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

Midwestern Memories

Wolf Creek Falls

I just returned from six days in northeastern Ohio, the area where I lived until I was 18 years old and where, until recently, most of my immediate family lived. Now, my youngest siblings have moved to the outer suburbs of Cleveland or to San Diego, California, but I needed to visit my elderly mother-in-law, who lives alone in one of the inner ring suburbs.

I decided to drive instead of fly because air fares were high. There's almost no competition between airlines for service between my home city and Cleveland; hence, there's no price competition, either. So, I made the 8-hour trip by car.

As I approached the Cleveland metropolitan area on the freeway, I started to get nostalgic pangs. The area was very important during my formative years, and it still has a grip on me, albeit one that becomes increasingly tenuous with each passing year. Part of the reason for its slipping away is that, when I visit natural places that were important when I was growing up, most have shrunken as a result of suburban development or, worse yet, have disappeared altogether. Thus, the "place" doesn't have the hold on me that it once did.

Most of the time in the Cleveland area I spent working on my mother-in-law's house, but I did escape twice--once to one of the wonderful Cleveland Metroparks, and once to a natural area owned by The Holden Arboretum in the far eastern suburb of Kirtland.

Wolf Creek Falls from above

The first site I visited was the Garfield Park Reservation of the Metroparks system. It's neither one of the larger nor one of the more interesting parks, but it was nearby and accessible. Its system of carriage roads was designed by Olmstead and Vaux (of Central park fame). Naturally, I gravitated to water, which, in Garfield Park Reservation, is either uninteresting and filthy Mill Creek or its more scenic tributary, Wolf Creek.

Wolf Creek, too, has always been a sewer--even 45 years ago when I first started to visit the park. It emerged from a big pipe where the stream had been buried in the newly-developed suburbs and was foul from its headwaters. Undoubtedly, sanitary sewer cross connections polluted the water. Despite its poor water quality, though, where the creek entered Garfield Park it flowed over hard, slick bluestone that created a fabulous slippery channel for several hundred feet before the water poured over a falls into a large plunge pool below. I can't begin to estimate how many times in the summer I "skated" along the streambed in bare feet up to the very brink of the cascade. Water quality hasn't improved any, but the creek is still amazingly beautiful.

One of the many crevasses on Little Mountain

For the second escape, I accompanied two docents who led a group of twelve walkers to Little Mountain, one of the natural areas protected by The Holden Arboretum. I would have liked to visit Stebbin's Gulch (another of the arboretum's natural areas, and one that has been called "the most sublime natural area in northern Ohio" [I agree]), but all visits to Holden's natural areas are by guided walks, and the Stebbin's Gulch tour was not scheduled for the time I was in northeast Ohio. So, it was off to Little Mountain, a natural area I had never previously visited.

Little Mountain is a high point in northeastern Ohio's glaciated landscape--hardly a mountain. It is capped with an erosion-resistant rock called Sharon Conglomerate. The conglomerate has a tendency to develop cracks that frost, rain, and ice erode into deep, vertical crevasses. Despite the fact that the crest of Little Mountain was the site of several successive hotel complexes that operated until the early 1900s, there is virtually no evidence of the resorts-- just a mature forest of Canada hemlocks and white pines mixed in with some yellow birch and oaks. A good afternoon walk.