Tried new recipes this year, some of which were an absolute failure, but most weren’t.

Sugar Cookies – The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook
Lemon Cookies – America’s Test Kitchen Christmas Cookies 2012
Rum-Raisin Chocolate Ship Cookies – The Good Cookie: Over 250 Delicious Recipes from Simple to Sublime
Hermits – The Good Cookie: Over 250 Delicious Recipes from Simple to Sublime
Shortbread – Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich (I made one regular batch and one batch with nutmeg, because I LOVE NUTMEG.)
Pumpkin Walnut Bread – Cook’s Illustrated Holiday Baking 2007 (I love this recipe)
Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies – The Best of Fine Cooking Cookies No 23
Praline-Pecan-Coconut Bars – Nancy Baggett’s Simply Sensational Cookies
Bourbon Balls (I no longer remember where this recipe came from)
Peanut Butter Blossoms (I no longer remember where this recipe came from)
Lemon Coins – Carole Bloom’s The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking with Chocolate, Fruit, Nuts, Spices, and Other Ingredients
I also plan on making Poticza from the The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook
And I’d also like to lemon poppy seed quick bread.
And probably a pumpkin pie.

I think I am going to give up trying to make pumpkin cookies. This year I tried Nancy Baggett’s Pumpkin Rocks with Cream Cheese Frosting (The All-American Cookie Book) and they were beyond a failure. I ended up with a flat, oily brown ooze. Theoretically, it’s because I use fresh (frozen) pumpkin, but this was a bigger mess than any other pumpkin cookie I’ve attempted to make with fresh (frozen) pumpkin.
The other recipe that failed was Chocolate Raspberry Cookies, which are delicious, but a complete mess.

And of course, there was the baking and decorating of sugar cookies, with peanut butter blossoms added in this year.

After leaving the New River Gorge Bridge, we stopped by Babcock State Park, because despite the overcast day, I figured it would be gorgeous.

It was.

I’ve heard this is the most photographed spot in the state. I find that kinda depressing, since, although the area is gorgeous, the gristmill isn’t original, but was instead reassembled from others that were taken down.

Plus, there’s so much non-man-made gorgeous scenery. But, here’s an obligatory picture of the grist mill, and you can see how gorgeous the area was yesterday.

We saw, in the short time we were there, two separate wedding shoots.

Here’s the stream above the mill:

We decided to take the Island in the Sky Trail.

Climb to an elevation of 2546 feet, and you’ll find this.

It was far less surprising, when we discovered there was a road that could bring you to this height, instead of climbing things like this:

Regardless of the shortcut, it was a gorgeous hike up. (Starting elevation was 2260 feet. We made the climb in about half an hour.)

Summersville Lake is quite interesting. It was built to control flooding of the Gauley River, and has a huge dam.

Normally, when I think of dams, I think of the giant cement structure that villains threaten to destroy in movies, to wreak destruction upon an unsuspecting populace.

Summersville dam is different.

Here a picture of the dam, looking up from the Gauley River. If you look closely, you can see cars driving across the dam.

Try this link to see the satellite view of the dam.

Summersville Lake is seasonal: in April it starts to fill, and in early autumn, the water is carefully released, allowing for some of the best white water rafting in the country.

So when we see the lake in October, the water levels are low, so you can see the underlying rock formations, exposed by the water.

Here’s the full moon over the lake.

And here’s the Gauley River. It was quite lovely, and I would have enjoyed spending more time hiking around there. Sadly for me, we casually strolled down, and I’d not bothered to put on my boots or carry my hiking stick. This is important because without those two items, walking on rocks quickly puts a major strain on my bad ankle.

But it was totally worth it.

This is the third year we’ve going to Bridge Day. For some reason I didn’t feel much like watching the base jumpers, but that’s not really the best part of Bridge Day–I love standing on the bridge looking out over the New River Gorge Canyon. It’s a stunning, amazing view.

Here’s a picture of the bridge from the Visitor Center platform. If you look at the bigger picture, you can see the rappelling lines.

In this one, you can see the rappelling lines and the zip line.

(I made notes in Flickr, to point out these lines if you can’t see them.)

Stairs from/to the visitor center to the viewing platform. Michael counted and there were 130.

A view from the bridge–you can see how foggy and overcast the morning was.

A nice gentleman took our picture for us:

While at Cass, we rode the trains two different days, in hopes the weather would be nice on one of those days. Although it was overcast and foggy, we also had some sun, so I really had no complaints at all.

I mentioned it was foggy, right? This was at the top of Bald Knob.

It cleared a tiny bit at the top of the mountain. See that white object? That’s the Green Bank telescope:

We stopped at Seneca Rocks on the way home:

Of course I was drawn to piles of rusting industrial parts and the burned out shell of the old lumber mill.

I went to the shell of the lumbermill without Michael, as he is lawful good, and these things make him nervous. (But in deference to Michael (and my clumsiness) I didn’t climb into the building and ruins. I just got really really close. And maybe stepped over some logs and stuff.)

Cass Scenic Railroad, located in Cass WV, allows you to ride on a coal powered steam train up into the mountains.

Cass was a lumber town, and had a mill that ran until the 1950s, but had it’s heyday in the early 1900s, when the mountains (and most of the state, to be honest) was logged.

The Cass rail line uses/used Shay Engines which were designed to allow the engines to climb steep inclines with sharp turns hauling heavy loads of timber.

Here’s a close-up of geared wheels:

Here is the crankshaft:

And here’s everything put together:

Here’s the view from the opposite side:

Here’s the view from the inside.

That square box is there so kids and stand on it and see better.

Here’s a look back at some of the track we’ve just passed over. I was serious about the track being curvy.

Here’s a look forward at the engine, from where I was sitting on the train.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the engine is “on backwards” actually pushing the train up the hill rather than pulling. The reason for this is because, as a coal engine, it throws lots of soot and cinders, and as we’re on a sight seeing tour, they want the cinders going behind the train rather than in front of it.

Of course, there are two switchbacks, so for part of the ride, we did get ash and cinder rained down on us, but luckily for us, our car had a top.

The guys leaning out at the ends of the cars are the break men (there was a break woman as well). Their job is to loosen or tighten the break on each car, and to do so in tandem with the other break men, so the cars don’t bump into one another. The break man on our car was a 70-year-old man who was also the narrator/guide for the trip. He was awesome, to be perfectly honest.

The break on the car in front of us:

And some more pictures of the train:

And, a completely random note, Cass supplied timber to the paper mill in Luke, Maryland–which is where my great-grandfather worked his entire life (except during WWII, when he was in the Navy). So the logging of the red spruce here help my great-grandfather employed.

Saturday we took a family trip to Ohiopyle PA. The leaves have started to change, the weather was beautiful, all in all it was a lovely day.

Weird. A picture of me.

Our initial goal was the Mountain Heritage Arts & Crafts Festival, which we did go to, but… It wasn’t bad, not at all, but I don’t think it was worth the $7 a person entrance fee.

So, we took the long route home, and stopped by Berkeley Springs on the way home.

Last of the year? Maybe, so we need to make the best of this!

I ate two.

This weekend I made what might be the last peach and berry cobbler of the summer, as well as Italian bread. I tried a different bread recipe this time.

As previously, I used Nancy Baggett’s The All-American Dessert Book: High-Summer Cobbler with Buttermilk Biscuit Crust, using peaches and raspberries. And I added ginger and nutmeg, which the original recipe doesn’t use, but I do, because I LOVE nutmeg.

The Italian bread was from by Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s quite different from the recipe I usually make, from The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook A James Beard Award Winner (King Arthur Flour Cookbooks).

I’d meant to make pasta Monday night, so we could have Italian bread, but I forgot I had a haircut, so, perhaps today.

We went to Green Bank Saturday, which is home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Green bank is the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, to reduce the amount of radio interference the telescopes pick up. The most obvious thing this means is that there is no cell phone reception. But it’s a lot more than that. Once you go past the gate, you cell phones must be turned off as must all digital cameras, so I was unable to take any pictures up close to the telescope. (You can buy disposable cameras at the gift shop, as they don’t cause interference.)

But it’s more than that.

On site, all electronic equipment–including microwave ovens–must be kept in Faraday cages. And locals occasionally receive visits from Green Bank personnel, who then fix their faulty electronic equipment (such as microwave ovens).

The telescopes operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and anyone can write a proposal for project.

The telescope sits on four wheeled stands that are a bit like train cars, which allow the telescope to rotate a full 360 degrees to point in any direction.

The angle of the dish can also be changed. The thick white arc with the black stripe running down the center contains teeth that allow the position of the dish to be raised and lowered.

The dish of the main telescope is larger than a football field, so it can been seen from quite far away.

There are multiple telescopes on site, to take advantage of the radio quiet zone.

And in the science center, there is a scale model. I took several pictures of it, if you’d like a better look the structure.

We went to Green Bank Saturday, which is home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

We amused ourselves at the Science Center.

Here’s Michael:

Some self-portraits:

Michael’s picture of me:

We went to Green Bank Saturday, which is home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

It was an awesome place to geek out.

But one thing especially struck me, and that was the number of old cars and trucks still in use.

That license plate is new, and expires in 2020. So these are not just junked vehicles that died in place. These are vehicles that are in regular use.

If anyone tries to tell you that scientists are “wasting money” they are completely full of shit.