When we aren't visiting with my mom, we try to get out to visit old friends and hit some of my old haunts. The old high school I went to is no longer being used. It was built around 1900 and had a certain amount of character, kind of like a dungeon. The story is it was inadequate. In any case, a replacement building was built and opened for business this school year. We went up there and watched our friend, Bruce's brother Chris(co), paint an awesome Leopard in the new gym. I got to wander around the school. It has all the warmth of a medium security prison...concrete block construction. Plastic, steel and glass. Stone cold and characterless. They tell me that's progress. Here it is from the outside.

Like I said, Chrisco was commissioned to paint a picture of a Leopard, the school mascot, on the wall of the new gym. Chrisco is an artiste extraordinaire. He can do just about any media imaginable. He got his experience on this macro stuff painting billboards back in the days when billboards were painted. Here's the master himself. If you'd like to commission him to paint your dog or your wife, e-mail Chrisco.

Here's his Liberty Leopard missing a few spots.

He's got his spots; now he's gettin' whiskers.

The finished masterpiece, ready to have a few basketballs bounced off it. The corney slogan is the coach's, not Chrisco's.

The admirers chat: Cathy, brothers Gary and Baja Bruce

The next day, we went down to the railroad tracks and visited the powder mill. The tracks that used to be the old Erie Railroad, then later the Erie-Lackawanna Line, were torn up years ago. The bed was recently graded and you can now drive down it. Someone is also removing the signal lines next to it. This made it easy to pick insulators. They had left the crossarms and insulators laying near where they fell, which was nice. Unfortunately, all the ones available were common. There were CD 145s, 152s, and 154s. As we have so many common insulators, I only saved a few. A CD 145 H.G. Co. and a CD 154 Gayner, among others. Here's the lines, looking toward Logangate.

And looking in the other direction.

On the other side, the old New York Central, which became the Penn Central and eventually was absorbed into Conrail, is still active. Here's a choo-choo train.

It's nice that you can walk the tracks in Ohio. In some states, Oregon and Florida come to mind, the railroad police are active and you can get into serious trouble for walking the tracks. Weird.

I've been walking these tracks since I was 10 years old. We made our way back to the old Powder Mill. The mill was built in 1886 and made black powder for blasting, before the advent of Nobel's dynamite. You can read an article about it here. It would be a historical site if it was in California. Here's a panorama of some of it.

Here's Cathy off to the left. This frame wouldn't stitch for some reason.

This out building did something, but I have no clue what.

Over in a little corner of the woods near the powder mill lies a small stand of virgin timber. I don't know why these trees survived, as they have beautiful trunks that were prime hardwoods for the sawyer. Here's Cathy by an old-growth Beech Tree.

A species of Red Oak is nearby.

These trees are over 100 feet tall and probably 200 - 300 years old. The Eastern Deciduous Forest in this part of Ohio was undoubtedly spectacular in its day, before the white man destroyed it to build homes and make iron. They used to make iron from charcoal, before coking coal became the norm. It amazes me that our ancestors saved virtually none of it. The largest plot of virgin hardwood forest left in the state is owned by Ohio University, my alma mater. It's called Dysart Woods and is located in Noble County. It totals a whopping 80 acres: two non-contiguous plots of about 40 acres each. Whoopdydoo.

The next day, we went out to my old stomping ground in Hartford. I engaged in just a little mischief on this road. It's called Thompson-Sharpsville Road and had been closed since the mid-1970s. I was more than amazed to see it re-graded and open. It has undergone several metamorphoses since the `70s. First, it became a junk yard in the mid `70s. Then, in the mid 80's it was logged big time. All the old growth trees, and there were a good many, were chopped down. These were mostly white oaks and Sugar Maple. They also took out any second growth oaks, maples, beeches, tulip poplars, and hickory they could sell. Money talks. Who wants woods when you can have pallets? Here's the road. I didn't think driving on it was such a good idea with my rental car, but once I started there was no turning around until I got to the "bumpkin spot".

A ways down the road is the old Stone Bridge. It's one of my favorite picture spots. I can imagine an old horse & buggy driving over it.

The spring where we used to keep our drinks cold is still hangin' in there.

We like to go over to Pennsylvania to hike. A page on that subject is