Skyuka Spring

Yesterday I escaped from the holidays for a couple of hours to visit Reflection Riding, the Lower Truck Trail, and Skyuka Spring. I had hiked to the spring with Mark Wolinsky two or three years ago via the Skyuka Trail, but had not been on the Lower Truck Road for a decade or more. Long ago our gang of mountain bikers would ride that road (one of the very few trails in the park that are open to bicycles) regularly. I had measured distances for the trail guide, driven trucks out to the spring with Dennis Curry on various occasions, been shown old homesites and mysterious walls that have faded into the fog of my memory as they have back into the woods that now surround them.

There was still some snow on the ground from the White Christmas of 2010 as I rode past the gazebo and pond that mark the southern boundary of Reflection Riding. The sky was blue and the creek was a deep green. And as always the spring was flowing, gurgling, gently gushing. Legend has it had gold was buried here somewhere, and that made me want to ask Dennis if anyone had ever tried to dive the tiny space beneath the rocks. There is a hole in the rocks above but no air was moving through even on this winter day, an almost certain sign that solid dirt and rock plugs any passage.

I walked uphill on the Skyuka Trail to examine an old stone wall and to look for the foundations of a house that once stood here. Two decades ago William Raul gave me the name of someone I could call who he said had delivered groceries here as a boy...but of course I never got around to calling, and now it is certainly too late. Alas, no air coming through that passage now, but even still I probably find out names, dates, perhaps even maps if I knew who to ask and where to look. But for now there were just rocks and some bits of metal marking what was once a house, questions waiting to be answered.

I got back and my bike and pedaled a mile or so to the top of the hill where I stopped because I thought it looked like a proper spot for a homesite. Sure enough there just a few yards in the woods was a line of stones, clearly manmade. Later, reading my own hiking guide, I would find this very spot mentioned as an old homesite, meaning that as so often happens lately that I was merely rediscovering things I once had known, but today I found a little more that I hadn't seen previously. Uphill from the rocks was a enclosed stone corral roughly three feet high, possibly a "cold house" or some sort of storage, but what? Built for what purpose, and how long ago?

After I rode back out to the truck parked at the Reflection Riding Gates I went for a run on the property, hoping to prove that I could still hoof it around the loop as fast as I had in my prime. No such luck!

P.S. (if there is such a thing in a blog)

I had carried a camera and later produced this video of my ride on a new "Hike Lookout" Channel on YouTube.