Photo of the Day: Toms Run Nature Reserve, Pittsburgh PA

I took this photo while away for a few days this past week visiting a close relative in Pittsburgh.

People who remember the longtime nickname of Pittsburgh, “The Smoky City,” might have a tough time believing that it can have an area filled with extended wooded areas and streams. 

But that in fact is the case with Toms Run Nature Reserve, which contains 369 acres of maple, oak and American beech trees in an urban forest 10 miles from downtown Pittsburgh in western Allegheny County.

In the spring and fall, you can hear a variety of songbirds, including vireos, warblers, thrushes and sparrows. But, following heavy rain from earlier in the week and plunging temperatures the day of my hike, I found thick mud much more abundant on the three-mile trail loop.

In 1977, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy began to protect the area from development, but the most intensive work took place after the turn of the millennium, continuing through 2018.

Photo of the Day: Weasel Brook Park, Clifton, NJ

Weasel Brook, a tributary of the Passaic River, is the center of a 19-acre “pocket park” in Clifton, NJ. It reminds me of the stream in my neighborhood in Bergen County, except that Clifton has surrounded it not with housing but with open greenery and recreational facilities.

Though I have seen on the Internet that Clifton has upgraded Weasel Brook Park, which I visited yesterday, it doesn’t seem to have attempted to change its flow.

That may be just as well: in the age of climate change, any belief that a dam project would stem flooding for good might have been a dangerous illusion (as my hometown, Englewood, found out when Hurricane Ida overflowed the banks of the creek across the street from me, on what had years ago been labeled a floodplain).

Instead of residences that would have to be evacuated, Weasel Brook Park features two basketball courts, a picnic area, a playground, a multiuse athletic field, and, up a hill, the restored, 300-year-old Westervelt-Vanderhoef House.

(“Weasel” is a modification of “Wesel,” a town in Holland, and the first inhabitants of the area surrounding the brook were Dutch.)

Mostly, it provides a chance to walk a dog, breathe in the air, even to exercise. (Yes, there’s an “outdoor fitness system,” with stops for, among other things, a “chest/back presser” and “cardio stepper.”)

But, as a longtime fixture of Clifton, and among a group of county parks managed by the famous landscape architecture firm Olmsted Brothers, this slice of land gives residents a chance, for a few minutes, to slow down the pace of life in this Northern New Jersey city.

Photo of the Day: Teeming Stream

About 40 years ago, in order to build a housing project across the street from me, my town rechanneled and tamed a longtime floodplain, scooping out hundreds of the rocks and pebbles I had loved to step across as a child as it built the stream's surrounding walls higher and erected a fence. Ever since then, the current in that creek has become almost constantly placid. 

You can imagine my surprise Friday morning, then, on my way to the bus stop for my morning commute into New York, to see that same stream suddenly reverting to something like the churning brown torrent I recalled as a child. The wind from a storm had been enough to wake me overnight, but nothing brought home the change in the weather so much as the dark, violent waters I photographed in the hours after the palest of daybreaks.

Photo of the Day: Rocks and Rushing Water, Brook, Ringwood Manor, NJ

Ringwood Manor has many lovely areas, as my blog posts over the last month and a half have demonstrated. This photograph, taken the same day as the others I took, further confirms the point.

Photo of the Day: Stream and Tepee, Chautauqua Institution

I took the image accompanying this post this past Friday at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. This particular scene seized my attention not only for what was at the end of the lens but also because of where I came across this: down a patch from a ravine winding down from Thunder Bridge, yet just across the way from a baseball field.