Strange towers and diverted disasters

 This weekend The Wife and I spent a bit of time driving on US 20A, from Orchard Park to Perry Center, where we hung a right for a day trip to Letchworth State Park. After Letchworth we went to Avon, NY where there's a good pizza place we like (they also do gluten-free!), and then we drove home, traveling south from Avon to Geneseo and then back home on 20A again. US 20A is one of my favorite drives for a number of reasons, all of which boil down to that it's just a beautiful road to drive, with its roughly 85 miles going from the flatness of the Buffalo area into the hills of eastern Erie County and then into the more rugged terrain of the western Finger Lakes region.

In addition to US 20A being a beautiful drive (and it's one of many gorgeous drives in autumn), it's also a bit less-traveled than its coast-to-coast parent road, US 20, which runs about twenty miles or so north of 20A (the A is for 'alternate'). Many farms dot its length, so you often have to be on the lookout for a tractor or a combine or hay wagon on its way from one part of one farm to another. US 20A runs east-west, which means lots of railroad crossings, and as you exit East Aurora and start encountering hills, you dip into small towns and up out of them on the other side. (Danger for leadfooted drivers: speed limits go from 55 to 35 immediately at the foot of the hills!)

US 20A is also an old road. It hasn't always been designed as 20A, but its route has existed since before World War II. It goes through old towns and old places. There are many long-closed businesses along its length, including restaurants that I've never known to be open that still carry signage. Restaurants out in the middle of nowhere...but at one point there was enough business for someone to make some money slinging hash or frying steaks. Each little town along the way has its own local hangout, located in very old big houses with fading paint jobs, and woodwork that's long been out of true, but with the current popular brands of beer advertised in neon (or whatever passes for neon these days).

There are two particular spots along US 20A that harken back to the road's, and the region's, younger days. Both are within sight of each other.

US 20A goes through a town called Warsaw, NY, which lies at the bottom of a steep-walled valley. The valley is actually so steep that trucks and other large vehicles (cars with trailers, campers, and buses) aren't even allowed to descend 20A into Warsaw, from either direction. Going either way, before you get to the steep descent into Warsaw, there are big signs and even a turn-off for large vehicles to figure out their alternate routes. Here's the signage at the turnaround west of Warsaw, for eastbound traffic:

Apparently this was all necessary because of a big fire that happened over fifty years ago:

It's a trucker's worst nightmare -- losing your brakes while traveling down a steep grade. 

That's exactly what happened to the driver of a large gasoline tanker on Warsaw's East Hill about 5:55 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 1969. The huge tanker careened out of control, smashed through a retaining wall and then crashed into a station wagon, rolling on top of it and bursting into flames. 

The station wagon driver, Thomas Drake of Elmira, was killed instantly. Tanker driver John M. Malatta of Macedon miraculously escaped serious injury, leaping from the cab before it became a giant fireball. 

Mr. and Mrs. Chester Kwiecen of Perry, driving up the hill behind the station wagon, narrowly escaped death by running to safety moments before their vehicle was overtaken by flames. 

Much of the East Hill area was transformed into a sea of fire, according to Daily News accounts. The explosion created a river of flames that engulfed four two-story homes within minutes, leaving 17 people homeless. All escaped safely, including an 83-year-old woman who was carried from her home by a neighbor. 

Still, the danger was far from over. 

Thousands of gallons of gasoline from the destroyed tanker leaked into village sewers, causing numerous explosions that blew manhole covers high into the air and caused a life-threatening situation for hours. 

As evening approached, the glow from the massive fire could be seen for miles around the Oatka Valley.

(quote from here)

In other areas around the country I've seen runaway truck piles, which are like exit lanes off the thruway except they go into a giant pile of sand, but 20A into Warsaw is too narrow for that sort of thing, so trucks have to just figure out a way around.

The truck entrance to Warsaw isn't the only interesting thing there! Just before that eastbound truck turnaround, on the opposite side of the road maybe a tenth of a mile away, is this building and structure:

Courtesy Google Maps street view.

As you come around a bend at the top of one of 20A's numerous hills and rises, the trees on the left end and then there's that structure, with the bunker beside it. I remember seeing a lot more of these towers at the tops of hills on our various drives (we road-tripped a lot when I was a kid); I remember one standing atop the big mountain that rises just south of Olean, NY, just before you crossed the line into Pennsylvania. I wouldn't learn for quite a few years just what these towers are, but they were once a crucial part of America's communications infrastructure. They are microwave transmission towers.

The website 99percentinvisible.com (which I just found as I was searching for information on microwave transmitter towers, and which has a book that I just happen to be reading now!) has an interesting and brief page explaining these things:

Between early wired networks and today’s fiber optics sat a system of microwave relay towers transmitting information from coast to coast across the United States. Built in the early 1950s, this line-of-sight network spanned the continent using zig-zag patterns to avoid signal overlap. It conveyed phone conversations and television signals from the era of the Kennedy assassination through the resignation of Nixon.

There's also a map of AT&T's once-extensive nationwide network of these towers, and lo, the Warsaw tower appears to be on it! As I read this map, it seems that the next one in the network is in Springville, NY, a town about 30 miles from Warsaw as the crow flies (or as the microwave beam transmits). These towers have to be placed in line-of-sight from one another, which is how it all works.

Courtesy 99percentinvisible.org

On one side of this road, a bit of old communications infrastructure; on the other, a construct built in response to an awful accident in the region's lore.

You can still drive through the old America. You just have to look for it and choose your roads carefully.

Images from the Ridge

 From Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday.

It was a beautiful day. The stream was rather low for this point in the season; the deep pools should be about six inches deeper than they are and there should be more water flowing through there. But there was enough for the water skimmers!

Scenes from Recent Adventures....

 From our recent trip to the Lilac Festival in Rochester, NY:

And these, from a recent mini-trek down to Buffalo's Outer Harbor and Wilkeson Pointe:

I live in a wonderful area.

Images from an April

 April is a strange month around these parts. I've maintained for years that of Buffalo-Niagara's four seasons, spring is the worst. Summers can be too hot and humid, but are mild compared to the South or the Eastern Seaboard; our autumns are spectacular and frankly, our winters are fine. Really. I'll take the snow. But spring? It's always an unpleasant March and April, usually stubbornly cold and stubbornly cloudy and just persistently unpleasant until May.

This April, though, has been...not bad. Not bad at all. It's been mixed, certainly! But all in all? Not bad.

In baseball terms, May is on deck and warming up, but April has hit a solid single that it's stretched into a double with some deft baserunning.

Here are some images of April 2021.

Sprung?

 I've long been of the belief that as delightful as three of the four seasons in Buffalo Niagara are, the last one is usually just annoying. It might surprise you to learn that the one I don't like is not winter, but rather, spring. I stand by this! Spring in these parts is not a welcome return to warmth, but rather it is generally a two-month affair of temperatures remaining stubbornly in the mid-to-upper 40s. Spring in Buffalo Niagara is usually a pretty gray affair, as the clouds maintain their stranglehold over the sun until mid-May at the earliest. It takes forever for trees and bushes and everything else to come back to life, to the point that green isn't the dominant color here until Memorial Day at the earliest. The snowpiles in parking lots and at the ends of streets endure, in their dirty grayness, and it seems like mud is everywhere.

And yes, it usually snows in April around here. Last year it even snowed not near Mothers Day, but actually on Mothers Day.

But we do once in a while get to enjoy a day like today in springtime around here, a day when it is warm and sunny out, when we get to open windows and switch out the stuffy indoor air for fresh outdoor air, when we can walk the dogs multiple times, and when the sun shines from sunrise to sunset.

Geology and astronomy may be in agreement that it is spring here, but it's just not. Not yet. Not in a way that feels real.

That's not stopping nature from looking like it's embracing the early wake-up call....

That's Chestnut Ridge park, just this morning. It's one of my favorite places, where The Dee-oh-gee and I visit often on our weekly Sunday morning nature walks. That particular stream is a combination of two streams that tumble from the upper reaches of the park; this is at the park's northern, and lower, end. Here it tumbles down through what's left of a deep ravine, and under a steel-deck bridge before it flows on, winding its way toward Lake Erie before it finally empties into Eighteen Mile Creek, which then flows on to Lake Erie. A lot of that water will eventually flow out of Lake Erie, down the Niagara River, over the Falls, and out to Lake Ontario...and on and on, eventually to the sea.

There's still snow up there (Chestnut Ridge is in what the weather people call "the upper elevations" when they are threatening snowfall for some of us), and as of now there hasn't been enough warmth to cause the grass to really start greening or for dormant trees and bushes to start budding. But it's tempting to look for those things.

Spring in Buffalo Niagara. It's here...kind of.

Winter at last?

 Except for a few days, winter here in Western New York has been a dingy affair thus far. I like snow, but we've had barely any at all. Mostly it's just been one gray, damp, muddy day after another. Days like what we've had thus far tend to be what March and April are like in these parts. But last night we got snow, and more is on tap for tonight, so maybe we'll finally have some actual winter, the way winter is supposed to look.

Here's the view of my street when I left for work this morning. It really was quite lovely.

Fall In WNY

 Autumn is turning out to be quite lovely this year. I remember a recent October--maybe last year's?--where it was just kind of rainy and unpleasant the whole month and then it was November and all the leaves fell at once and it felt like fall never actually happened. Anyhow, here's a photographic glimpse into how Autumn has been going in my neck of the woods. I hope yours is as lovely!

RIP, Pizza Hut

Every Pizza Hut restaurant in Western New York has permanently closed.

I'm not going to pretend that this is a loss, except in the sense that this is a few hundred jobs down the drain. I worked for Pizza Hut back in the 1990s, when we lived in Olean, NY, and I posted years ago what that was like. It wasn't a horrible place to work back then, but it sure wasn't great, either; pay was a joke, and for all the lip service paid to the idea that Pizza Hut was supposed to be a step above fast food, it was clear that even then the higher-ups had no idea what they were doing with respect to the shifting restaurant scene.

I have no idea how long it's been since I've even eaten at a Pizza Hut, and it's something of a long-running joke in this region that the number of buildings that used to be Pizza Huts far outnumbers those that house actual Pizza Huts.

Oh well. Support your local pizza joint, folks. Let the chains figure it out on their own.

Winter at the Ridge

What a strange winter we're having in WNY! Our snowfall is way down, well below average, and Lake Erie remains almost entirely ice-free. At this point in the season, the lake is almost certainly guaranteed to remain wide open (we're past winter's halfway point, and as temperatures slowly go up, so will the amount of sunlight the lake receives, thus preventing large formations of ice)...which you would think would mean that we're set up for a lot of the dreaded lake-effect snow, but you have to have really cold air blowing over the lake for that to happen and so far, we haven't even had that. But we did get some snow over the weekend, resulting in these lovely scenes from Chestnut Ridge Park in the hills south of Buffalo....






The kicker? Today and tomorrow we're above freezing, so we're already melting all that off. Sigh!

The Snowy Ridge

Chestnut Ridge Park, which lies in the hills just south of Orchard Park, is one of my favorite places on Earth. Here are a few photos from a brief walk The Dee-oh-gee and I took there yesterday.

Sunrise

Buffalo Niagara is, admittedly, cloudier in general than I would like. But it's not always like living under a gray bowl, and we get some very nice sunrises here.

This morning's is a case in point. Geography puts the sunrise directly behind my workplace this time of year, and it can be a real delight.

Tornadoes in the Forest

The week before last, there was a day of very stormy weather in Western New York. On that day the Erie County Fairgrounds and Chestnut Ridge Park--both favorite spots of mine--were hit by tornadoes.

Tornadoes aren't unheard of in this region, but they are much more uncommon than in other parts of the country. When one hits here, it's usually news. We were very lucky that no one was killed in these events, which did serious damage to the Fairgrounds (where a lot of people were passing the afternoon in the casino there). The damage at Chestnut Ridge hit me even closer to home, because that park is one of my favorite places to go on my Sunday nature walks with the dee-oh-gee.

I plan to write a longer "Chestnut Ridge Appreciation Post" at some point later on, so for now all we need know is that the park is the largest of Erie County's county parks. It resides in the hilly country south of the Buffalo Niagara region, and its trails feature steep climbs into and out of valleys and ravines and deep forests of old pines. The tornado struck down a lot of those trees as it cut its swath through the park, leaving some still broken and twisted as the clean-up crews haven't gotten to them yet.

Yesterday morning was my first visit to Chestnut Ridge since the tornado hit and even though I expected to see the damage, it was still stunning to behold once I finally got there. The most surprising thing was how localized it was. Most of the forest looked perfectly normal, and then I rounded a bend in the trail to see these landscapes.








Nature will recover, in one way or another. It always does. Still, stark reminders like this of nature's power are always humbling.