Altoona and Back

 A friend, Byron Smail recently released a new book that he wrote (Blair County Iron) and was going to give a talk about it. Ann Marie and I were going to go and also spend a little time roaming around the area. His talk was taking place at the Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum, being a railroad fanatic; I wasn’t going to miss that! We had been to another of Byron’s talks when he had printed his first book and we enjoyed his talk immensely. We were looking forward to both the talk and the trip!

    As is always the case, when we are going somewhere, I look for a few things to do on our trip, a couple little things which might make the ride a bit more enjoyable.

    Of course, there were a couple geocaches on our route. Since we were going to hear a talk about iron furnaces, I also added 3 furnaces that we hadn’t visited yet to our itinerary. We also would stop at a couple quilt shops and a new to us, restaurant. Then, there were the sites we would just run across, we never know what we will find!

    Our start was a little after sunrise, hoping to avoid some of the heat of the day. We ended up in Gallitzin around 9. There was a cache that we hadn’t found a few weeks ago and we were going to try to find it again. Unfortunately, after 15-20 minutes of searching around, we couldn’t locate it. We weren’t too concerned, it is only a game, chances are, we will be back.

    About a mile or two away, just below the railroad tracks coming out of Altoona, there used to be a furnace. The town of Bennington sat here, now all that remains are a couple foundations and a cemetery. My hopes were to find the stack from the furnace. I had only a rough idea of its location; it was below the tracks and above a large slag pile. A couple friends had been there but we hadn’t…yet.

    We drove along a dirt road, searching for where a path/road might have once been, leading down to the site.  We passed a long line of coke ovens; we counted over 40 of them. Hundreds used to be here. The fronts are all broken. I’ve heard that the owners would take the doors and fronts off of them after they were no longer used to avoid taxation.

    We got out of the car and walked back and forth searching for a possible route down to the furnace. At one spot, the slope was extremely steep and almost all of the edges were covered in thick, high Bind weed. Driving back I found what I believed was the trail, I stopped the car and went down over the hill. Fighting through high weeds and jagger bushes I went down a couple hundred yards. AMB stayed in the car and not wanting to continue on by myself and possibly get hurt, I returned to the car. I marked the spot with my GPS, I WILL be back to explore further!

We meandered around the Hollidaysburg area, checking out a couple quilt shops, a roadside veggie stand and then stopped for lunch at a Pennsylvania Dutch style restaurant. A little further down the road we came into the town of Woodbury. The Elizabeth Iron Furnace used to sit here. Peter Shoenberger had a furnace built here in 1827. It operated through 1843 and then it was dismantled and moved. We looked at the field where it once stood but didn’t bother going over to explore. There are no ruins there.

The furnace was moved to Bloomfield Township where it became the Bloomfield Furnace. After operating for a few years, it was once again dismantled and moved to Rodman where it became the Middle Martha Furnace.

    I stopped in a small business and asked if they knew anything about the furnace. Bryan, the owner didn’t know anything about it but he did give me some directions to a near-by limestone kiln. We drove over and stopped to take some pictures.

    Limestone kilns were used to burn limestone to produce lime which was spread on fields to help improve crop yields. They were operated much the same as iron furnaces. Limestone and charcoal, or a similar heat source was loaded from the top and the finished product sunk to the bottom where it was taken out. These kilns can be found all over the state.

    After looking around the kiln and photographing it, we drove to the outskirts of Bellwood, a bit north of Altoona. There we searched for a set of ruins, another Elizabeth Furnace. The first one we looked for was in Bedford County, this one was in Blair. Once again, I only had an idea of where they might be located. I tried coming in from one side of Sandy Run Creek but saw nothing, the land was too flat. The furnace had to be on the opposite side of the stream, up against the hillside.

    We drove across a near-by bridge and tried again. Ann Marie decided to hang out in the car while I searched. My “search” took me through thick weeds and across hundreds of fallen trees. I walked through mud bogs and had mosquitoes feeding off me. I tried my best to avoid the poison ivy. I had shorts on, not the best clothing for bushwhacking and my legs were bleeding from scratches. I followed the stream and didn’t see anything and eventually backtracked. I found a small deer trail and followed it in closer to the hillside and then... all of a sudden, it appeared in front of me. Like a vision it became apparent to me, I could discern between the trees and leaves and the rock ruins behind them.

    The furnace had partially collapsed though one corner was still standing sharp and straight. I didn’t see any openings; they had been covered when the sides collapsed. Older pictures show that there were 3 openings. I climbed up the hillside to the top where I could see the chimney. Looking in, I could see the bricks which lined it and some trash that other “explorers” had tossed inside. Parts of a wall connected the top to the hillside. Numerous animal holes were visible between the stones. After taking a few more pictures, I took the easy way out by sneaking through the yard of a house above it and returned to the car and Ann Marie. She told me that 2 people had stopped to inquire if she needed any help. Nice people in this area!

    We then returned to Hollidaysburg where we checked into a “low priced” motel. We showered and got dressed for the lecture.

    Held in a lecture room in the Railroaders Memorial Museum, Byron kept us enthralled for about an hour and a half. He told about the various iron furnaces situated around Blair County and showed us pictures, both old and present day. He explained some things about how the iron ore was mined and also about some of the limestone quarries in the county. A little bit about the Portage Railroad and the canals was presented also. A little over 50 people were in attendance.

    Leaving the building after the talk we were presented with a wide rainbow that stretched across the sky. The sun was just setting and that added even more color to the view. Driving back to Hollidaysburg, we watched the sky turn orange. The mountains above Altoona showed all the various hills and valleys, all dark, underneath a spectacular reddish orange sky. There was no place to pull over and take a picture, but there is no doubt, it will always be in our memories.

    The next morning, I was up at dawn and went out to find a couple geocaches before I returned with coffee. We returned to Altoona for breakfast at a great diner called Tom and Joes. Opened originally in 1933 it reflects the way diners used to be. The tables and chairs are vintage styled, a counter is available and the food was both flavorful and plenty. Best breakfast I’ve had in a long time!

    We walked down to the RR tracks and watched the east-bound Amtrak train pull into the station. We found another geocache and then headed up towards the Horseshoe Curve. We did another cache there and then went under the tracks, past the coke ovens located in the ghost town of Glen White and then to Gallitzin where we attempted again to find the cache we couldn’t find the day before. NO LUCK! I’d like to think it is gone, how could we have missed it, THREE TIMES?

    We did one more cache in the town and then got onto rt.22 and headed west towards home. We had only been here for two days but we kept saying that it felt as if we’d been on the road for a week. We managed to squeeze a lot into this short little trip; I’d have to say it was another complete success!

The TWOs

     This is it, the morning of the 22^nd. A Tuesday morning, a bit early, just a little over TWO hours into the day. It isn’t the time which is important so much as it is, the numbers.

    I have a weird obsession of seeing certain numbers come together.  Watching the odometer turn over to 100,000 miles, or on π Day, May 14^th, 2015, watching the clock turn to 9:26:53am.  (π= 3.141592653 or May 14^th, 2015@9:26:53)

I even baked a pie for the occasion

    Yes, this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Right now I am waiting for the clock to hit, 2:22:22AM, on TWOsday, February 22^nd, 2022. That’s a whole bunch of twos in there! How could anyone NOT get excited about that? I imagine there are alarm clocks going off all over the eastern part of the country right now! Today is a great day to celebrate the number TWO!

    The number TWO is a very important number, it governs most of our lives. We have TWO eyes to see, TWO ears to listen, TWO arms to hold and hug and TWO legs to move us around. The majority of us end up with another, the forces of love drawing us together into a pair, TWO people.

    Later in the day, Frank and I are heading towards Altoona to do some geocaches and maybe, see a train or TWO. Geocaching.com has a souvenir they are awarding any cacher who finds TWO caches today. We are planning on adding that souvenir to our banks.

    The time has come…gotta take a picture!

2:22:22am on 2/22/2022

    A few hours later, I arrived at Frank’s house, a little before 5. We wanted to be in the Altoona area by seven, just in case there might be a sunrise.  Frank got us there right at our scheduled time. There wasn’t much of a sunrise though, it was more of a brightening of the sky.

Sunrise?

    We didn’t complain; it wasn’t raining! (Yet) Our first cache was near a railroad crossing.  Sadly, no trains passed by while we were there. Our second find was hidden close to where a sanitarium used to be located. The high altitude and fresh air was thought to be helpful for the patients.  It was later turned into a prison and is now owned by a hydroponic company.

    Hmmm, this could be a future exploration site!

Frank at the Sanitarium Cache

    TWO caches later we came to one hidden near a line of coke ovens. The trip down to them was very treacherous because even though the temperatures were in the 40’s, the dirt road that led to them was covered with a thick coating of ice! Walking was treacherous, thank heavens for hiking staffs! Snow along the edges provided some traction but with each step, you would sink in an inch, making simple walking a step, lift, step type of procedure. It got a bit tiring. The cache was only a ¼ mile away from where the truck was parked but it took much longer to get there. Follow the road or climb/fall down cliffs…

    I believe it was Archimedes that said that the shortest distance between TWO points is a straight line, he obviously never went geocaching!

Me at the coke oven, #2000!

    This was my TWO thousandth find!  I had found my 1000^th cache about 5 miles away from this one. (Altoona has some good caches.) The find was worth the slippery hike down to it, the difficulties are part of what make it fun!

    To read about my 1000^th cache, click here: ​​Books, Adventure and Life: Grail of the Alleghenies Legend, My 1000th Cache! (booksadventuresandlife.blogspot.com)

    The coke ovens are part of a community that once was here called Bennington. There is a near-by cemetery with the foundation of the church beside it and a few other remnants hidden in the woods.  The town was built when the RR tunnels in Gallitzen were dug. Originally a shanty town to house the Irish and other immigrant laborers who hand-dug the tunnels, it could only be reached by train. Coal miners also occupied the houses of the village. It was abandoned in the late 40's.

    After this find, Frank and I then headed down towards the Horseshoe Curve and found four more caches. We passed on climbing up to the curve because the rain was starting and frankly, we didn’t want to get wet, or fall! (Such wimps!)

The last cache

    The last cache of the day was hidden in some rocks about 20-30 feet above the trail. We had to get around a large, icy culvert to get to the cache. The path had lots of ice on it and care was needed to mak sure we didn’t slip. Once we were at “ground zero” we made a quick find and then returned to the truck where it was nice and dry.  The ride home was uneventful and went quickly.

Almost home

    Fog was rising off the streams as I neared my home.  Like all our trips, we had a good time, I believe that this is caused by the TWO people involved! There was only one train we saw in AlTWOna, but we found all the caches we had searched for! There were no unfortunate slips or falls, we stayed fairly dry and, I made my 2000th find! On top of all that, we both received a souvenir! Not bad for a day of Twos!

    One final shot, taken just a few minutes ago…

22:22:22 on 2/22/2022

Comin' Round the Curve

 

As is so often the case with pre-planned days, this one started with rain.  Thankfully it wasn’t much more than a light sprinkle. We sure weren’t going to let it stop us from enjoying our trip!

We had been planning this “photo-expedition/geocache search” for a couple weeks. Our final destination would be the Horseshoe Curve near Altoona.  We were planning on going up the hill on the backside of the curve to take some pictures of trains. On our way over, we would make a few stops to try our luck at finding some geocaches.

Frank and I have taken countless photo trips, starting sometime in the 80’s and continuing on through the present day. Frank is a fine photographer and we always enjoy discussing photography and our various other hobbies. Whether our photos turn out good or bad, the day sunny or rainy, we always seem to have a good time.

We left Franks house around 6:30 in the morning. The windshield wipers were only used intermittently, the day was looking good.

Our first stop was at a BBQ joint. It wasn’t to get some food, it was to find a cache. We had been here previously but hadn’t realized that there was a cache hidden there. Since the place was closed, the food option was off the table. We settled on finding the cache instead. It was an easy find, inside a box that contained a rubber pig that oinked when the lid was opened.

On top of a mountain about 5 miles away we made our next stop. This cache was hidden in a small ambulance! Cool, you never know what you might find when you’re geocaching! The radio towers across the highway were partially hidden by the fog. Further down the road we would see fog hugging the hillsides on the distant mountains. Pennsylvania has so many nice views!!

A few “pedestrian” caches followed; nothing real exciting other than the thrill of another find. Rt. 22 has hundreds of caches hidden near it. We picked only a small quantity and left the others for another time. There were two that we couldn’t locate. We looked in all the usual spots but couldn’t find them. We left because we had more important things to do, like watching trains!

Driving to the curve using the back roads avoided going into Altoona. Getting off rt.22 at Gallitzin gave us clear roads with hardly any traffic and no traffic lights. We reached the back side of the curve in about 15 minutes.

Our camera gear was packed in our backpacks. I carried a tripod, planning on using it as a hiking staff if needed. We doused ourselves in bug spray and started up the hill. It was a steep climb but other than a few stops for me to catch my breath, there were no problems.

At the top, we were uphill from the observation platform in the center of the curve. We looked down at the building and the locomotive that is sitting there. The rocks we set up on were thankfully in the shade, not that we had to worry about sunlight. It was just brighter and hotter out on the tracks.

Not much was happening at first. Two trucks were up the tracks a bit, the workers were doing some sort of maintenance. We sat and waited and BS’d.

The picture above shows the curve from space. The yellow line is our path up to the curve and the approximate spot where we set up. Altoona is located off to the upper right of the picture. The track rises as it goes towards Gallitzin, off the picture at the lower right. The curve was built in 1854 by the Pennsylvania Railroad to allow trains to cross the Allegheny Mountains. The curve, approximately a quarter mile across uses the topography of the mountains to lessen the grade to the summit.

 As we sat and talked, we heard a couple toots and then the echoes from across the valley. The men cleared off the tracks and a train came downhill towards us. The engineer tooted to the men as he passed them and then again to us as he went by. A short while later we heard another toot as he passed the observation deck.

A few minutes passed and then an Amtrak train came down the hill, heading east into the curve. He tooted also as he passed the observation deck. It must be in the engineers handbook; “Always toot your horn at railfans on the Curve!”

Next to appear was a train heading west, coming uphill out of Altoona. This one was going slow; we heard the noise of the growling engines before we saw them. There were three locomotives pulling the train. We didn’t think to count the cars. The train seemed to go on forever. We guessed that there were at least 300 cars. Two engines were helping at the end. It is amazing to me to think how much power was in those 5 engines!

After that train there was a lull in the action. Then the sounds of another reached us and finally we saw the engines slowly coming into view across the valley. Eight engines pulled this train! Wow, this will be a long one we thought. We started counting the cars as they passed. 

Forty seven… That was it?  Maybe the engines were being taken somewhere? They sure didn’t need that many to pull that small amount of cars. While we were watching and counting, another eastbound train passed on the tracks behind it. This train was much longer and had some helpers positioned in mid train. It passed before the westbound train passed us.

Once these trains had passed we packed our gear and returned to the car. We had been here for about an hour and a half; we were ready to get moving again. The path going down the hill was much easier going down! We did another cache located inside the bowl of the bend. Frank signed the log as another train passed on the curve above us. We then stopped at two other caches but decided to pass on them since they involved some risky climbing.

The caches I do these days pale in comparison to some of the ones I’ve done in the past. My body just doesn’t bend and stretch as well as it used to. Then there is the healing time, which tends to drag out a bit longer than in the old days!

We were back home around 2PM. My odometer showed that I had traveled a little over 200 miles. We had no slips or falls and we found most of the caches we searched for. I only got us lost once, which is about average, but Frank quickly found our road and we were back on track again. I felt pretty good when we got back, after a stretch or two my back muscles felt normal once again. The pictures came out well and the rain had held off for most of the trip. There were no problems; it was a good trip…as always!

Note; I have to say, I did have one small problem. I found a tick on me before I went to bed. Hopefully it was the only one.  Human nature being as it is, for the next hour or two, I could feel “them” crawling all over me!