A dump truck that said “Best Offer” on the way to David’s PA Place (otherwise known as “The PA Experience”)I got to David’s house around 4:00 on Thursday afternoon. Since his foot was hurting him pretty bad we decided to hang around his house with his dog Dandy and his parents.
Dandy waiting for me to put him out of his misery because his Mommy wasn’t home (I.E. David’s Mom)
David and I talked a bunch and also watched a ton of the show Phineas and Ferb. We’re both keen fans of the show and I brought a bunch of the episodes to his house and we spent a good portion of the evening watching them.
Towards the end of the day we got into a great conversation about living awake and thinking about everything so that you can do it in the best way, and thus, live life in the best way, for the glory of God and to love of others. We realized that people need to be leaders rather than waiting around for someone else to do something.
Friday morning we had some breakfast and then decided to go exploring after David decided his foot was feeling good enough for some adventures! We hopped in his car and went about 500 yards down his road and started exploring a strip mine behind his house.
We went a little way through a shallow patch of woods and past a ramshackle log cabin with about three and a half walls, and into a clearing. The clearing was an enormous strip mine where they used to mine coal back in the 90s, perhaps even into the 2000s. It was huge; it felt like walking across the desert; heat beating down while simultaneously emanating from the black, soot-covered ground.
A little bit further and we came to the real mine behind the desert. There was a large ravine which went down about 500 feet or something crazy like that. I took pictures to try to show scale but it’s almost impossible to even understand without being there.
That small black thing by the path is a tire; not a small one.
And it went further back. I felt like Little Foot having just seen the earth shake and the ground split in half. I must have been about a football field away from the other side, if not a football field and a half.
I circled David to show how far it was. He was a little black spec in the picture. In real life I could still see him, better than in this picture anyway, but it was shocking seeing how far he was already. Even being there it was hard to understand how far everything was because of the continuous shades of gray and black. It was totally intense.
There’s David again. The scenery all around there was really cool too, and we could see quad tracks going through all of it. I took this next picture as I was going down to meet up with David at the bottom.
This is approaching the bottom. If you look at the zoomed in version of the picture you just might be able to see David.
Hey! There he is And here I am at the bottom finally, next to the tire you saw in the picture earlier.
That cracked ground was really fun to walk on. In general the coal dust around there made me feel like I was walking on the moon. But being in that ravine with the dried up ground felt like The Land Before Time or something poetic.
That’s where I had been standing when I looked down on the tire and everything.
A bit further in I stood up a stick at the top of a mound of coal dust and rock, as a tribute to our visit. Notice the tire already very far away in the background. I can’t emphasize enough how big that place was. We were in a valley of coal dust surrounded by coal mountains.Further in we found some mementos of past workers and life here.
I felt like I was in a video game, probably a first person shooter, because they always have unknown barrels inexplicably strewn about everywhere, always filled with some sort of flammable, explosive fluid that ignites when you shoot it.
And here were some curious bits of wreckage. Some things look like motors or other random items that don’t seem to go together at all. We were very cautious around all that twisted, rusty metal.I thought it was really interesting the way plant life just grew up out of the coal.
This place has been here for a while. No one even seems to care that it’s there, though everyone knows about it.We went back to the house for a while after that little adventure and had some amazing steak sandwiches for lunch and hung out with David’s wonderful parents. They had just gotten back from an adventure of their own at Hawk Mountain. It’s a pretty well known bird watching area in their part of PA. David’s parents love bird watching which is evidenced by the birdhouses lining their back yard and the bird feeder at the center of it. As a fellow bird watching enthusiast, I very much approved of their expedition.
David and I hung around the house for a little while to rest and cool off a little bit. Soon we were off again on another adventure. Before we went to our second location we found the place where you can get your headliners replaced.
Finally! I’ve been looking my whole life for that place. My headliners need to be replaced really bad. They’re basically shot. I mean, they don’t even headline anymore. And of course, home depot and walmart don’t replace ‘em. I was starting to think I was out of luck. Truly, Pennsylvania is a mystical fantasy world where all your childhood dreams come true. This time we went to a naturally mountainous area. Check out the colors there!
Dave and I trudged up the mountainside. I didn’t know what was coming, and David, who had already been there before, told me I hadn’t even seen the best part yet.
I loved the mountains in the background, and it was interesting to note that we saw condors at about three out of the four places we explored; kind of weird. I mean, David was wounded, but he wasn’t in that bad of shape. Moments later I realized why the mountainside wasn’t the best part of this area!
We could see for miles. That redish thing far off in the distance was a crane that was mining while we watched. The thing was about the size of David’s house and had about five or six windows on one side of it. There were cars next to it that looked like ants. Off to our left we gazed down into the valley.
Content with our site seeing we excitedly climbed higher up the hillside to explore a pine lined pathway.
The pines seemed to have been hand planted to outline a pathway. The floor of the path was covered in brown pine needles and there were half covered rocks jutting out. It was so breezy and nice up there. I thought it would make a great place for a picnic. Eventually the path ended anticlimactically in the woods with a bunch of trash strewn about, like just about everywhere else in PA.Later that day we went to go explore a third location and we found another one of those building sized cranes, only this time up a lot closer.
I was looking almost straight down at that. Again, you can’t even tell how impossibly far away, and how impressively deep that ravine was.
All around this area, up where we were, the ground had been packed solid from the truck and construction vehicle traffic. There were tons of rocks smashed on the ground in the most picturesque way; it reminded me of scattered frozen explosions; starbursts in a black sky.
We found a cool little hill on the edge of the ravine that kind of looked like a volcano. David really wanted to climb to the top of it.
Legendary. I climbed up after him and realized that it was kind of hard to do because every side of that little hill was very loose and squishy. There wasn’t really any firm footing.
The view from the top of that hill, overlooking the edge of the valley, was amazing.
David climbed down before me.
I really liked that crane. I wanted to see what the inside looked like!
And it was really cool to see all of the meticulous hills and rows, surrounded by roads, hundreds of feet below us.
There were even telephone poles down there. This was some set up! We were pretty sure this site was current too. I think as recently as this afternoon people were working there.
David stopped to really take a good look at the entire bowl. We began to explore the never ending landscape further and found a pathway that the workers had made and then cut off.
Looking back the way we came.
And then going down the path that was cut off we found some haphazardly placed—as if they were dropped there by a giant—train cars which seemed to have been used as an office space. They were very rusty but I thought I’d climb up the side of the first one.
Then we both discovered openings into ominously dark rooms. The first one was sort of empty but their was some kind of filter for a very large engine in it. It looked really new and seemed to have been placed their just because the owner didn’t care about it or know what to do with it.
The second car (out of two) looked like the file space.
It also looked like a very curious bear was looking for food. But more likely, some frantic person was looking for some clues to something. I wish I knew the story…it looked like a crime scene.
Inside the car it was very organized.
Shelves and cabinets with lots and lots of papers; and all of it very old.
Satisfied we had seen all there was to see at this site, and also beginning to get wet because of the rain, we decided to move on and do some exploration in David’s car. We soon came to some of the weird neighborhoods in the area.
All the buildings were very old and badly taken care of. Any people we saw were very odd too.
If you look at the bigger version of this photo you’ll be able to note that that hillside in the background is a graveyard; across the street from the neighborhood. You see it when you go to work everyday, and when your kids go out to play in the yard.We went down the road a little bit further and found yet another cemetery. But there was something odd about this graveyard, and it wasn’t the fact that lots of people were buried there. We couldn’t put our finger on it, but then we read the name of the graveyard and decided we didn’t really want to stick around to find out what it was.
A little further down the road we found another sign.
I’m not sure if it was any of the mines that we had explored, but this sign was talking about an abandoned strip mine. They’re everywhere in that area so this sign probably wasn’t referring to any of the mines we explored.A bit later we decided we would do something a little different. It was Friday night so David showed me what everyone in the area does on a Friday night. We went over to the Black Diamond Raceway where everyone took their whole family, crammed into Dad’s old pick-up truck, and they sat around in the parking lot in their lawn chairs for the tailgate party before the “big” race. People were shocked when they saw us driving out rather than in.
After that we went to the local mall. This is how many people were walking around in the local mall at 6:45 PM on a Friday night.
It looked completely abandoned. In fact, on this side of the mall, every other store space was for rent with nothing even there. They had amazing displays in the center of the mall area though. Everything was well thought out and artistic and people had put some real time into making those little gardens and trees in the center of the isles.
I was shocked at how pretty it was.
So cool!None of the stores were even anything noteworthy except for a “Magic the Gathering” store where fans could buy cards and even play together in the store at tables. David and I walked by that store kind of quickly. And there was also an antique shop; it really felt a lot more like a flea market than an antique store. Well, maybe half and half. Besides finding lots of cool looking action figures and overpriced comic books, I thought this was really funny:
Oh, the 90s; apparently they never left PA.Finally we went back to David’s house, feeling accomplished with our day, but also pretty worn out, not to mention done with the oddities of PA.
Pennsylvania; what a wonderland!
I felt like a photo journalist today. I really enjoyed taking all of these picture! Was totally an awesome, fun day!
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