else it has, is known for its surpassing scenery. This reputation, I can confirm, is deserved.

Weather-wise, spring travel is a crap shoot. The day we left a cold, unpleasant wind blew in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, and it followed us under the same gray skies and at temps barely above freezing the next day, into central Ohio.

By last Monday, in southwest Pennsylvania, temps had moderated with the appearance of the sun, and each day was more pleasant than the last as we headed south into West Virginia, where the grass had greened and some bushes had too, though most trees were at the barely budding stage. Thursday, March 23 proved best of all, with sunny skies and temps in the 70s, allowing us to enjoy the best meal of our trip — ricebowl meals — at a picnic table in Fayetteville, W.Va.

A cold rain came calling on Friday as we headed from West Virginia back to Ohio. On Saturday, again in central Ohio, it wasn’t bitterly cold, but the wind was so strong at times that it jostled my car as I drove and my body as I walked. Rain squalls came and went, with a spell of sleet I actually enjoyed, sitting in our parked car listening, knowing that the ice was too small to do any damage. Returning home yesterday, Illinois was pretty much as we’d left it, chilly and not-quite-spring.

The upshot of it all is to pack for the weather variety you’re going to encounter, and I was more than glad – as I returned to the car in a stiff wind, crossing a green field in small-town Ohio, feeling wind chill that must have been around zero (and I mean Fahrenheit) – that I’d brought the coat I use most of the winter.

We brought the dog. We don’t want to leave her at a kennel any more, and no one was at home to mind her. Having your dog along is something like traveling with a small child you can’t take into restaurants or a lot of other places, but we don’t regret a bit of it. Long drives in the car don’t faze her at all, since after the first few minutes, that’s like lying around the house and, as the comedian said, a dog’s job is lying around the house.

She had her energetic moments too, more than you’d think for an ancient dog, such as walking the trail to Diamond Point overlooking the New River Gorge, with its smooth straightaways through forests giving way to patches of mud, large rocks or tightly packed tree roots underfoot, sometimes all of those in a single stretch. Our reward for the sometime-slog was a vista of rare beauty. Her reward? I don’t think it was anything so visual. Maybe following the pack is its own reward for her.

Companion dogs also mean you acquaint yourself with the look and feel of the front office and main entrance of limited-service hotels during the empty early a.m. hours, well lit as a Broadway stage but without any players. Except maybe for the night clerk, just outside the door, who is peering into his phone, cigarette in other hand. Probably our dog, as any dog, could be trained to pee on a disposable rug in the room during the small hours, but somehow we’ve never wanted to do that. There’s something appealing somehow about the ritual of dressing as simply as possible a few minutes after waking at 2:30 or 3, or 25 or 6 to 4, hitching a leash to the dog’s collar and repairing to the first patch of green, or pebbles ringed by a curb, outside the hotel door

Take me home, country roads. I’ll say this for West Virginia, it’s got some crazy-ass serpentine roads through its ancient and forested mountains. The Laurel Highlands in southwest Pennsylvania was no piker in that regard, either. You need to keep an intense focus on the road as it winds this way and that, rises and falls, and passes ever so close to boulder walls, massive trees and wicked ditches. If you don’t mind thinking about your mortality every now and then, that’s some good driving.

Mostly good driving. There are moments when a red sedan, or a black pickup truck, decides that tailgating you at roughly the speed limit as you wind around and navigate switchbacks, is a good idea, and blasts around you at the first marginal opportunity, double solid stripes be damned.

Yet I only got the smallest sampling of the twisty roads. No roads without pavement this trip, though plenty enough didn’t bother with details such as guardrails. Another, entirely unpaved and mostly unregulated network of roads and tracks, many perhaps pre-New Deal, must exist in West Virginia. Out away from the nearest town, while we were parked a national park site on a small paved road, three ATVs buzzed past, each with two people. They were headed toward town after emerging from the woods, their vehicles streaked with mud. I was just close enough to see in their faces they’d had a fine time out in the unpaved network.

Also, if you really wanted to get home to West Virginia, wouldn’t you take the Interstate?

We made stops in Ohio going and coming.

On Saturday, March 18 we made our way south from Ann Arbor, where we’d spent the first night, to Columbus, Ohio, to spent the second. On the way is the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, a Byzantine edifice rising in a small town, which we visited, but also sites associated with Warren G. Harding: his memorial and burial site, and also his home, in the large town of Marion, Ohio.

Our return home, beginning on Friday, March 24, took us back through Ohio, to Columbus for the last night of the trip. Saturday morning, after takeout breakfast at Tim Horton’s – for that part of Ohio is in the Tim Horton’s orb, we were glad to learn – we visited downtown Columbus and the Ohio Statehouse in a howling cool wind. Ate lunch, Korean-style chicken and salad, sitting in the car in a clearly gentrified neighborhood, the bricked-streeted German Village. We spent the rest of Saturday driving back, via Indianapolis.

On the morning of Sunday, March 19, we left Columbus and made our way east through the remarkable town of Newark, Ohio, then Wheeling and Moundsville, West Virginia and from there to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized far outer suburb of Pittsburgh. Or at least it will be in a few years.

On Monday, we paid our visit to Fallingwater, taking turns on tours, after which we had lunch in a low-season tourist town and took an impediment-rich hike in Ohiopyle State Park, along the rocky shore of the Youghiogheny River, at that point boasting a highly picturesque waterfall. That was enough for one day for Yuriko, who napped in the car (along with the dog) as I walked the much shorter and smoother path to Fort Necessity National Battlefield late that afternoon.

On Tuesday, we made our way back west a short distance, to visit the Palace of Gold in rural West Virginia, in the peculiar north panhandle of the state (which I’ve long thought of as a conning tower). We returned that day to Uniontown by way of Moundsville, W. Va., home of an ancient mound of remarkable height, a former penitentiary of remarkable solidity, and a bridge across the Ohio River of remarkable elegance. Those things, and some tasty if not remarkable barbecue.

The next day, we left for West Virginia, but not by the most direct route, because I wanted to see the Flight 93 National Memorial in deep rural Pennsylvania. Progressively smaller roads lead there, including – as we traveled it, which I figured would be the quickest route – a short stretch of I-68 through the oddity that is the Maryland panhandle. Late that day, Wednesday, we arrived in Beckley, W. Va.

We spent almost all of Thursday at the national park, at one sight or another, driving and hiking and pondering historic and sometimes crumbled structures. But that wasn’t quite enough. On Friday morning, before we left for Ohio, we went back to the park. Around noon, we headed west, passing through Charleston long enough to visit the West Virginia State Capitol and eat Chinese takeout, though not at the same time. A little north of Charleston, we crossed back into Ohio after gassing up near the small town of Ripley, West Virginia. Believe it or not.

One other thing: this was a vacation from the news, which following is part of my job. Except for the briefest snippets on the radio, when sometimes I didn’t change stations out of habit for some seconds, I ignored the news of the world, or even smaller parts of it. I think that’s a good thing to do.

But of course, a few things got through. I heard the opening bars of The Dick Van Dyke Show theme on a news program one day, and I jumped to the conclusion that he had died. That isn’t a big jump, since he’s 97. But no, merely a one-car accident.

Image being that well regarded, that your minor auto accident as a nonagenarian is national news. Anyway, glad not to say, RIP, Dick Van Dyke.

Hot Springs NP, 2007

Posted on March 12, 2023 by admin

Even though it was a digital camera, and a fairly good one when I acquired it ca. 2001, my Nikon Coolpix 4300 had its limits. Mainly, memory. At least compared to the vast memories of current devices.

So that might account for the fact that I only have one image at Hot Springs National Park in March 2007. Or maybe I wasn’t much in the mood for using a camera there. It’s good to put the camera down for a while sometimes, no matter how photogenic the place you find yourself.

This is it, the Hernando de Soto statue at Fordyce Bathhouse. The image itself is only passable.

The sculpture is in the former men’s bath hall and was a centerpiece of a fountain.

The Fordyce Bathhouse is a building of exceptional beauty in its public spaces and state-of-the-art health and fitness equipment of the roaring ’20s in its bath spaces.

“The Fordyce is now the park’s visitor center, and offers tours of its elaborate facilities – self-guided, but at a good price, free,” I wrote at the time. “The building style, Spanish Renaissance Revival, is supposed to pay tribute to Hernando de Soto, who supposedly came this way. No fancy bath houses were necessary for passing Spaniards, Indians or other early visitors, however, who apparently soaked in pools fed by the springs wherever they found them.”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: National Parks