Canada Trip #3 – Ricker Basin Ghost Village

Between our tour of Ben & Jerry’s and all of our edible tourism later in the day, we went for a hike in Little River State Park.  We all like to wander in the wilderness and I love ghost towns so our aim was to do the history trail that took us around the abandoned farming community of Ricker basin.  What I had not planned for, when proposing this hike, was the weather and the elevation of the trail.  We arrived at the State Park in absolutely torrential rain.  Even the park officers looked at us like we were loopy.  They also revealed to us that the trail should take us a few hours.  This did not compute with me, even as I looked at the map, but that was because I had not comprehended that the hike was going to be so steep and, at points, difficult underfoot.  I did that thing of assuming the park folks were basing their estimation on a slow pace of walking instead of asking about the topography so we committed to the trek and off we went.

Thankfully, the rain eased up and then stopped entirely early on in our trail.  The mud underfoot was still something we had to contend with and the intense humidity brought with it mosquitoes and other biting minibeasts galore but we were thankful at least to not be battling through rain.  One of the reasons Ricker Basin was abandoned was because of flooding.  It experienced two awful floods in 1927 and 1934, the first of which killed 55 people.  The second flood inspired the construction of a dam and led to a declining population.  Until then, however, the area had been farmed by a number of families for a century.

As we trudged past the remnants of farmhouses and buildings, it seemed incredible to me that people had ever lived here.  The terrain was really pretty steep.  It was little wonder that they were largely subsistence farmers because trudging back and forth to market would have been quite the task.  Even before that, however, it must have been a massive undertaking to clear the land and prepare the ground for agriculture.  In the years since its abandonment, nature had almost completely engulfed all signs of human habitation.  There were trees everywhere.  There must have been even more dense woodland back when Mr Ricker first bought the land and started endeavouring to clear it.  These were definitely hardy people.

One building is still standing but otherwise nothing remains of the buildings except for foundations and the occasional basement.  In addition to the farms, there was also a school house, and a couple of cemeteries.  At one of the cemeteries, I learned that the family who owned the plot had planted trees around its borders, one for every member of the family, planting another when someone married into the family, so that each individual had a tree available for cutting down and turning into a coffin when they died.  As morbid as it seems to have a coffin tree planted to commemorate your birth or wedding, I actually found myself admiring the pragmatism and forward planning of the scheme.  Circle of Life and all that.  As we walked – and it was a whole lot of walking, our phones logging almost 15,000 steps – we would occasionally stumble across a little fragment of metal.  Previous hikers had started a tradition of gathering artefacts found on or near the paths into collections in specific sites so we picked up what we found and added the items – including a bolt and a bed spring – to gatherings of other finds lined up on walls.

It was a really enjoyable walk that reminded me a lot of some of our favourite treks in Argyll.  It mercifully did not take us the four or five hours the park rangers had predicted but it did take us a great deal more time and energy than I had anticipated.  Thankfully all the little spots of human habitation kept all of us – especially the children – engaged.  We definitely earned our calorie intake that day.

 

 

Road Trip 2018 #11 – Missiles and Nebraska

When you think of South Dakota, do you think of the Cold War and missiles?  No.  Me neither.  Mr Pict, however, does.  For that reason, on the day we bade farewell to our temporary log cabin house, we headed to the Minuteman National Historic Site.

Mr Pict and I obviously grew up in the final decades of the Cold War and can remember  pretty terrifying public information films about nuclear holocaust being shown at school.  Our sons, however, don’t have that context or understanding so first port of call was to the Visitors Center.  We handily arrived just as the video was starting.  The kids learned about the use of missiles as a deterrent, about false alarms and close calls, and about “duck and cover” training.  Ultimately the only thing our youngest son could recall about the video was that “Bert the Turtle says Duck and Cover”.  Better than nothing I suppose.  You already know that I am no expert in military history having only the most passing interest in it.  I am, therefore, probably atrociously simplifying things when I write that the Minuteman programme involved constructing silos across the sparsely populated Plains states and having each silo tube house a ballistic missile.  These could be activated by staff at the control facilities.  It must have been boring to man one of these facilities, having to always be on alert while ultimately not doing much each day.  We learned that staff often studied for educational courses or spent their time reading.

We drove from the Visitor Center to the site of the D-09 missile silo which has been preserved as part of the historic site.  We could look through the glass into the silo below and see the deactivated missile within.  It was weird to imagine thousands of these things dotted across South Dakota and the neighbouring states.  We did not stay long at the site as we were being devoured by vampiric flying insects.

I am a sucker for decay and rust so we took a detour to a small town called Okaton, near Murdo.  While the town still has a population of about 30 people, I had steered us there because it is in large part a ghost town.  Like so many American ghost towns, Okaton’s life and death was determined by the railroad.  The houses were built to accommodate railroad workers and, when the railroad work moved further west, so did the people.  The railroad ceased operating altogether in the 1980s which was really the death knell of the little hamlet.  I did not venture off into the long prairie grass in search of the railroad tracks (see – I’m learning) but I did poke around the decaying, collapsing buildings, and the rusting hulks of old vehicles and rotting agricultural equipment.  I did not risk stepping inside any of the buildings but I did poke my head and camera through doorways and interiors to get a better look.  The abandoned appliances, moth-eaten soft furnishings, and peeling wallpaper were both nostalgic and poignant.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we crossed the state line into Nebraska.  That was state number 37 for me!  Sadly our route was boring and flat.  There was not even any “roadside Americana” to divert me and cause a pit stop or detour.  Our hotel for the evening was in Valentine and, while the room was spacious, it felt weird and somewhat aggravating to be back in confined quarters again.  We could have headed out to see the nearby river or waterfall but the kids were just not feeling it.  Therefore, having not done anything kid-friendly all day, we opted for dinner and a movie.  We ate at the Peppermill restaurant where the food was good and the service excellent.  Nebraska is known for its beef so Mr Pict ordered a steak which he declared to be amazing.  We then went to the tiny, two screen Jewel cinema to see ‘The Incredibles 2’ and the kids then burned off some energy in the hotel pool.  I, therefore, get to claim Nebraska but don’t really feel like I accomplished anything Nebraskan while I was within the state’s boundaries.

Road Trip 2017 #23 – Bodie

The thirteenth day of our road trip fell on Independence Day.  We were staying in Mammoth Lakes at a ski lodge hotel.  Our suite had two large bedrooms, two bathrooms (which is a boon when you have six people sharing a space), and a spacious living room and kitchen-diner.  It was a welcome slice of domesticity after a few days of being crammed together into hotel rooms with regular proportions.  Despite having access to kitchen facilities, however, we decided to go out for breakfast as our 4th of July treat.  The hotel receptionist recommended a place in town named The Stove so it was to there that we headed.  It was a quaint little place, clearly popular with locals and tourists alike, and we enjoyed a pleasant breakfast to set us up for the day.  The diner was on the street where the town’s Independence Day parade was happening so we saw fun runners come jogging past and poked around at some of the stalls that were set up, including one where my younger kids obtained some new reading material.  We decided to get out of town before the parade, however, as we feared we might end up stuck by all the road closures.

Our first destination for the day was Bodie, a ghost town I have wanted to visit for a very long time.  It was a long drive up a winding, narrow, rubbly road to reach Bodie so – even before we set foot in the town – I was struck by how challenging life must have been for those who lived and worked there before the days of motorised transport.  I had assumed the national holiday might mean that people were at home with family and friends, doing the home town celebration thing, but when we pulled up to the entry booth the ranger informed us that the car park was full, the overflow car park was full, so we ought to just find a space on the road somewhere and park on the right.  I thought maybe that all of the visitors might detract from the sense of isolation and abandonment – those qualities one really wants from a ghost town – but the site was so vast that actually it wasn’t problematic.

Bodie was a mining town founded after a chap named Bodey found gold there in 1859.  The town gradually grew and peaked in the late 1870s, booming after a rich seam of gold ore was happened upon following a mine collapse.  During that period, Bodie had an incredible 30 mines and 9 stamp mills, where the ore was processed.  The population ballooned to about 8000 people but rapidly declined with mine closures.  Fires, the climate, and the passing decades destroyed many of the structures in the town and then the state park service stepped in and decided to preserve Bodie in a state of what they refer to as “arrested decay”.  Apparently what remains represents a mere 5% of what was once there so it really had been a massive town at one point in time.

We had a guide book to the town which was useful in identifying buildings and in breathing life into the old bones of the place by telling some of the stories of the people who lived and worked there.  We happened to be parked near some mining equipment so it was there that we started our tour of the 100+ buildings still standing in Bodie.  This equipment had been relocated from the Red Cloud mine and included the head frame and the cages that hauled miners and ore out of the mine shafts.

From there we wandered among the residential and commercial buildings and the wonky outhouses.  Many of these still had their contents inside.  We could peer through the windows and see dust-laden rooms containing busted furniture, plates and bottles on tables, blankets on beds, layers of wallpaper peeling.  As we did so, we learned about some of the residents of the town.  We learned about the schoolteacher whose father was a Sheriff killed in a shootout near Mono Lake, about a very naughty schoolchild arsonist who burned down the original schoolhouse, the murder of one man and the lynching of his killer, the one-armed manager of a baseball team, the women of the red light district, and those of Chinatown, and we saw coffins propped up against the wall in the morgue.  We were able to step just inside the Methodist Church so we could view its interior and were able to enter and wander around one home.  It was fantastic.

The Miner’s Union Hall is now a museum and we had fun looking in the display cases at all the personal items, photographs, hearses, and glass bottles.  We also loved finding random rusty objects lying in space between buildings, old vehicles standing like sculptures among the long grass, and gas pumps.

We took a wander past the lopsided hotel and the fire station and headed towards the stamp mill.  It was here that iron rods, mercury and cyanide, were used to separate the gold from the rock.  It was through being superintendent of this mining company that President Herbert Hoover’s brother Theodore lived in Bodie.  It would have been very interesting to tour the stamp mill but we knew the kids would rail against the idea so we didn’t get tickets.  We took a route past some more houses, the schoolhouse, and the hydroelectric substation, and then sadly it was time to return to the car and leave Bodie.

I absolutely loved visiting Bodie!  It actually exceeded my expectations, which were high.  I could have stayed there for hours and hours, maybe even days.  I especially would have loved seeing it at night to see if it made the place feel eerie at all.  I am so glad we were able to fit a visit to Bodie into our road trip.

 

Road Trip #16 – Thurmond

After spending a good few hours exploring Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine, we headed a short distance away to visit a ghost town named Thurmond, now in the care of the National Park Service.

The drive to Thurmond was beautiful.  In fact, throughout our travels in West Virginia I was struck by just how arrestingly beautiful the landscape was.  Perhaps it reminded me a little bit of Scotland and was stirring some homesickness for hills and glens and thick forests of trees.  The road to Thurmond was also very reminiscent of the single track roads we were very familiar with from living in Argyll for over a decade, winding and bumpy and with a new vista opening up around every corner.  It also took us, however, past scenes of pretty dire poverty. There were lots of run down shacks and trailers, some looking to be derelict to the point of collapse.  I don’t think I have seen poverty like it in America since visiting reservations in the South West.

We crossed a single track road bridge that was attached to a rusty iron rail bridge and emerged on the other side of the gorge at the railway depot building that serves as the NPS office and small museum.  We chatted to the friendly Park Ranger and had a look around the small museum and saw a three dimensional map of the area, demonstrating the extreme curve that trains have to take around the curve of the gorge and Thurmond nestled on the edge.  Trains still come through Thurmond including Amtrak passenger trains which people can board at Thurmond a couple of times a week.  Thurmond, fact fans, is America’s second least used train station after one in Texas.  Looking at the map again, it seemed to me a bit of a marvel that trains could make that bend at any sort of speed and still keep on the track.

Thurmond was once a bustling and thriving Appalachian town.  Its economy was dependent on the interrelated business of the local coal mines and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.  It was at Thurmond that all the trains from the surrounding mines would be coupled together to form one large train for shipment elsewhere in the nation.  In its heyday, there was a strip of commercial buildings along the line of the railway track and then residential buildings on the hills behind.  A hotel – long since burned down – was famous as the site of the longest card game in history, lasting something like fourteen years.  This hotel, the Dun Glen, had made Thurmond a resort town but when it burned down in the 1930 and one of the town’s two banks failed the following year that was the start of the town’s rapid decline.

As we set off to explore the remaining buildings, we were warned that the heat had brought out lots of rattlesnakes in the area to bask in the sunshine.  This set up the kids to have high expectations of a dangerous snake encounter.  When none materialised, they became somewhat irked.  This was because they were already annoyed at not being able to access any of the abandoned buildings in the ghost town.  Back home in Argyll, one of their favourite spots had been the abandoned crofting village of Arichonan and then there were all the ruined castles in the vicinity too so they were used to being able to get into places and quite annoyed that Thurmond did not permit that.  The grumps swiftly set in and, in the baking heat, they were soon fractious.

Then, just when the kids were nearing peak crankiness, a train saved the day.  We heard the train hooter (that’s not what it’s called, is it?) echo long before we saw it but soon a coal train came into view and stopped just beside the depot briefly before setting off again.  Apparently these trains only come through eight times a month so we were lucky to be there to see it during our visit.  It was massively long and the boys enjoyed trying to count the coal wagons as it hurtled past us and one of the boys even tried to race it for a bit.

Following our visit to Thurmond, I risked inciting the wrath of the children by dragging us on a bonkers detour.  We had noticed on the map that there was a place nearby named Lochgelly.  Since I am from Fife, I knew the original Lochgelly well and thought it would be fun to go and see a town in West Virginia that had been named after a coal mining town in Fife.  A bit of googling reveals that the town was originally named Stuart but a mining explosion in 1907 that killed 85 workers led to a difficulty in hiring miners to the mine there.  The name change was, therefore, a way to remove the taint of disaster.  The mining connection meant it was named for Lochgelly in Fife.  There was really no purpose to our excursion to Lochgelly other than for me to be able to say I had been.  We pulled up at a mulch company which was handily right next door to a frozen custard place.  The kids were plied with frozen custard which cooled them down and put an end to their cantankerousness.

Having gone as far as Lochgelly, Mr Pict and I decided it was not much further to the New River Gorge Bridge so we should go check it out.  It was once the longest single span arch bridge in the world, is the second highest bridge in America, and stands 876 feet above the New River that runs beneath.  Having got the idea from driving across the bridge, the kids refused to get out of the car to see it.  I, therefore, wandered out to the viewpoint on my own to see a vista of it.  There were steps that would take my down to the bottom for a worm’s eye view but I decided that I had neither the time nor inclination to descend and ascend hundreds of wooden steps just to get a different perspective on a road bridge.

We ended the day with a challenge.  Dining at a local steakhouse in Beckley, our 9 year old pleaded with Mr Pict to try their steak eating challenge.  Mr Pict initially resisted and placed an order for an entirely different meal.  Our 9 year old loves cookery competition TV shows so he was disappointed.  Between his pleading chocolate brown eyes, pouting lip, and his broken arm, his Dad capitulated and changed his order.  He had to eat a 31 ounce steak plus the sweet potato fries and salad that accompanied it.  Every. Last. Morsel.  And he managed it!  The kids were over the moon and our 9 year old declared him to be his “idol”.