A View of Four Season in the Hocking Hills
Fall is considered peak season for visitors to the Hocking Hills. Damp, misty mornings saturate trails and display the rich reds and rust colors of a deciduous forest
foor. Crisp, sunny afternoons accent trees nearly transparent in bright splashes of yellow and orange, their leaves still holding fast to limbs, waving in harvest winds.
Veteran travelers to this region will tell you that autumn is most pronounced in the first weekend of October, before breezes through the hollows empty color from
the hillsides. But locals might have a hard time describing this as a "peak" to any season. To residents here, every day is a change of scenery, diverse in weather and
landscape.
After the "fall of things" the woodlands opens up. Rocks and cliffs hidden through most of the year become massive landmarks. Along 180 you can see down into a canyon along the curves. On 56, a drive from South Bloomingville past Ash cave exposes High Rock Hollow and the rocky rim of the narrow East Fork gorge. This is true of Big Pine Road and 374 as well . . . not to mention that when you stop to walk, old barns, fallen cabins, giant boulders become new landmarks for old hikes, things you might have missed completely while foliage was rich and thick.
Winter is always unexpected. One day may be drenched in showers mistaken for autumn showers or spring rains. The next could deliver a dusting of powdered snow to outline stone and canyon walls. A month will pass with frost-tight pines insulating columns of ice secretly building mammoth formations on shaded cliffsides. In January or February there can be a week of snow thick enough for you to regret not bringing cross country skis. And sometime before "spring," hard rains will create the first flash floods---a blast of water from Ash Cave and Cedar Falls which in one hour will wash two feet over the road's surface and in the next will expose a new streambed emptied and cut down to boulders (see PHOTO GALLERY).
Often spring arrives with its first buds coming up through lightly fallen snows. Other times, winter strikes again with freezing rains encasing everything in thick layers of ice which make the hills a crystal castle as clouds recede. If redbuds and dogwoods aren't hit with a late frost, their blooms become a painted trail to follow from one hill to the next. Rains come, the waterfalls become roars of domination, and residents wait until that precise change when morel mushrooms become secret kingdoms hidden in time and place (hint: for the time, think about asparagus sprouting; for place, well, secrets must be maintained).
Spring to summer is a steady painting on a canvas. Trillium and May Apples appear and recede. Ferns stand and thicken. Trees bud, bloom and only toward hot days of summer become thick enough to hide an army of playful children on family picnics. Wildflowers along streams come and go with a variety of mushrooms, edible and not. And the floor of the woods comes up to grab in thickets where there are no paths, making every trail a copse with no other way but to continue on or turn around. In summer, there is no knowing a trail, hill, or field unless you pass through it again and again. And the storms that come carry high rolling thunder on the north side of the Hills with lightening striking on distance ridges. In the south side hollows, lightening is the ultimate beast of an experience. It's midnight raids leaves visitors and residents wide eyed and staring.
Finally, when the unbearable heat of the midwest plains almost invade the misty coolness surviving in caves and groves of towering hemlock, then a maple on a
hillside turns a bright red and trumpets in the coming fall. Fenceline and roadside flora dry to expose fields of goldenrod and ironweed and treelines turning. The last
of the honey is taken, and the time of cider pressing comes its way in Laurelville. Then, with laughter of a fresh, new school year spilling through open windows, the
scene of school busses pulling into parking lots at Old Man's Cave and Conkles Hollow remind us of our childhood field trips when we first started learning about
the ways of woods and weather and nature.
Copyright by Kirk Hathaway, March 1997
writing or images may not be reproduced without
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