American Discovery Trail: Last Leg to Ohio

I am on the last West Virginia segment of the American Discovery Trail, still about 34 miles from the Ohio River, which marks the Ohio border with West Virginia. I would make it to Ohio next week except that I am taking two days off from walking this coming week while I attend a bridge tournament near Portland.

My walk this week is along the North Bend Rail Trail, which features 10 tunnels and 37 bridges, so we have pictures of one of each. It is not unusual for the ADT to follow other existing trails for a ways - we have already encountered this and will see plenty more; there were 13 "affiliated" trails in Maryland alone, and four in West Virginia.

I have walked 570 miles so far, over 1.2 million steps.

One of the 37 bridges on the North Bend Rail Trail. On the other side of the bridge is Cairo, West Virginia, pronounced care-oh. That's embarrassing.

When I was very young, we played with marbles. Does anyone do that anymore?

If so, there are glass factories in Ellensboro, WV, and they still make marbles, very nice ones by the look of them.

 

ADT: Salem, West Virginia

Clarksburg, WV

This week, I finished the eighth segment of the American Discovery Trail and started the ninth, passing Clarksburg and Wilsonburg WV and making my way ten miles down the next segment, past Wolf Summit and on to Salem. The Ohio border is the at the end of the current segment, 65 miles from here.

We are looking at pictures of people this week; each of these pictures pops up on Google Images when you put in the name of the town I passed through.

My walking has been severely hampered by the cold weather here. For six consecutive days through last weekend, temperatures were in the 20s and even teens, and I walked just over 6,000 steps at most - barely over 2,000 one day. As a result, I have walked fewer than 10,000 steps per day for the month, although I may still just get there by month end. Starting last Tuesday, the weather has been warmer (high 30s to mid-40s) and my daily progress is back on track.

Total distance covered so far is 537 miles, 1.2 million steps. If I were repeating the walk to Miami, I would just be in Idaho by now. Early days.

Wolf Summit, WV. Meet Martha Stonestreet.

At Salem, WV, there is a Fort Salem. Put Fort Salem into Google Images and this picture from a TV show comes up. In the show, Fort Salem is the location of a boot camp for magical people, in a world where women are on the front lines in battle and men are not, and so....zzzzz. The picture says copyright Disney Enterprises. The show lasted three years.

There is an actual fort at Salem. It looks like an old fort.

 

American Discovery Trail (ADT): The Spelter Smelter

 

"Spelter" is, it turns out, an English-language word meaning "commercial crude smelted zinc," and the town of Spelter, West Virginia lives up to its name, or at least used to, as it produced over four billion pounds of zinc over ninety years.

The Internet says this picture of the smelter plant is from the early 2000's, and another note says that the site now is just a grassy mound, so maybe the building isn't there anymore. Dupont had to pay a lot of money to clean up the site after it was shut down in 2000 and they left piles of zinc over 50 acres. Now it has a fence around it and nothing is left, apparently. According to the article I read about it, 350 people live in Spelter now.

My walking has slowed considerably the last two days because it is too cold to take Arlo very far - he does not have a doggy coat to keep him warm - and it's not that great for me either. Today the high was 25 degrees. The next few days will get up to the low 30's, with snow expected Tuesday, then temperatures should get back to the 40's on Wednesday. And since these types of temperatures are unusual here and are expected to only last for a few days, I can just stay indoors as much as possible and wait them out.

After Spelter, I am taking the Harrison County Rail Trail toward Clarksburg and Wilsonburg, but I am not to those places yet, so I am somewhere along the trail pictured here. I assume a rail trail runs along a former railroad track, and I have hiked some of those before. They tend to be easy to walk, because trains need nice wide smooth beds to run on, and this looks like that sort of trail.

I will point out, once again, that this trail is not exactly the most direct way to get from one place to another. Google Maps says that I can walk from one end of the current trail segment to the other in less than 40 miles, but following the ADT ( I am tired of spelling it out), the segment is 84 miles long. The end result of all this meandering is that, even though I am still in West Virginia and will be for a few more weeks, if I had picked my own route, I could be halfway across Ohio by now. But we are taking our time, apparently zigzagging our way across the country, and the point is to walk, not so much to get anywhere, so this is good. Just, if you are wondering why I am still only in West Virginia, remember that the wandering trail route is holding back my apparent movement across the country.

We knew this one would take a while.

American Discovery Trail: 10%

A long time after I started, I am 10% of the way along the American Discovery Trail, or I will be when I walk one more mile tonight. I still have a few weeks to go in West Virginia, but I will get to 500 miles in the next few days, and this is progress.

The International Mother's Day Shrine is in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna Jarvis came up with the idea of celebrating Mother's Day, and the day was first celebrated in 1908.

To give some idea of how well-maintained the American Discovery Trail main website is, the description of this trail segment says that the next stop is Spetler, West Virginia. Thing is though, the town is actually called Spelter , not Spetler. I am guessing that that mistake has been there a long time, and no one has cared enough to proofread the site and fix it. It makes me wonder how legitimate this trail is.

I have a picture of Spelter, but I am not that far along yet, so that is for next week. Since the Mother's Day Shrine is the only landmark mentioned on the part of the trail I walked this week, my second picture is from Africa. It looks like a good place to visit someday.