Another American Adventure: rapids, rocks and wildflowers

Sunday, April 10, 2011

rapids, rocks and wildflowers

It got into the 70s here today! We explored parts of the McConnells Mill hike where we hadn't been before. With the weather so warm, several people were taking kayaks down the rapidly running Slippery Rock river.

We hiked up and down the rocky river bank until we were tired enough to realize that we will probably never be able to do the full 10-mile loop. Jubilee got 3 or 4 times the walk we got, running up and down the hills (we were scared she would fall down a cliff) and several times attempting to swim in the rapidly running river (which also scared us). We're all exhausted (and have some of John's co-workers coming over for dinner tonight)!

This is the shale rock that is so predominant in this area - and that they are drilling for gas.

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.