Shingletown in Winter

It was a chilly winter morning, with temperatures just a few degrees below freezing. I had a few minutes before my day's commitments started, and I was practically itching to go somewhere different, even if just for 20 minutes. So I took a back way to work and, well, you know how it goes, when way leads onto way. I found myself somehow heading for Shingletown for a quick visit with the mountains and the trees and the stream. (Sometimes you just have to fit into the morning the thing that your soul craves; this was one of those times.)

The sky was gray and the sun hadn't arrived yet. I drove up the narrow winding road to the parking lot, watching carefully for other vehicles. And when I got there, parking was no problem. The parking lots are tiny, but there were only two other vehicles there besides mine. It turned out they belonged to two guys on mountain bikes with fat tires, whom I ran into on the trail just before the end of my visit.

The pathway up the hill was well used, and the snow was packed down and slippery. I watched my step as I trudged, as quickly as I could muster, up the hill and into the woods. There is less snow in the valley, but there is more snow on the hill under the cover of the trees. And so I enjoyed walking in my beautiful central Pennsylvania winter woods, finding my way through rhododendron thickets, walking carefully amid the rocks along and in the stream.

I can't believe I have only included one photograph of this place in my Blip journal so far. It is a picture that I took on a very different day than this: on a beautiful July day, when, to get some of my photos, I went walking (with my Crocs on) right into the stream. On this winter's day, however, it was a bit too chilly for wading, even for a girl like me.

We had some extremely cold days earlier in the week, and the creek was full of neat and interesting ice structures. I took a lot of photos of them, enjoyed the patterns the water made when freezing into ice. These are some of the delights of winter: the intricate ice designs, the frost crystals, the way the snow looks on trees. By the time my visit was nearing its end, it was starting to flurry. My heart smiled as I listened to the song of the stream; and then I said good-bye for now to my beloved woods, and I went off to work.

The song to accompany this image has to be about a stream. And so here is a favorite, and I'm including two versions: Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, with Islands in the Stream. Here are both the original version and a second performance 15 years later (music begins around 2:25).