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Clifton Gorge and a Walk Back in Time

We’re hanging around the Cincinnati area for awhile; it’s been a bit too cold to camp so the Scamp Shrimpi is in dry dock, sitting next to a ferris wheel at a friend’s sister’s carnival storage yard. It’s a nice place to rest its tires.

Meanwhile, we are trying to get out and about when we can, and last week Mike and I went to Clifton Gorge, near Yellow Springs, Ohio, on a sunny but cool early spring day. After fortifying ourselves at the Clifton Mill restaurant, we headed down into the gorge for a hike, and right at the entrance to the trail there was a patch of grape hyacinth. They aren’t exactly wildflowers, someone must have planted them, but it was nice to see some color in the woods already.


Grape hyacinth at the edge of Clifton Gorge

There was a lot of water in the river, so the narrows were frothing, and we got a good view of them since there aren’t leaves on the trees yet. We hiked all the way (it’s not that far but I was happy to make it) to where Clifton Gorge connects to John Bryant State Park, not far past the Blue Hole of the Miami, made famous in the painting by Robert S. Duncanson. It looked pretty green that day, though.


                   The Narrows                                               The Blue Hole of the Miami

Also visible because there wasn’t so much foliage was a large, overhanging rock with the names (or words) “SPENGLER” and “SHEETS” carved fairly high up on the side. A work of determination and agility on the part of the carver(s), though I can’t find anything about whether it was a company (there were some businesses that operated on the river along there), or just two plucky youths.


Spengler Sheets is carved into an
overhanging rock along the trail

When we got to the bridge over the river into John Bryant, we turned the other way and went up the steep and partly cobbled path to the North Rim Trail, which was once the Pittsburgh to Cincinnati stagecoach road. Interesting, because my four greats grandfather, Elisha Hotchkiss, came to Cincinnati with his family overland in 1815. And he kept a journal of the trip, which we still have. Mostly he recorded the temperature every day, and the weather in general, but he did make mention of the terrible stagecoach road. I have to agree with him; it can’t have been a pleasant ride. But they made it to Cincinnati, he became a justice of the peace, and 16 years later he was voted the second mayor of Cincinnati. It was pretty neat to see the road he’d taken to come to town more than two centuries ago was still in evidence at the nature preserve.


The Pittsburgh to Cincinnati Stagecoach Road (left) and the grave marker of Elisha Hotchkiss (right)

We came back along the rim trail and a service road, past the Nature Center in Clifton, and along the last part of the trail, we passed a park worker who was marking an area where trees were cut down. She told us they were widening and paving the trail to make it ADA accessible, at least for a stretch. It would be pretty hard to make the steep ups and downs of the Clifton Gorge trails accessible, I think. We also saw someone working to eradicate some invasive plants, which is always nice to see. Further back, we did see a few snowdrops, one of the earliest wildflowers to show up. The fellow fighting the invasives told us there were some snow trillium back in the woods too, but we hadn’t seen any, and I thought it might be a little late for trillium. But it was a nice walk in the woods, and I hope we have a chance to hike some other places in the coming weeks as it warms up.

Mike went for a hike the next day with friends; they went to Clifty Falls in Madison, Indiana, but there were roads closed in various places so they had a wandering way there, and then back again. Seems like Route 56 along the river in Indiana, which was closed for years but was open a month ago when we drove up from the south, is closed again, so they had to cross the Ohio at Madison and came back to Cincinnati by way of Carrolton, Kentucky. Definitely the long way, both ways.

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