The Connector and Creekside Trails - a short cut to righteousness

This report is the second and last covering my path of iniquity.  Yes, I confess to have strayed from the way that the Trail Gods set before me.  Yet the route I chose could truthfully be called the Straight Path (or at least the straighter path), so who's to say which is the true course?

In my last report I covered the Tri-County Triangle Trail, a 34 mile paved bike path lined with cheesy poetry on official signs, which headed west from Chillicothe where I temporarily abandoned the route of the Buckeye Trail/North Country Trail.

The trails covered here include a short road walk to the unimaginatively named Xenia-Jamestown Connector Trail, and then the Creekside Trail, which brought me back to the Buckeye Trail in Dayton, Ohio.

This route saved me time and lots of road walking and likely saved me from scratched-up legs and tick bites caused by the thorny overgrown off-road trail that is endemic this time of year wherever this seldom-hiked trail plunges into the woods.

Late spring is the time that maintainers hate.  They can't keep up with the burst of growth. Mid-latitude plants do virtually all of their growing before the heat and dry weather of summer sets in.  By mid-June the growth spurt is over and maintainers get out and hack it back and then the trails are passable again.  Often one further pass is made in late summer or early fall, and the trail is good to go until the following spring.

So this short-cut on paved bike trail presented itself at a good time for me.

The Connector trail comes into Xenia from the east.  Xenia promotes itself as a bicycler's mecca because the spider web of old abandoned rail routes that converge on Xenia Station have all been converted to rail trail.  Even the station building is a reconstruction, and the parking area surrounding it was abuzz with bicyclers loading and unloading.

From Xenia Station one can choose five bike trails including the unfinished Cincinnati to Cleveland Ohio (river) to (lake) Erie Trail, the Little Miami Scenic Trail, the Prairie Grass Trail, and the two trails I followed.

I left Xenia heading west on the Creekside Trail, and despite my protestations about unmaintained footpaths in the woods, I had the opportunity to digress from the paved bike trail to wander through Creekside Reserve.

Here the trail was well trampled, and the maintainers had been hard at work.  It literally was a Creekside trail.

Where the Creekside Trail ends, it hooks up with the Mad River Trail (a scene beside the Mad River is the headline photo).   The Mad River Trail and those connecting in Xenia are all part of what is being sold as the largest network of continuous paved bike trails in the United States.  Collectively this network is known as the Miami Valley Trail system. 

And the Buckeye Trail and North Country Trail make extensive use of this system.  I was back on the path of righteousness.

So there's much more bike trail ahead.  Stay tuned.

Here are screen shots of the GPS tracks for the three days it took to get me back to the fold.

If you're interested in more detail--in zooming in on my route step-by-step, the interactive version of these tracks can be found by zooming in on the general map of my Personal Continuous Footpath meanderings:

Powered by Wikiloc

The Tri-County Triangle Trail - 34 poetic miles

The poetry may be a little cheesy, but the sentiment fits perfectly.  When there is no other hiking trail, abandoned railroad rights-of-way are there, ready to support the long distance hiker.  In my particular case, when the hiking route proves to be overgrown, thorn- and tick-infested, and with too many long road-walk gaps, and when the existing route following old railroad grades had been developed into paved bike paths ... well ...

These two particular routes diverged at Chillicothe, Ohio.  In my last post I discussed the two choices in some detail:

A. Follow the Buckeye Trail from south of Chillicothe to Dayton. This alternative involves 355.0 miles of trail, 192.3 miles of which is road walking including some particularly dangerous road in the vicinity of Cincinnati according to BTA Director Andrew Bashaw, and more than half of the off-road portion is woods walking in State Forest land, which my experience has shown is seldom hiked and unevenly maintained.

B. Take the developed Rail Trails.  The Tri-County Trail from Chillicothe to Washington Court House, the Jamestown-Xenia Connector, and then the Creekside Recreational Trail straight to Dayton. Including the 12 miles to get from the Buckeye Trail up to the start of the Tri-County Trail in Chillicothe, this involves 92.2 miles of trail, only 30.4 of which is on roads and virtually all of the rest is paved, tick free, underbrush-free, non-motorized bicycle trail in a wooded corridor.

I chose plan B and was rewarded by a trail sprinkled with cheesy poetry on signs like the one up top, with vistas of pastoral farm land,

with creek-side vistas

wooded corridors with rest stops

a few more park-like, developed woodlands,

and with a side trail to explore pre-Columbian history at the Hopewell Mound Group, where traces of 2000-year-old native American earthworks (burial mounds) were on display.

The split from the Buckeye/North Country/American Discovery trail route began with a last trail walk into Scioto Trail State Forest then came back down a forest road to follow beside the Scioto River south of Chillicothe.

It was a fairly pleasant road walk through the country,

then into downtown Chillicothe.  Here I found a bike shop where I could have a tune up done to my bicycle.  With my second car in the shop for body work, I will be using the bicycle in its place.  Here in Chillicothe I hooked up with the Rail Trail at a truly peaceful downtown urban park called Yoctangee Park

The word Yoctangee means "paint" and I had walked Paint Street into town and the bike trail followed Paint Creek for the next day.

Farther west the trail enters more flat, open country, then finally becomes an urban bike trail through the heart of Washington Court House

That's where the Tri-County Triangle Trail ends, and where a road walk of about seventeen miles begins.  For the most part the roads were extremely lightly traveled, and I had the opportunity to visit a veteran's memorial in a cemetery between the little towns of South Plymouth and Milledgeville.

I may always wonder what I missed by not sticking with the Buckeye Trail route, but such thinking is a waste of time.  Life always presents more opportunities than it is possible for one person to experience.  It's making the most of the path you choose that really matters.

Toward a Fully Connected Interstate (non-motorized) Trail System

America, do you want to be known as 'second best'?  Are you ready to admit you just can't cut it?

Well, I'm not.  But look at the map above.  It shows the heart of Europe, and every one of those lines is a long distance hiking trail.

Yes, America.  Right now, when it comes to connected long distance trails, Europe puts us to shame.

It doesn't need to be that way.  But to close the gap, we've got some work ahead of us.

The European Ramblers Association, an umbrella organization spanning 34 European countries has been working to establish, mark, support, promote, and maintain that grand network of connected trails.  They've designated twelve long distance trails, which they call E-paths, reaching every corner of the continent.  Trails range in length from 994 to 7332 miles.  To give two examples, on E-1 you can hike from Nordkapp, Norway on the Arctic Ocean well north of the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea on the southern tip of Italy, or you can follow E-3 from the Atlantic Coast of Portugal to the Black Sea at Istanbul, Turkey.

Europe isn't the only place that is moving ahead of us in the area of connected long-distance trail development.  Canada is on the verge of celebrating its 150th birthday by completing 'The Great Trail.'  At over 13,330 miles, it is the longest trail in the world!

America, I challenge you to do better.  We have so many great wild places and open spaces.  We have our patented 'can-do' pioneering spirit and so much unquenchable energy.  We have plenty of experience and know-how in all phases of trail development.  Surely we can achieve a trail network to match and exceed the one in Europe.

What I see as the key missing factor is a committed umbrella organization.  In this country we have excellent individual trail organizations, the strongest of which is probably the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and we have a number of national hiker organizations such as the American Hiking Society, the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association, and my favorite, American Trails; but none of these organizations take direct responsibility for hands-on development of trails nationwide.  None have the expansive vision I'm advocating here--to build a national network of connected trails.

Back in 1921 trail visionary Benton MacKaye famously imagined a network of interstate trails connecting cities, camp communities, and local recreational businesses.

Excerpt from MacKaye's pioneering proposal

His ideas came at a time when other visionaries were just beginning to formulate the national network of motor highways.  In the 1950's The highway system found a strong champion in President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Eisenhower National Interstate Highway System came to fruition.

Why do we need a 'Benton MacKaye Interstate Trail Network'?  MacKaye spelled out many reasons, and others, such as Steve Myers, who is developing the Great Plains Trail from Canada to Texas continue to make cogent arguments for the need for long distance trails, but there's one argument they all leave out.

Dwight Eisenhower was a retired five-star Army General who led America's forces during World War II.  He saw our streamlined, high speed motor highway system as fulfilling a significant National Security need.

Well, guess what.  A system of interstate primitive walking trails is probably an even more effective National Security resource than a highway system.  Imagine if our country is ever invaded by a hostile force.  The first thing they would do is bomb bridges, disabling the highway system.  But what an invading force has the hardest time doing is effectively quelling grass-roots citizen resistance.  I'm old enough to vividly remember Viet Nam.  From that painful experience we learned just how valuable and effective a resource a primitive trail can be (What we called the Ho-Chi-Minh Trail) in engaging Guerrilla Warfare against an invading force. 

Building trails in wilderness corridors, and indeed building a network of connected wilderness corridors expressly for primitive trails, ought to be on the National Defense agenda.  We fought a Guerrilla War against the British in the Revolutionary War starting with Lexington and Concord in 1775, and just because we haven't been invaded by an army of a foreign power since doesn't mean we can smugly ignore the possibility.  When it happens it will happen with little warning, quicker than we can imagine, and we'll need to be ready.

So how to start?  First, as I said, we need a focused, committed umbrella organization.  How about modeling the effort after Canada's push to complete its trail for its 150th birthday?  Our 250th is coming up in 2026.

Then we need a master plan such as the twelve great trails in Europe's network.  We already have a decent set of long distance trails in the federally sanctioned National Trails System, and the object ought to be to fully connect them.  There are lots of individual visions for more long distance trails such as the already mentioned Great Plains Trail, the American Discovery Trail, the East Coast Greenway, the C2C (Sea-to-Sea across the northern tier of the US), the Eastern Continental Trail (Canada to Key West, FL).  There are at least three border-to-border trails running north-south in the western US (Pacific Crest, Continental Divide Trail, the Great Western Trail and a fourth proposed (the Desert Trail).  We need a couple good east-west routes across the southern US (perhaps a more northern one incorporating North Carolina's Mountains-to-Sea Trail or South Carolina's Palmetto Trail with the Trail of Tears and the Hayduke Trail, and a deep-south one incorporating the Florida Trail with a dip into south Texas) and a couple good north-south routes across the heartland/breadbasket, one using, say, the Gandy Dancer Trail, the Ice Age Trail, the Land-Between-the-Lakes North-South Trail, and Natchez Trace and one west of the Mississippi.  We ought to turn most of the National Historic Trails into hikeable trails.  Federal, state and county highways often have wide rights of way that are much wider than are being used, and a number of those have been turned into bike trails.  We need much more of that.

Trails are fundamental to human existence.  Walking is the mode of transportation of last resort.  It will be a long time, if ever, before we replace our feet with machines.  So let's give those feet a robust web of paths to follow.  Let's take Benton MacKaye's ideas nationwide.  Let's get out there and do what we do best--be the unrivaled Trail Blazing Nation that our hearts know we are.

Two days in the woods then a change of plans

Lemons often become lemonade if you take the time to let the sour meld with some sweetness.  For me there's nothing sweeter than discovering non-motorized trails that connect with one another--trails that can take me from horizon to horizon, trails that let my heart soar as I ramble cross-country day after day using only the soles of my two wandering feet.

With one of my two support vehicles in the shop for major body work, I've had a chance to do some trail scouting.  The car is at a shop in Chillicothe, Ohio, about twelve miles from the closest pass of the Buckeye Trail.  But I've discovered that Chillicothe has its own trail, right in the heart of town.

I first noticed it driving in and out of town.  It's a paved bike path.  Lots of cities have them, so they're not something I normally pay much attention to.  But with my changed circumstances and a new frame of mind, this time I decided to do a quick Google search for "Chillicothe bike trail" and I discovered that what I had seen beside the road was just the tip of quite a gigantic iceberg.  One that may sink the Buckeye Trail's ship.

More on that in a moment.

With my changed circumstance I'm currently limited to hiking out-and-back day hikes with one vehicle--park at a trailhead and hike into the woods and back out.  Since the other vehicle went into the shop I've done just two of those, taking three other days to take care of a mountain of paperwork and logistics.

The bits of trail I hiked were on either side of US 35 between the quaint little town of Londonderry and the Scioto River at the western boundary of Scioto State Forest.

I passed through Londonderry on Memorial Day, and the Friends Church there has a huge cemetery with a veteran's memorial.

People were assembling there for a Memorial Day Parade followed by a Memorial service in the church/meetinghouse.  I was there a bit too early and didn't take the time to stick around for the parade, but I saw some antique cars and a number of fire trucks driving in, and could hear a band or two warming up in some staging area down the road.

Outside of Londonderry there two nice trail sections on private land.  One crosses a rolling pasture that I was sharing with a herd of mama cows and their calves.  Fortunately no bulls.  Fortunately cows don't have the same mindset as bears when it comes to protecting their young.  They vacated the area and left me with the wind in the grass and a few old oaks for company.

After a two mile road walk south of the pasture, the trail enters the woods again on private land and later passes under US 35 through a hiker-dedicated culvert.

It then parallels the freeway where it cuts through the side of a hill.  The culvert is visible again in the second photo.

Between the sites of the above pair of photos is a section of hand-built foot-only trail, newly opened just a couple years ago as far as I can tell, that has been utterly neglected since it was built.

I found this section totally overgrown with blackberry thorn bushes.  The lower part had been well blazed, but the upper part of it was so badly blazed (not blazed at all) that it was trial and error, and the only clue to the course of the trail was the side-hill hoeing work buried deep beneath the overgrown vegetation.

It was a bushwhack, and tougher than most bushwacks that I’d actually attempt. Each step I had to gingerly push aside thorn bushes or step over or duck under them. So it was really slow going . . . and then I had to hike back through it on the way back to my vehicle.

Pretty discouraging, especially at a time when I'm fighting off a general sense of discouragement.

Worse yet, the vegetation I was wading through was heavily infested with ticks. I picked dozens and dozens off my legs as I walked. Most of them were the pernicious little deer ticks that carry Lyme Disease. When I got back to my two-ton steel tent I kept finding more, eight or ten I pulled off my legs and flung out the window as I drove. And back at the motel I found still more. A dozen more before I finished finding them.

Back on the previous reported hike in Tar Hollow State Forest I had encountered equally overgrown trail and nearly as many ticks.  Suddenly my 'gold standard' woods-trail hiking was losing some of its luster.  I normally seek out and look forward to the woods trail sections, but these I would recommend avoiding until maintenance can be done, and had I known the conditions beforehand I would have bypassed them.

There were good times too, though.  Once up on the ridge the route passes what I estimate to be Ohio's best viewpoint--certainly the best I've seen by a long shot.  It's from 'Hang Glider Hill' beside a microwave tower and overlooking the Scioto River valley.  The photo up top was taken there.  Here's a look at the nice grassy knoll where the Hang Gliders launch.

So as I reported with Tar Hollow State Forest, the hiking was a Jekyll/Hyde sort of experience.  Immediately ahead of me on the Buckeye Trail is Scioto State Forest.  Then a road walk, then Pike State Forest.  And on ...

What if there was an alternative trail where Dr. Jekyll is in control of himself, and Mr. Hyde seldom appears?

At this point I might be tempted to take it.  And at this point I just happen to have found such a trail.

This brings us back to that bike path in Chillicothe.  My dream for this country is to build an Interstate Trail System that is every bit as robust and connected as our Interstate Highway System.  Ideally this would include government acquisition of continuous public rights-of-way where necessary, and government funding to build and help maintain the trails.  I'll be posting more about this concept soon.

One of the great existing sources of rights-of-way is abandoned railroads.  It turns out that the bike path I noticed in Chillicothe is part of a 34 mile paved rails-to-trails bike path called the Tri-County Triangle Trail.  It roughly parallels US 35 west-northwest from Chillicothe to the town of Washington Court House.  But that's not the end of it.  After an unfinished gap, the trail resumes east of Jamestown and continues through Xenia and all the way to downtown Dayton, where the Buckeye Trail just happens to pick up the bike route heading north out of Dayton.

Suddenly I have two viable choices:

A.  Follow the Buckeye Trail to Dayton.  This alternative involves 355.0 miles of trail, 192.3 miles of which is road walking including some particularly dangerous road in the vicinity of Cincinnati according to BTA Director Andrew Bashaw, and more than half of the off-road portion is woods walking in State Forest land, which my experience has shown is seldom hiked and unevenly maintained.

B.  Take the Tri-County Trail, the Jamestown-Xenia Connector, and then the Creekside Recreational Trail straight to Dayton.  Including the 12 miles to get from where I'm currently hiking up to the start of the Tri-County Trail in Chillicothe, this involves 92.2 miles of trail, only 30.4 of which is on roads and virtually all of the rest is paved, tick free, underbrush-free, non-motorized bicycle trail.

I've chosen plan B.  From my perspective this is the more 'connected' route (much less road walking).  I'm already having some regret, wondering what I might be missing in the woods.  But the fact is, it wasn't a hard decision.  I could always go back and hike the woods sections later.

Lemonade.  I'm looking forward to a cool, tall, refreshing glass.

Took four .45s to the body. Still ticking, but I’m off trail

… until the auto shop can fix the damage.

No, I’m okay, really. It was overnight vandalism to my unattended car. You see, I have two vehicles with me, hiking “leapfrog style.”

Amazingly, the car took no mechanical damage.  I could drive it away.

Two side windows were shattered, though, making for a drafty trip back to the two-ton steel tent.

Bullet one was aimed toward the engine but got stopped by the framework inside the quarter panel. That’s the hole in photo above.

Bullet Two passed clear through both front doors and would have hit me in the legs if I was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Bullet Three came through the passenger front window and lodged in the driver’s side door frame right behind the window. That bullet would have gone through my torso, had I been sitting in the driving seat, and might have been fatal.

Fourth bullet hit the right rear door at the window line and shattered that window.

It's all covered by insurance, except for a deductible.  I may have the option of having the insurance company cut me a check then do the repairs as I see fit.  Potential big profit ... if I leave the bullet holes.  What do you think?  Should I get the four bullet holes fixed or should I keep them as conversation starters? I’m still thinking about that. Maybe I’ll keep one. Maybe the photos are enough. Yeah, the photos and the memories are probably enough.

The vandalism occurred in Tar Hollow State Forest. The officer who responded is a State Natural Resources Police.  He was wonderful and helpful.  He's determined to track down the culprits.  He retrieved two of the slugs.  That's his hand holding one up top.  And he found all four shell casings at the scene.  Likely these are carrying fingerprints and tell-tale DNA evidence.

Of course the purpose of my being in Tar Hollow State Forest was to hike the Buckeye Trail section through it, so I still need to report about that.

Hiking Tar Hollow was a real Jekyll/Hyde affair even without the punctuation of the vandalism at the end of my last leg through the forest. The trail varied from virtually grown shut with shoulder-high thorn bushes to freshly weed-whacked with a boulevard-wide swath cropped right down to the ground.

Scenery was mostly non-existent—it was quintessential green tunnel walking except when I passed the Tar Hollow Fire Tower

The day before I entered Tar Hollow found me doing a road walk with rustic farm scenes like this,

and some newly blooming tall weeds.

The most interesting part of the road walk was on a truly gnarly 4WD road.

And there was a nice section in the woods on property owned by the Buckeye Trail Association. Here there was a campground, some pretty woods walking

And an excursion through a recently clear-cut area that provided contrast, if not scenery.

I don’t know how others would react to the experience of such mindless vandalism, but I guess I knew something like that would happen eventually, leaving a vehicle unattended overnight in unfamiliar territory. I’ve read plenty of examples of it happening along the AT. I’m inclined to go on as before. I have a few days to think about it while the repair work proceeds, so in the meantime I’ll be doing out-and-back hikes using my other vehicle.

Here are screen shots of the GPS Tracks for the three days covered here.  Interactive maps are available through my Wikiloc page.