Chapin Forest and the Beautiful Metro Parks of Northeast Ohio

I've been "training" for a 14-mile (28 miles round trip) hike into Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness. Since I am 69 years old, such a long trip into the Wilderness is a serious matter. I have to be physically and mentally prepared for the challenge. To get ready I've been doing long hikes in Metroparks all around the East Side of Cleveland--the Cleveland Metroparks, the Lake County Metroparks, and the Geauga County Metroparks. I love all these park systems. The Cleveland system is the biggest and oldest, and it is magnificent. I've been hiking the North Chagrin Reservation, an awesome assemblage of forests, meadows, streams, ponds, and picnic areas. And I've been going into this huge park since I was a little kid growing up in Euclid. I love Squire's Castle, Strawberry Lane, Forest Lane, Sunset Pond, and all the trails and the wonderful diverse woods and ravines in North Chagrin. I hiked seven miles there yesterday, a great day.

Earlier this week I hiked the length of Chapin Forest in Kirtland, Ohio.

Besides a rich woods of sugar maple, beech, black cherry, red oak, and myriad other trees and shrubs, Chapin has some unusual geological features. It has caves and ledges, and a lot of rock called Sharon Conglomerate, a sandstone filled with luckystones (rounded milky quartz stones). The luckystones are one of the characteristic features of our Lake Erie beaches--they are found in Cuyahoga, Lake, and Ashtabula Counties (and probably on beaches in Pennsylvania and New York)--and nowhere else that I know of. As a toddler in Willoughby, Ohio, we would collect luckystones, put them under our pillows at night, and trick the tooth fairy. This always worked--as long as we told my Grampa about the plan.

Here is a photo I took of Sharon Conglomerate:

Another wonderful feature of Chapin Forest is Gildersleve Mountain, a high hill in the Forest that looks north to Lake Erie, rising 593 feet above the Big Lake, 6.7 miles to the north. Part of the hill has been quarried, so there is a precipitous drop-off at the top. By the way, very few people know the name "Gildersleve Mountain." It is part of local lore and it needs to be preserved. Here is a view of the lake from Gildersleve. My cell phone camera cannot do it justice. On a clear day you can see 18 miles to the skyscrapers in downtown Cleveland. An odd thing is that it looks like the entire area is a forest, when it is really a large, densely populated city. It brings to mind the old nickname of Cleveland: the "Forest City."

About 1.5 miles from Gildersleve is another historic quarry, where the stone for the Kirtland Mormon Temple was quarried in the early 1830s. Part of that is now a pond. And just north of the pond you can see an area where huge blocks of stone were quarried.:

The forest in this park is full of huge trees and I ran across a stump about 4-feet in diameter, the remains of an old red oak:

There are many huge trees in this forest, but some of them are dying, especially the white ash; they are being annihilated by the emerald ash borer. The ash trees are facing the same devastation that has met the American Chestnut and the American Elm. I have seen some small chestnut trees and many elm trees in local woods. Some elm trees have survived, but there has been a huge die off since my childhood. Will any ash trees somehow demonstrate immunity to the emerald ash borer? Time will tell.

Almost every day I walk in a different park. I love them all, but Chapin is near the top of the list.

Skiing in Chapin Forest, Kirtland, Ohio

Great day, perfect day for cross-country skiing! Chapin Forest and Gildersleve Mountain in Kirtland, Ohio--in the great Lake County Metroparks.

Bob, atop Gildersleve Mountain, Chapin Forest

Good thing there are straw bales here!

"Ski Heil!" --as we used to say in Austria.

Carolan atop Gildersleve Mountain.

Fooling the Toothfairy with Luckystones

Anyone who grew up near Lake Erie in Lake County, Ohio knows about "luckystones." They are small stones of milky quartz, usually white (though occasionally tinged with yellow or orange), that are rounded and polished by the wave action of the Big Lake. Many people collect these beautiful lucky stones.

As a kid in Willoughby, Ohio, I learned from my grandparents that you could put an appropriately sized luckystone under your pillow, and voila, the next morning, you would get a dime from the toothfairy. Does this still work? Of course it does, as long as the little kid informs his parents or grandparents about what he or she is doing. Of course inflation has hit this market too.

Once, while studying geology at the University of Notre Dame, I asked my professor what exactly a luckystone consisted of. He laughed and said he had never heard of a a luckystone--that it was not a scientific geologic name. Now every kid in Willoughby in the 1940s and 1950s knew what a luckystone was! And certainly my children know! So much for the limits of these brilliant Notre Dame profs.

My understanding is that these luckystones are washed down some of the local hills in creeks and rivers where they reach Lake Erie, and then are further rounded and polished by the Lake. I think the rock formations they come from are called "Sharon Conglomerate," and can be found on Gildersleeve Mountain in Chapin Forest (Kirtland), at Thompson Ledges, at Nelson-Kennedy Ledges, and around Chardon by the Best Sand quarries. Best Sand produces some of the purest silica sand in the world from these Sharon Conglomerate formations--and that's lucky for them indeed.

Give it a try. Find a luckystone down by the Lake, put it under your pillow--then let me know.

"The sweep of easy wind and downy flake" (Robert Frost)

This winter I have gone cross country skiing about 7 or 8 times. Often I go to Chapin Forest, a Lake Metropark in Kirtland, Ohio, following the Arbor Trail to Luckystone Loop, climbing up what we used to call as kids "Gildersleeve Mountain." At the top of the "mountain" there is a bluff over an old luckystone (milky quartz) quarry. And from there, on a clear day, you can see Lake Erie and the taller buildings on the Lake in Eastlake, Willowick, Euclid, Bratenahl--and even Cleveland. You can see the skyscrapers of Cleveland, some 18 miles away. The valley underneath Gildersleeve Mountain looks like a vast forested wilderness in the summer. But that is an illusion because hundreds of thousands of people live on the East Side of Greater Cleveland. Still, you start to understand why Cleveland was once called the "Forest City." So Chapin Forest is one of my favorite skiing venues.

I also like to ski at the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, one of the world's greatest arboreta. There are miles of trails through deep woods, through prairie and plantings, around ponds and Corning Lake.

Today I skied at the Mentor Lagoons, another of Lake County's treasures--with hundreds of acres of lagoons, forest, marshland, and a mile of untouched lake shore. I took the lake trail, and as it emerged from the deep woods, I could see a completely frozen Lake Erie--solid ice as far as the eye can see. And at this time of the year, a kind of silent dessert, awesomely beautiful. I stood there on my skis thinking of Robert Frost's great poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I especially thought of the lines, "He gives his harness bells a shake/ To ask if there is some mistake. / The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake." That's exactly what I heard--nothing but the sweep of easy wind. This wonderful music and this wonderful silence!

[There is a fantastic Wikipedia article on Gildersleeve Mountain at this site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gildersleeve_Mountain]