Fall Foliage 2011

It’s been over a month since my last road trip and I was itching to get out and enjoy the gorgeous fall foliage so this past weekend Dad and I took off to the wilds of Pennsylvania. While doing an audit of the NPS sites I’ve been to so far (145!) I discovered that the North Country Trail runs through NY and PA so I thought I’d check it out. With the added bonus of fall foliage in full bloom I decided to head down to one of the most scenic parts of the NCT in the Allegheny National Forest. The North Country Trail is still in development (as of 2010, over 2,100 miles have been certified) but when complete it will stretches 4,600 miles from eastern New York to central North Dakota.Dad and I headed out first thing Saturday morning and didn’t even make it past the local corner store before I realized that I had never printed the itinerary. We headed back home and I printed it out so we could actually know where we were going. It was raining but as we headed south the sun came out and gave us a beautiful rainbow. I don’t think I’d ever seen a full rainbow before with a completely perfect arch. The rains came back and continued as we drove the Kinzua Bridge Byway and reached our first stop at the Kinzua Bridge State Park. The park is noted as the home of the Kinzua Bridge spanning Kinzua Creek, original bridge built in 1882 and destroyed in 2003 by a tornado. It was built in less than 100 days by a crew of 40 men. The reason for the short construction time was that scaffolding was not used in the bridge's construction. At the time it was built, the original Kinzua Bridge was the highest, at 301 feet , and longest, at 2,053 feet railway bridge in the world and was billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”.

This is what it looked like when built:

Prior to the destruction:

In 2003 an F1 tornado wiped out 11 of the 20 towers so today it looks like this:

The bridge has been partially reconstructed so now you can walk out on it and look down to the valley through a glass floor. With the rain though, you couldn’t really see down. We didn’t spend much time out on the bridge because it was so windy and rainy that people’s umbrellas were breaking and I couldn’t feel my hands. We walked over to another observation deck to get a side view of the bridge. I had never even heard of this place before and it was amazing and terrifying to view the tangled heap of metal left on the floor. The ruins are used to show the forces of nature at work.

Dad and I then drove through Kane, PA and headed into the Allegheny National Forest. As the rains continued to pour we drove through our intended camping spot for the night, Red Bridge. We decided not to set up camp in the rain and decided to continue on and see how the weather shakes out. We drove past an NPS interpretive site of an old powerhouse. This region has a big history of oil production. At the turn of the century this area of PA produced over 90% of the United States’ oil. It doesn’t do nearly that amount today but remains an active operation. The particular powerhouse closed in the 1980s but gave a good overview of how the oil gets out of the ground.