Goodbye, Ohio

On the brink, Bridal Veil Falls 

Kali's mom (my mother-in-law) is developing dementia and can't live alone any longer.  A year ago, after a plumbing accident in her house which simply overwhelmed Mom, Kali's brother flew to northeastern Ohio to gather-up Mom and a few of her things to take back to San Diego with him.  She's been there ever since, and her house has sat empty.

Because Mom can't move back to northeastern Ohio, we're getting ready to sell her house.  Over the week preceding and including  Thanksgiving, Kali, her brother, and I gathered in the house to get things organized and sort through a lifetime of possessions and memories.  It was a physically and psychically challenging seven days we spent together.

On the last day we were together, we finished up our work in early afternoon and had a few hours before we had to take Kali's brother to the airport.  I suggested a walk at my favorite natural area, Bridal Veil Falls on Deerlick Run in the Bedford Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks system.  Though it had rained in the morning, by late afternoon the wan autumn sun was shining.

I've posted images of the falls before.  When I was growing up, the falls and the tight gorge below them were my favorite summer hangout.  Back then, the Metroparks system had not yet built the elaborate boardwalk that now lets just about anyone who is ambulatory to view the falls.  Decades ago, I entered the stream above the falls and waded, slid and scrambled all the way down to Deerlick Run's confluence with Tinker's Creek.  A few hundred feet downstream of Bridal Veil Falls, Deerlick Run and another unnamed Tinker's Creek tributary each plunge over a shelf of resistant sandstone to create twin falls in an isolated hemlock-shaded glen, then course together with their waters conjoined.  It was a sacred place for me.

Bridal Veil Falls after morning rain

Northern half of Twin Falls on an unnamed tributary of Tinker's Creek

Because Kali, her brother and I were content to just explore the falls' environs and not take a long hike, we got off the formal trail (which, incidentally, is part of the state-looping Buckeye Trail) and wandered  through the woods along the lip of the gorge.  To my utter disappointment, I found that my sacred place has been desecrated--not terribly, but enough to cause me great sadness.  Many of the birches bore carvings in their bark, and a well-worn path traced the cliff edge.  The woodland understory was virtually non-existent, and all of the very few saplings and root-sprouts had been nibbled by deer.

Fungus-encrusted snag in the woods

There's a very good chance that this will have been my last visit to Bridal Veil Falls.  While my brother and his family and my sister and her family still live in northeastern Ohio, we are none of us particularly close and I have never returned to Ohio just to visit with my younger siblings.  (Nor have they ever come to visit me in 23 years, either.)

Hemlocks and sycamore

And it's not just Bridal Veil Falls; this may have been my last bittersweet visit to Ohio, too, since we have professionals dealing with the sale of the house and the transaction can probably be completed by attorneys via mail or email.  Though there are still tethers that can probably never be completely severed, I think it's time to move on.   

Ohio Reunion Weekend

Deer Lick Run
Cleveland Metropark's Bedford Reservation

My wife and I made a quick three-day weekend trip to Ohio last weekend to attend our 40th high school reunion in an inner-ring Cleveland suburb. Because airfares from our home city to Cleveland are outrageous (we can fly to the West Coast for less money), we flew to Columbus, rented a car, and drove 2-1/2 hours to Cleveland.

As we approached Cleveland late Friday afternoon, I begged my wife's indulgence to stop to photograph Deerlick Run in Cleveland Metropark's Bedford Reservation. She knows that Deerlick Run is my favorite stream in the whole world, and so she agreed. I've featured images of this creek in previous posts, but only in winter and autumn. Now I have images from deep summer, too.

Just downstream from the small cascade in the images above, there is a much taller falls called Bridal Veil Falls. I've tried to photograph Bridal Veil Falls in the past, but the images haven't been great. I explained this to my wife, and she told me to take some pictures anyway. I did, and they weren't great, but the image below was the best I got. The ravine is dark, and the upper falls are bright in the sunlight, making the picture full of contrast.

Bridal Veil Falls
Deer Lick Run
Cleveland Metropark's Bedford Reservation

While we photographed the stream, there was a family wading in the creek. I remarked to them that Deerlick Run is a great wading stream, and the father agreed, saying, "I've been coming here for 35 years!" I told him that it had been nearly 50 years for me.

My wife, who had only been to Deerlick Run once before many years ago, said that the stream was truly lovely, and that she could understand why I had fallen in love with it. She added that, for her, it brought to mind a Victorian landscape painting.

The class reunion spread over three days, with an "icebreaker" at a local bar-and-grill on Friday evening, a dinner-dance in the old high school cafeteria on Saturday evening, and a picnic on Sunday afternoon. We had to get back home on Sunday and skipped the picnic, but attended the other two events. We enjoyed ourselves, but couldn't recognize many of the 100+ folks from our class of 525 who attended the reunion.

Because we had no reunion-related commitments on Saturday afternoon, we visited The West Woods, a relatively new Geauga County park that I had wanted to visit for many years. In fact, in my 1970's-vintage road map book of Geauga County (which I still own), I had made a note that there was a geologic feature that I had wanted to explore, but in the 1970's, the land was private property. I certainly was not above trespassing back in the 1970's to investigate natural features, but in this case I had marked the attraction (Ansel's Ledges) on my map but had never gone to see them. I intended to right that oversight during this trip.

The West Woods is a large park (around 500 acres), most of which is cloaked in dense beech-sugar maple forest. Ansel's Ledges (now called Ansel's Cave) is the main attraction. Despite dense cloud cover and the threat of showers, we set off on the 0.75-mile trail to the cave.

Ansel's Ledges formed from erosion of Sharon Conglomerate. The conglomerate is resistant to weathering, but the underlying shales are not, so the supporting shale erodes away, and then great blocks of the conglomerate crack off, forming modest cliffs and ledges.

Ansel's Ledges in Sharon Conglomerate
The West Woods Park, Geauga County

When we arrived at Ansel's "Cave," we were in for some disappointment. The feature is not a cave in the true sense of the word; it's a very narrow ravine with huge undercut and overhanging conglomerate cliffs that do not fully close over the top of the ravine. The ravine was cut through the conglomerate and shale by an intermittent stream with a small falls at the head of the ravine, but northeast Ohio's unusually dry summer meant that there was no water flowing over the lip of the falls. Lastly, the canopy of a huge tree had recently fallen into the mouth of the ravine, partially obscuring the view up to the spill off at the head of the ravine with a tangle of dead branches. Ansel's Cave in this state was so uninspiring and unphotogenic that I didn't even bother to take a picture.

Boardwalk alongside Ansel's Ledges

Ansel's Ledges
The West Woods Park

When Geauga County Parks established The West Woods, they built an enviable environmental education and meeting facility. The rain showers did not hold off until we returned from our walk, so we stopped in the visitor center to dry off (and cool off, too, since it was unmercifully hot and humid). The center features a long wall with windows looking out over an elaborate (and busy) bird feeding station. There, we watched a Downy Woodpecker repeatedly return to (and aggressively defend) a hummingbird feeder--a Downy with a definite sweet beak, that's a first for me!

Five Days in Ohio

Deerlick Run, Bedford Reservation, Cleveland Metroparks

I spent five days in northeast Ohio from Saturday, March 6 through Wednesday, March10. I grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Garfield Heights, and my mother-in-law still lives there alone. Her mental health is deteriorating rapidly, and my wife and I had to make a semi-emergency trip to help her out. I may be back to Ohio on a fairly regular basis, or I may have to move her closer to us.

While I was there, I visited some of my old natural area haunts. On Saturday afternoon, soon after I arrived, I slipped out to the Bedford Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks system to visit Deerlick Run and Bridal Veil Falls while there was still a deep blanket of snow on the ground. Right up front, I have to confess that Deerlick Run is my favorite stream in the entire world. I'm sure that growing up within bicycling distance of the creek had a significant effect on my choice of a favorite stream, but there's no shaking the feeling. Deer Run, for a few hundred feet, runs over horizontal beds of shale creating a series of small falls alternating with shallow sheets of flat water. Then, as the creek approaches the lip of Tinkers Creek gorge, it breaks through the shale and tumbles over Bridal Veil Falls. The falls are fine, but it is really the intimate series of cascades and glissades above the big falls that captivate me. When I was young (and that means well into my college years), I used to spend hours playing in this part of the creek, wading in the water and sliding barefoot over the smooth shale slabs. Water quality in the creek has deteriorated a bit since I lived in northeast Ohio, but the stream's still pretty clean.

Deerlick Run, just above Bridal Veil Falls

Wooden stairway leading to the Bridal Veil Falls Overlook

Just below Bridal Veil Falls, Deerlick Run joins together with another stream of about equal size, and the conjoined streams empty shortly thereafter into Tinker's Creek, largest of the Cuyahoga River tributaries. Unfortunately, the second stream drains a heavily industrialized watershed and its water quality is poor. However, as the two streams approach their meeting point, they tumble over twin falls separated by only a thin point of land. It was too icy and dangerous to climb down into the gorge the day that I visited, but the opportunity to enjoy the twin falls head-on is a delight in summer.

Wolf Creek Falls, Garfield Park Reservation, Cleveland Metroparks

The next morning (Sunday, March 7), I ventured out to the Garfield Park Reservation of the Metroparks to photograph Mill Creek Falls in the snow. The lighting wasn't the best, but I got a few good images of the falls.

Wolf Creek really is little more than an open sewer now. When I was growing up in the area, suburban development was eating up its watershed, and the developers' answer to an irritating stream was to encase it in a huge concrete culvert. Out of sight, out of mind. Each year, more and more of the stream disappeared underground. But the portion of the stream in the Garfield Park Reservation was never buried. Like Deerlick Run, Wolf Creek flows for a short distance over horizontal shale bedrock, which makes for a very scenic stretch of water, before the creek reaches the lip of the falls. From that point downstream, the creek is not interesting; its bed is filled with rocky rubble. When I was growing up, I used to wade Wolf Creek above the falls, too. With that in mind, I decided to cross the shallow creek in my L.L. Bean boots to get a different perspective from the other bank. Unfortunately, the high nutrient content of the water has encouraged luxuriant growth of diatoms on the streambed, and the rocks were really slippery. I went down, and thoroughly slimed (or diatomed) my pants, my jacket, and my hands. Yuck! And, the image wasn't even worth it!

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We also took advantage of the fact that the refrigerated tobogganing chutes in the Mill Stream Run Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks were operating for the last day of the season on Sunday, March 7. It was sunny, beautiful, and mild as we carried the toboggan up the wooden stairs to the top of the chutes. The long lines gave us plenty of time to build up our anticipation. I sat in the front, my 85-year-old mother-in-law sat in the middle, and my wife sat in the back. As the attendant opened the gate and we slid toward the brink, my reaction was, "Holy crap!" I'll tell you, flying down the chute at 45 miles per hour made me so much more appreciative of the bobsled and skeleton crews at the Olympics. It was a blast!

Toboggan Chutes, Mill Stream Run Reservation, Cleveland Metroparks