For our Saturday hike, Michael decided we should take the Scott’s Run Trail, which we had not taken before.

It was gorgeous.

It was also subtly educational, although I doubt most people would notice. We started from the main entrance and ended at the camp ground.

The beginning of the trail was, essentially, a muddy water run-off track. Some sections were muddier than others, and I’m glad I had my hiking stick, because the ground was often rocky and uneven.

Then, the run-off track turned into a small creek.

From here, to the bottom of the valley, the trail was mostly along the side of this creek (I’m guessing along an old logging trail)–you were rarely out of sight (or at least hearing) of the water.

Other springs and run off areas join in, and the creek now occasionally has small pools.

Soon it looks like a “real” creek, and you need a bridge to cross.

There are now deeper pools, areas that look like they would have water even at the height of summer’s heat.

At the bottom of the trail, multiple springs and run-off areas have created this shaded stream that continues on.

If you continue on the trail, it’s all uphill to the camp ground, and you see more springs that run down the side of the mountain to feed into the stream in the valley.

The end of the trail (or the beginning if you were starting at the campground) is again a rocky muddy water run-off area. (This part was less fun, as I was already tired and I had to be careful of my ankle on the rocks.) If we did this hike again I believe I would instead stop at the lowest part of the trail and backtrack form whence we came.

Of course there were a couple random things that caught my eye.

My theory on this is it dates back to when the forest was logged. That a truck broke down, and when they brought the replacement part, the just dumped the old part in the woods, because no one cared. Now, it’s an oddity, and a glimpse into the past.

Some woodpeckers went NUTS on this tree.

If you click through to Flickr, all of the above pictures have their GPS coordinates, if you’d like to find a specific spot yourself.

ADDENDUM the First:

I’ve started playing with the GPS data, because I’m a geek. Here’s a map of our hike:

(via GPS Visualizer)

Here’s the elevation change:

And here are the stats:

Yeah, we went back for the second weekend in a row. I realized that once the gates open, we won’t feel comfortable biking on the main road, so we should enjoy it while we can.

Plus, there’s something lovely about being at Coopers Rock when it’s nearly empty. It’s normally a busy park. It’s also beautiful, but there is rarely a sense of being in the wilderness when you’re there during the summer. You see people everything, and even when you can’t see them you ca typically hear them. So it’s a nice change of pace to be there when it’s relatively unpopulated.

It was also a gorgeous day, and deserving of us doing something outside.

They really didn’t want you to drive in.

What do all these pictures have in common, that fascinated me so much?

You can see the sky.

Once the leaves come out, you can’t see the sky in much of Coopers Rocks.

(All photos should have GPS location coordinates, if you want to know specifically where a pictures was taken.)

The weather was lovely, so we out our bikes for the first time this year, went to Coopers Rock and biked to the overlook.

It was gorgeous, and probably one of the few times I’ve been to Coopers Rock that we had the overlook to ourselves for any length of time.

It was so strange to look down and be able to actually see the ground.

For those who have never been to Coopers Rock, that isn’t a boardwark, it’s a bridge, and those are not shrubs, but the tops of trees,

The lowest path is the railroad. The other paths we’re thinking are old trails (Michael suggested logging trails, but I think perhaps those would have been overgrown by now).

The melted snow was coming off the roof in silvery streams.

I love trees in full leaf, but I find the shapes of trees without their leaves to be utterly fascinating. Mind you, I’m the last person who should be walking up staring at the skies instead of where she is walking, but sometimes I can’t help myself.

As most everyone knows by now, there was a chemical leak into the Elk river in Charleston WV that led to a state of emergency in 9 of our 55 counties.

First, some clarification and geographical grounding.

Here are the watersheds in the state. I live up in the corner near the only straight lines in the state outline, in Monongahela county in the Monongahela watershed. (We’ve biked into PA along the local rail trail.)

Here are the affected counties:

So you can see that despite the fact that the Monongahela river flows north, we’re nowhere near the chemical spill.

This picture shows you the location of the spill, and the affected counties:

Since Thursday afternoon, we’ve had constant updates, notification that for the nine counties, Boone, Clay, Jackson, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, Putnam, Roane, and Cabell, were under a state of emergency, and residents were not to use water except for flushing toilets and putting out fires.

I was initially confused by the “putting out fires” bit until I realized that some chemicals can lead to water that could, in fact, catch fire. So it would be best to clarify that putting the contaminated water on a fire wouldn’t cause an explosion.

Yeah.

So what did this mean to those in the affected counties? It meant that all schools, hotels and restaurants in the area had to close.

Stop for just a second, and think of all the times during the day you reach out and turn on a faucet. Can you count the number of times today you turned on the tap and water came out? All those times you went to the faucet without thinking, someone in those counties was attempting to do the same thing, and then remembering they can’t turn on the water.

In the affected areas, you can’t wash clothes, dishes, or your hands. You can’t shower or bathe. You can’t drink the water or cook with it.

All those little thing you do every day without thinking, they can’t do.

In West Virginia, most of us get our water from our rivers.

And our treated sewage goes right back into those same bodies of water.

Well, it’s treated most of the time. In Mon county we historically had problems with heavy rains overwhelming our sewage treatment plants and putting untreated sewage directly into the river. But they changed the storm drains to go directly into the streams and river, which is good, because the amount of new construction–the amount of concrete and asphalt where there used to be woods and fields–in Morgantown has led to more and more run off. Has led to flooding where before the ground would just soak up the water.

When I was growing up, most of the local creeks looked like this:

Confused?

Does this help at all?

Most streams and creeks were orange from acid mine drainage. Water from mines went straight into nearby streams and creeks.

Streams and creeks that fed into the rivers from which got our water.

So, you see, water quality has always been a problem in West Virginia. Big companies, often with out-of-state owners, would come in to take our resources–our forests, our coal, our natural gas–and leave the forests and creeks and streams and rivers damaged.

Why would they care? The owners didn’t live here.

If we didn’t like it, they’d just take their jobs and leave.

So, we took the short end of the stick, and, well, we took it. And our streams were polluted and our forests cut and our mountains flattened.

So when I heard about the chemical spill into the Elk river, I didn’t imagine an isolated incident.

I was instead reminded of how what happens in West Virginia doesn’t matter, unless it gets in the way of taking our resources so they can be used in other, more important, areas of the country.

Oh, just came across this, which made me feel ALL the better.

So yeah, keep those dirty lights on.

ADDENDUM the First:
I forgot to point out that more than 300,000 people were affected by the chemical spill. That’s more than 16% of the population of West Virginia. So although it was only 9 of our 55 counties affected, it is still a large percentage of our population.

ADDENDUM the Second:
Critics Say Chemical Spill Highlights Lax West Virginia Regulations (NY Times)

I heard (but don’t have a link right this second for verification) that the plant was known to be in poor condition.

I posted this on Facebook, but I’d really like to address it more thoroughly.

I heard about this initially on the WV Public Radio, which addressed a slightly different issue, “lawyers with the Jackson Kelly law firm submitted only favorable evidence in court.”

But this article, on the doctors used most frequently by coal companies to deny claims, is completely heart-breaking.

Johns Hopkins medical unit rarely finds black lung, helping coal industry defeat miners’ claims

The article is long, but well worth reading. However, if you don’t want to read it, take note of this:

“It breaks my heart,” he said. “This man has been victimized twice — once by the conditions that allowed him to get this disease and again by a benefits system that failed him.”

For 40 years, doctors from Johns Hopkins have been reading x-rays of coal miners lungs. And instead of finding evidence of black lung, they note other causes.

Where other doctors saw black lung, Wheeler often saw evidence of another disease, most commonly tuberculosis or histoplasmosis — an illness caused by a fungus in bird and bat droppings. This was particularly true in cases involving the most serious form of the disease. In two-thirds of cases in which other doctors found complicated black lung, Wheeler attributed the masses in miners’ lungs to TB, the fungal infection or a similar disease.

You read that correctly. When looking at films of the lungs of coal miners, this doctor sees a fungal infection caused by bat droppings.

That in and of itself is horrifying, but even worse is this:

(T)issue samples from miners’ lungs have proven Wheeler wrong again and again.

When they do tissue samples (which can be dangerous to the patient, which is why radiology is the preferred method of diagnosis) the cause of the disease is usually determined to be black lung.

But as I said, these biopsies are not the recommend method of diagnosis, so what happens is this:

Sometimes miners had to die to prove they had black lung.

Then the widow or other family members receive death benefits.

Cold comfort for those who watched their loved ones slowly suffocate, and were told despite years in the mines, the cause of the disease wasn’t black lung, and they didn’t deserve support and benefits from the coal companies.

But here’s what royally pissed me off.

This man, sitting in his clean office, miles from the mines, far removed from these men struggling with every breath, believes the incidence and prevalence of black lung should be low, solely because he believes the law put an end to coal dust in mines.

A pair of assumptions shapes Wheeler’s views in ways that some judges and government officials have found troubling.
…
In reaching his conclusions about the cause of the large masses in Stacy’s lungs, Wheeler drew upon beliefs that pervade his opinions: Improved conditions in mines should make complicated black lung rare; whereas, histoplasmosis is endemic in coal mining areas.

In case after case, Wheeler has said complicated black lung was found primarily in “drillers working unprotected during and prior to World War II.”

This is the part where anyone who grew up in West Virginia is completely incredulous.

A law was put in place to regulate coal dust, ipso facto miners don’t have black lung.

If you think that’s ridiculous, let me tell you, it’s far worse than you think.

You see, coal companies regular falsify the dust readings in their mines.

(C)heating on dust tests is common, and… many miners help operators falsify the tests to protect their jobs.
…
Two dozen former mine owners or managers acknowledged that they had falsified tests.

Despite laws, hundreds are killed by black lung

[An important aside: “Dust tests tend to be taken more accurately at union mines than at non-union mines.”]

(The Labor Department) received 4,710 faked samples from 847 coal mines across the country, or 40 percent of the mines that the Government is charged with sampling.

U.S. Fines 500 Mine Companies for False Air Tests

Let me sum it up like this: the doctor the coal companies turn to because he provides diagnoses that allow them to deny black-lung claims believes that mines are dust free.

Yet for decades, coal companies have been falsifying the dust test that are supposed to show they are keeping the amount of dust in the air at legal limits.

Right now, I want more than anything else, for this doctor to work at coal mines, breathing the air miners have to breathe. Knowing supervisors are falsifying dust tests, but knowing he can’t say anything about it, or he’ll lose his job. And for him to know he can’t lose his job, because there are no other decent jobs to be had.

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.

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.

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: