(Edited to add a couple pictures our friend took while we were at the Dam! Thanks Roy!)
Just to the south and west of Allegany State Park’s Quaker Area is the Kinzua Dam, and the trip runs along the southeastern shore of the Alleghany Reservoir.
And the Reservoir runs from New York into Pennsylvania.
After our trip to the Cain Hollow campground, we went with our friends to visit the Dam, a 180′ x 1877′ concrete monstrosity that holds back 24 miles of river whose surface area comprises over 21 thousand acres when full.
Kinzua Dam from the air.
The day was fine, sunny and warm, for October. The trip was a workout for the bus, with some of the roads having some pretty steep grades that we had to crawl up in third gear, at about 35 miles per hour. But the scenery was nice.
I caught some of the trip on the dash-cam, but for some reason on the trip to the Dam the camera turned itself off. It’s really odd, as the whole trip back to Buffalo was captured, as have been all our other trips.
Once we got there, we parked at the Dam to walk up on top, then drove down to the Nature Center/park that is just downstream from the Dam for a picnic.
(Kinzua) Dam Facts! (Photo by Roy Clay)Downstream of the Kinzua Dam. (Photo by Roy Clay)Upstream of the Kinzua Dam (Photo by Roy Clay)
We had a nice drive after back up through Bradford, PA and then home on the 219. It was a nice learning experience of how well the bus hauls, and an exercise in patience in getting where we wanted to be (which was home) along unfamiliar roadways. But lots of fun.
Some of our friends traditionally spend the long weekend of Columbus Day in cabins on the Quaker side of the Allegany State Park, near Salamanca, NY. While we weren’t looking to rent a cabin when we have the bus, we did want to go and spend time for them. Unfortunately, RVs aren’t allowed in the cabin areas, so, we spent the weekend in the Cain Hollow campground.
Compared to the Red House Campground I described from when we spent the week there, the Cain Hollow campground was steeper, and the bathroom facilities were a bit more sparse – though both males and females had a utility sink! But the sites had more trees and bushes (and streams) between them, so they were more secluded than the Red House sites.
Our trip was slowed by an accident (and people not understanding how to efficiently merge), West Valley Fire Department’s “Fill The Boot” roadbock, and Ellicotville’s Fall Festival being set-up. After that, though, the travel was pretty standard, though once we got off of I-86/NY 17 onto NY 280, there was some very nice scenery where the road followed along the banks of the Allegheny River/Kinzua Reservoir on the way to the Quaker Area entrance to the Park. Once we were in the park, which you enter by the edge of Quaker Lake, giving a spectacular view along it’s length, we drove past the campsite area to the Rental Office, only to find that we could have checked in at the entrance to the campgrounds, as it was a Friday evening.
Once there, I watched for signage to get to our site, as it was obvious from our time at the Red House campsite that the signage essentially directed traffic in particular directions to produce one-way travel through the loops. There, it was obvious when someone went the ‘wrong’ way, and often startled pedestrians, and I didn’t want to be that person. Unfortunately, as I was informed later by the camp Captain, the sign that would have nicely directed us efficiently up the hill was missing, so we took a scenic tour of the campground to get to our site. (All this is in the dashcam video.)
The only bad thing that I could find to complain about was the light pollution. Perhaps some of this is due to our site being directly across from a bathroom whose light flooded our site (well, at least where the bus was parked) all night, but one clear evening when I wanted to see the stars, I had to walk all the way out of the campsite and around to Quaker Lake in order to get anything like a clear view of the sky in any of the open places. The area of the grassy field near the entrance to the campground seemed like it would be promising, but the garbage dumping area had a 30′ pole with a big sodium arc light atop it, so the area was flooded with light.
We also found that the Quaker Area is much more spread out than the Red House Area. Even with Red House Lake being in the middle of things, we could bike around to every place we wanted to go, quickly and easily. Quaker was not like this, as to get from the campground to the cabin where our friends were was about 5 miles, and while we brought our bikes, they never really made it out of the bus.
Us at Thunder Rocks!
We did cooking both on the stove and on the fire, and as the October nights were getting colder & darker earlier, the seven of us ate in the bus in a slightly unplanned way. We went hiking around Science Lake, and climbed Thunder Rocks. These are great, huge hunks of rock and some are easy to climb unaided, others nearly impossible, and they litter the top of the mountain along through the woods.
So, after a hectic summer hiatus of making updates, I’m back.
Not much has happened on working on the bus, but we DID get to make a trip, and I got some night footage on the dash-cam. During the last week of August, we spent a whole week in the Red House area of Allegany State Park. Due to some other scheduling, our Saturday departure (and the less than 24-hour prep time) wasn’t during the afternoon, like I’d hoped, but well after dark.
But with the bus relatively packed and the canoe on the car (with my wife following behind) we started off on the ~80 mile trip. The trip encompassed well-lit streets, in Buffalo, and smaller villages like Ellicotville and Salamanca, as well as expressways that ranged from well- and sparsely-trafficed, and from well- to poorly-lit, and then there were the more rural two-lane roads as well. And then there was some rain – an interesting test, as there’s no wipers up on the eyebrow window.
I thought that in the well-lit (lots of streetlights) or well-trafficed (lots of headlights), the camera did well. After I had the alternator rebuilt, the headlights are MUCH brighter, but in some places in the recording you’d never know they were on. And the footage of the reflective signs on the 219 where there was hardly any late-night traffic reminded me of an early 80’s driving game I had for our family’s Apple IIe.
But once we were there, we did plenty of troubleshooting (another upcoming post), socializing, and I got requests to sound the horns! But perhaps the coolest thing was when we were driving the canoe to the launch and saw a warship out on the lake. We ran into Gerald and Esther Kirk who were our running their nearly 11 foot long working model of the U.S.S. Boston (CAG-I) (A heavy cruiser converted to a Terrier missile cruiser, much like Buffalo’s USS Little Rock (CLG – 4) which is a light cruiser with a Talos missile system.)
When we get our pictures downloaded, I’ll add a couple, but I did find this bit of video which doesn’t do the model justice, and Gerald HAS the Terrier launchers in place, and they not only rotate, but can elevate the missiles as well. The thing is a work of art and hard work, and Gerald spent the better part of 40 minutes giving us a ‘tour’, explaining life on the ship, and answering kid’s (and our) questions on both the real ship and the model.
